Programming with OCI is painful.

        It's my first exposure to OCI programming. However, I believe the way that Oracle provides their library is not very professional. You may not agree with me, but I just want to make my complaint and warn the sucessors.

        We do the OCI programming on three popular platforms, SUN, PC and MAC. The major programming job and verification is done on SUN. With OCI programming, you need to compile your program and link with OCI library given by ORACLE. For a strict type checking, we need prototypes for the OCI routines. IT'S NOT THERE. That means you can not do any type checking unless you run into CORE DUMP. This may not be a problem if you write toy examples. But if you are professional programmer, you will never have confidence in the parameter passing because the compiler is not able to check for you. For a across platform project, the prototype checking becomes more important. So be aware OCI programmers, you have to programm on YOU OWN RISK. I have talk to Oracle support, it seems the representative doesn't know about this prototype checking at all. To provide these prototypes is only a minor job for ORACLE but save a lot of breath of the poor programmers.

        BTW, if you don't agree with and have a better idea on this problem. Let me know.(My solution is do reverse-engineering these prototypes from the manual)

Sorry if I annoy those who don't care.

Frank H. Lai

frank_at_clarify.com Received on Thu Feb 11 1993 - 23:47:23 CET