Re: Foreign key in Oracle Sql
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 14:01:34 -0800
Message-ID: <41eed8b2$1_1_at_127.0.0.1>
David Cressey wrote:
>>Given that those other products didn't exist when Oracle was created. >>And given that those that have worked with Oracle for almost 20 years >>have a large volume of working code they don't want broken. And given >>that it really doesn't matter ... what's your point other than whining?
>
>
> My point is not whining. In fact, my general opinion of Oracle is a
> favorable one.
> But if they get something wrong, it deserves to be called wrong. Especially
> in the context of this thread, where somebody is using Oracle behavior to
> prove the point to somebody else.
>
> Two points deserve mention:
>
> The first is that there was at least one commercial Relational DBMS product
> that got this particular thing right 20 years ago.
What currently available commercial RDBMS was available 20 years ago other than Oracle? State the name. And while your at it at least acknowledge that back then it was a coin toss ... there were no standards. So the fact that the decision didn't coincide with where the rest of the market went is relatively unimportant.
But the critical thing here, from the standpoint of using the product is "Who really cares?" If it was an arbitrary architecture, undocumented, and it caused problems for applications I'd agree. But it is a known behavior, excellently documented, and anyone that makes a mistake coding because of it has defined themselves as too lazy to read the docs. So it is far more likely that person will make far more serious mistakes buiding temporary tables, doing incremental commits, etc.
In short ... I think this issue is a nit.
> The second is that Oracle warns its users that code that depends on the
> confusion between the empty string and NULL
> might be broken in a future release of Oracle! (emphasis mine). If you
> don't believe me, check out the Oracle documentation.
They also warn not to use keywords to objects and to use VARCHAR2 rather than VARCHAR because things might break. Still a nit.
>>That Oracle should gut its product and make it just another flavour of >>Microsoft vanilla?
>
> Absolutely not! I never said that, and I don't intend to imply that!
Others have.
> Read some more of my posts before you conclude whether I'm just whining or
> not.
I did. I don't see you as whining but I certainly see most posts about it that way. And I still see it as a totally insignificant matter that has never hurt anyone that learns about the tool before using it.
-- Daniel A. Morgan University of Washington damorgan_at_x.washington.edu (replace 'x' with 'u' to respond) ----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==---- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups ---= East/West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---Received on Wed Jan 19 2005 - 23:01:34 CET