Re: Another angle on this....

sorry, to jump in on a reply to a reply, but it helps to draw attention to the point I wanna make.

you raise some very good points that Oracle should do well to address at some future stage if they do really want to get into ss territory. So I'll just talk about where I think you're not quite correct.

Tom McClelland doodled thusly:

>blank strings. I don't understand how you can defend it. I can't
>include a blank field in a primary key, ever, in Oracle.

By RDBMS theory definition, a composite PK can NOT have a null value in a column. But you can emulate the functionality of SS very easily nowadays. In a way, Oracle is doing the "correct, textbook" thing. If that is handy or not is debatable. then again, what are standards for if nobody follows them?

>> > 2. Quoted identifiers are case sensitive, just what you need...

I must admit I don't follow your initial problem? Why is it what I need? Don't really see that as a problem. Again, the SQL standard says: if you quote, you get what you asked for. What's wrong with that?

>> >
>> > 4. No option to ignore case on indexes or character-string comparison

Use function-based indexes. Also, think about exactly how can SS implement "case-insensitive" indexes. Isn't it losing something? Well, with Oracle you now lose nothing. Since 8i.

>> >
>> > 5. No support for comparison operators in arithmetic expressions

to do exactly what? How can you have a comparison operator in an arithmetic expression? You either have a comparison operator in a logical expression or an arithmetic operator in an arithmetic expression. What am I missing here? Unless we want to _assume_ that TRUE is = arithmetic 1 and False = arithmetic 0, which is absolutely flawed to start with!

>I stand corrected. I didn't notice that this had appeared in 9i, due

It's in 8i as well. But only for SQL (no PL/SQL). It's in the doco too. I can confirm for sure in 8.1.6 and 8.1.7, the two 8i versions I'm well familiar with.

>>
>> > 8. Out-of-the-box retrieval of multi-record datasets at 1/40 the speed
>> > of SQL Server in my (highly optimised) ODBC usage (SQLBindCol,
>> > multi-record Chunked retrievals, etc)

Hmmmm, I'd like to "scan" that problem in detail, but prolly no time to do it. Strongly suspect that whatever you can do in DB2 or SS in terms of performance you can also in Oracle. However you may have to twiddle with the default. In that respect, I agree with your frustration completely!

>views, the ability to use a sub query where a table-name goes in a
>query without building a view first, function-based indexes, and many

Hehehe! How about the sub-query as the column? I like that one!

>some of my complaints could be legitimate criticisms?

IMHO, some are. I've had a bone with Oracle about some of them for ages, but unfortunately most people I talk to think I'm somehow *undermining* Oracle or whatever. Nothing could be more remote, but what the heck I stopped caring about that years ago...

Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam Received on Tue Feb 19 2002 - 05:09:34 CST