Re: Oracle direction on triggers

Ed Stevens <nospam_at_noway.nohow> wrote in message news:<8qek5vs8psuifc57o8k14smlc8678f7eck_at_4ax.com>...
> We have a developing situation I'd like some feedback on.
>
> A few months ago a new application went to production, using an Oracle
> 8.1.7 db on Win2k. This app is partly purchased product, partly
> custom code. Recently, another app, running on DB2 on the mainframe,
> needed to have a copy of the data on one of the tables in this system.
> We settled on using a trigger and the OTG to keep a DB2 table
> populated with changes from the Oracle table. The lead analyst on the
> Oracle app got upset over this approach, claiming it would wreck
> performance. He further stated that "Oracle apps have set a direction
> of moving away from the use of triggers because of performace." Since
> I don't keep up with Oracle Apps (we have none here) I couldn't refute
> it, but it sure sounded specious to me.

I don't know what the Analyst is referring to about performance lag by using triggers however, I personally like to avoid triggers for couple of reasons.

1. A disabled trigger does not complain unless manually enabled. So if a trigger is disabled for whatever reason and you are inserting/updating records in your table thinking trigger is doing it's job, it is actually fast asleep.
2. If you are using triggers to do integrity check, then you can multiply the above scenario by whatever the damage a bad row of data may cause.

Triggers are good to use in certain situations but I don't know if there are any performance issues with use of triggers. Maybe you should ask your Analyst to provide some Oracle documentation to support his claim.

Regards
/Rauf Sarwar Received on Mon Feb 24 2003 - 18:40:25 CST