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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> Re: what is oracle rdb?
Monday, November 24, 2003, 3:49:26 PM, ryan_oracle_at_cox.net (ryan_oracle_at_cox.net) wrote:
rcn> I see it referred to on metalink alot. I know its seperate from the rdbms.
Rdb was the database I cut my teeth on. So easy to use. As I recall, you could create a database with just the following:
CREATE DATABASE; Everything, including the database name, would default. It was great, especially for learning on.
Digital's online help was unsurpassed too. I learned a lot from that, and from their Rdb manual set. All Rdb's commands worked consistently and logically, and everything was so orthogonal. Heck, if you wanted to see what a table looked like, you just issued commands such as:
SHOW TABLE SHOW TABLE /CONSTRAINTS (to see constraints too)
SHOW TABLE /INDEXES /CONSTRAINTS SHOW TABLE /ALL (to see everything)
I recall beginning my database education by tying HELP RDB at the operating system, and then progressing from there. Typing HELP from within RDB's interactive-SQL utility was sheer joy.
One of the first things I did when I made the move to Oracle was to fire up SQL*Plus and issue the SHOW TABLE command to see the structure of a table I was trying to insert into. I was baffled that there was no such command. HELP SHOW didn't help much either, because I discovered that SHOW seemed to show a whole bunch of things I didn't care about and nothing that I did care about. I was even more astounded when I discovered DISPLAY, which didn't, and still doesn't, even begin to give you the information you needed in order to be able to get work done with a table. It took me over a day, as I recall, before I managed to find someone who could show me how to look at constraints on a table. I'd heard all these great and wonderful things about Oracle, that it was *the* database to learn. Well, from a career standpoint that's probably true, Oracle was the database to learn, but certainly not from a usability standpoint.
Best regards,
Jonathan Gennick --- Brighten the corner where you are http://Gennick.com * 906.387.1698 * mailto:jonathan@gennick.com
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Author: Jonathan Gennick
INET: jonathan_at_gennick.com
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