Re: Flameless Advice Please...

Jeff D. Hamann wrote:
>
>
> Now I don't want some ranting session about the virtues of Oracle vs
Access
> on this platform or that, but....
>
> I've been developing a VB application (I'm not new to coding and don't
like
> the lack of control that VBA allows) and have been having some problems
with
> data corruption, and unpredictable behavior with Access VBA and would
like
> to investigate using another database for (if it possible) performing
small
> programming tasks instead of using ODBC (or something equivalent) for
> producing lots of data for a simulator. Basically, I'm running lots of
> simulations, storing the data in Access (using VBA) and exporting the
> crosstab queries to run in another piece of software. Usually, I delete
all
> the rows from the tables and repopulate with over 1000000 records. My
> database files (mdb) are about 120mb which is much larger than they
should
> be even after compacting and my NT machine keeps telling me that I've run
> out of virtual memory. I need this thing to be not just good but VERY
> reliable because I can't stand up in court and say, "MSAccess wasn't
doing
> what it was told."
>
> So I guess my questions are (and not knowing anything about Oracle):
>
> 1) Does Oracle have some kind of VBA language?
> 2) Can Oracle call DLLs with user defined data types?
> 3) Does Oracle run under NT and Linux equally well?
>
> Thanks for the flameless advice,
> Jeff.
>
> --
> Jeff D. Hamann
> 2601 NE Jack London Street #27
> Corvallis, Oregon 97330 USA
> 541-740-5988
> hamannj_at_ucs.orst.edu
> http://ucs.orst.edu/~hamannj

I've beeen working with Oracle for over 10 years now. Here is my opinion about Oracle with respect to your questions.

First Oracle is an EXTREMELY reliable database. In terms of data integrity in has just about every conceivalbe feature you could want (RI, cascading deletes / update, triggers, constraints etc.)

It has its own Procedural language (PL/SQL) which is alot more powerful than VB script like language and has EXCEPTION Handling built into the language. In addition, should you find PL/SQL not powerful enough it can be called from other languages such as C / C++ , COBOL, etc. So you can use the constructs of those languages to extend the functionality of PL/SQL. In that vain you could create DLL's (on the Windows platform) which could have user defined types and would allow you access to the Oracle database.

Oracle runs well on just about every platform its on. I'm not sure the comparison stats are between NT and Linux but I think its more dependenty on the machine configuration that on Oracle itself.

[Quoted] [Quoted] Also Oracle allows you to do things like TRUNCATE a table which removes all rows from table much faster than say deletes which can take a long time. I'm sure there are other databases which could also provide you with a solution but you certainly won't have reliability issues if you choose Oracle.

HTH. RC

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