Re: OCI Talk

On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 02:44:44PM -0400, Phil R Lawrence wrote:
> I read through the OCI Talk (from the perl conference?) and followed
> up with a skim through _Oracle Call Interface Programmer's Guide_.
> 
> Unfortunately I saw that
>   1) the coding was generally beyond my experience
>      (i.e., I can't code OCI stuff in C)
>   2) I couldn't grasp just what it was that OCI enables
>       that SQL and Pro*Cobol or DBD::Oracle doesn't

From slides 8 and 9:

    Read and write LOBs in chunks 
        Including streaming LOBs to or from the database via callbacks. 

    Create and manipulate collections, iterators, user defined types 
        variable-length arrays, nested tables, etc 

    Have multiple processes share the same transaction 

    Have multiple users share the same database connection 

    Non-blocking mode for OCI function calls 

    High speed bulk loading via Arrays or Direct Path

    Pin objects in the cache 

    Use Oracle's data manipulation and formatting facilities 
        dates, numbers, character set conversions, etc 

    Advanced Queuing 
        Including Publish / Subscribe event notifications 

    Managed automatic fail-over with Parallel Server 


> I am guessing Tim's response to the above would be "You needn't
> concern yourself with OCI then."... yet I am curious.  Can someone
> give me examples of what *practical* benefits are to be gained with
> OCI?  What exactly is this "finer control" etc that OCI promises?
> I've always found SQL jammed into a procedural language to be quite
> fine!

Hopefuly the list above will help. If not then ask again.

Tim.