Re: Informix vs. Oracle

On Sun, 10 Aug 1997 19:14:57 -0500, Richard Stanford <richards@herald.net> wrote: >Database development tools .. not really sure what you mean here. If you're >referring to tools in general though, Oracle doesn't even give you something >as basic as 'dbschema' (from the 8 year Oracle veteran teaching the class -- >just do an export without the data). No good way to get the information about >the entire database. Have you seen the EM Performance pack tools. Believe not! > >The number of times myself or others w/ external db experience in the training >classes would ask a question to be told 'Well, I think there's a third-party >tool that does something like that' just overwhelmed me. I can see why Oracle >DBAs are in such high demand, though. A very high maintenance system. See above. >Then things like their number storage -- if you don't know, numbers are stored >in some packed form and are inherently VARIABLE LENGTH. If you have some >heavily updated numbers, be prepared to have some update overhead. I'll stop >now, but I was really surprised -- I was expecting a much cleaner system for >the self-proclaimed industry-leader. The packed form happens to be Oracle's internal number format. Oracle uses this format to provide the same number format, NUMBER(38), from DOS/WIN to Mainframes. As far as the variable length goes... I'm not sure why such architectural detail should affect you or anyone. One should be interested only in the db's total throughput in one's environment. -sm