Re: Oraperl Vs. PL/SQL, ReportWriter

In article <3g3t4f$t4j_at_netnews.upenn.edu>, Dania M. Egedi <egedi_at_linc.cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
>
>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.

Oraperl uses OCI calls. Oracle have stated that the OCI interface will be around for a long time to come. In an ideal world you should only need to recompile oraperl against the latest oci libraries.

A bigger problem is the arrival Perl 5. I am once again working on the Perl 5 Database Interface and driver for Oracle. Once ready to release it will be supplied with an oraperl.pl file which will provide a backwards compatible interface so your investment in oraperl scripts will not be lost.

> 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.
>

It's worth noting that you can use some elements of PL/SQL within oraperl:

&ora_do($lda, <<END
begin

    dbms_alert.signal('ALERT_DEMO','oraperl test');     commit;
end;
END In the longer term the Perl 5 Oracle DBD may offer direct support for PL/SQL arrays and other fancy features.

>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?
>
I can't comment on that, but if you're a FrameMaker user please send me some email. We have a very cute FrameMaker/oraperl reporting tool.

>Thank you in advance....
>Doug Thelen. (Borrowing this account,
> reply to the borrowedhere is ok)
>
Regards,
Tim Bunce. Received on Mon Jan 30 1995 - 13:36:07 CET