Oraperl Vs. PL/SQL, ReportWriter

I am looking into whether to us oraperl or PL/SQL to develop an application using Oracle. I have used oraperl before and found it **extremely** useful. I have absolutely no doubt as to whether oraperl will do the job. My only concern is that it seems that when Oracle upgrades, oraperl gets left behind. I am afraid of writing lots of code, then having Oracle upgrade and the oraperl code will not work. I have looked for good descriptions of PL/SQL and it's features but have not had much (any) success. Among the most useful oraperl features were

1. Package definition
2. Easy tie in to the native OS
3. Able to dynamically create SQL statements
4. Able to dynamically create perl functions (the eval() function)
5. Great string/regular expression processing
6. Dynamic arrays
7. Associative arraays (especially the dbm file tie in)

I have seens some references to one or two of these sorts of features in PL/SQL, but most of them are in passing.

Has anybody used both oraperl and PL/SQL and did they find them roughly equal? How would you compare the two? I would greatly appreciate any input regarding this questions.

I also have a second question.....

I need to generate some reports to print out the results of the application run. I have had some experience with SQL*REPORT (I don't recall the version). It was only a text based application and was very simplistic (as I recall). I understand that Oracle has a new version of SQL*Report and that it is much better. Has anyone used it and is it really better?

Thank you in advance....
Doug Thelen. (Borrowing this account,

               reply to the borrowedhere is ok) Received on Tue Jan 24 1995 - 22:57:35 CET