Re: ODBC ? DAO ? OleDB ? OCI ? ADO ?

Christian,

I'm afraid nobody can give you the definite aswer. It depends on a lot of circumstances. Your goals, your needs, your experience, your ability and willing to learn.

We can look at two groups
1) Pure APIs (OCI, ODBC, DAO)
2) OLE/(D)COM APIs (OLE-DB, ADO)

If your intention is creating components for COM environment, choose from group 2). ADO is build over the OLE-DB, it is a higher-level then OLE-DB.

What about the group 1)...
OCI - It is the mostly supported from ORACLE and it is intented to be used only with ORACLE. With OCI you can get all specs ORACLE provides however you're loosing cross-RDBMS portability. If your application runs only in ORACLE environment, using OCI can be a good choice.

DAO - It is intented for use with MS Jet (.MDB) databases or these which MS Jet Engine
can read directly - e.g.:FoxPro, dBase, Paradox, MS Excel or Lotus worksheets or Text files.
You can use it with ORACLE - ODBC too but it doesn't seem to be a good choice.

ODBC - It is the great idea however folks from ORACLE don't seem to be sharing my opinion.
ODBC (drivers for ORACLE) are not supported by ORACLE too much. You can get driver
from more vendors (MS or former Intersolv) but every driver behaves differently.
What mostly suprises me is that there are mess in mapping ORACLE datatypes to ODBC SQL datatypes.
NUMBER(10) could be mapped as SQL_INTEGER, SQL_DECIMAL or SQL_DOUBLE. ODBC drawback seen from DBMS vendors other then MS is that with adding new functionality to their DBMS,
they have to put a pressure on MS to release the new ODBC version which will include their new technology.
However I think you can chose from variety drivers and it could be also a good choice for creating some application types using ODBC.

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Thank you for keeping >anti-spam< habit: not including my address in your reply. Received on Fri Sep 17 1999 - 03:41:20 CDT