Should one use OCI or the Oracle Precompilers?

OCI is superior to Pro*C in the following ways:

• Performance is much better with OCI
• Reduced code size
• Direct access to built-in functions (No intermediate files or substitutions).
• Piecewise Operation on LONG fields (All LONG field problems are solved)
• In Pro*C one cannot dynamically allocate memory to be used as bind variables
• You cannot control the Pro*C precompiler to provide better and more compilable C-code.
• etc...

Common problems with OCI:

• OCI code is difficult to write and to maintain
• Very few people can write, let alone maintain OCI code
• etc...

An OCI application program must do the following:

• Connect to one or more databases: call the OCILogon (olog, olon or orlon) routines
• Open the cursors needed by the program: use oexec, oexn, ofen or oftech calls.
• Process the SQL statements that are needed to perform the application's tasks.
• Close the cursors using the oclose routine.
• Disconnect from the databases: use ologoff to close an open connection to oracle.