Re: Difference between Oracle OCI and thin Driver?

Peter Swampton wrote:

> As far as I know there are two different options to acces the Oracle database:
> With the thin or the OCI driver.
> What is the difference ?
>
> Peter

The thin driver is all Java. It can run anywhere without needing any other oracle stuff installed. The OCI driver needs all the Oracle client installed. It uses Oracle's native client libraries to communicate with the DBMS. The thin driver just opens a raw socket to the DBMS and knows/uses the client-DBMS protocol itself.

    Originally the OCI driver was faster, but in recent years this has been fixed, especially for the 10g version of the thin driver. OCI has evolved too, but bugs in native OCI code can still kill an entire JVM, whereas the thin driver is completely safe in that regard.

    To tell an OCI driver where to connect, you just have to tell it the entry name in the tnsnames.ora file that is in it's ORACLE_HOME environment. With the thin driver, you give it the DBMS machine name, port number (1521 is default), and the DBMS's SID.
I hope this helps a bit,
Joe Weinstein at BEA Received on Thu Jan 20 2005 - 12:27:01 CST