Re: Which is better Sybase/Oracle??

Wow guys till now tremedouse responses......but probably we are
diverting a little bit and getting into more syntactically nature of
both databases.
I believe Oracle was designed for programmer friendly that's why more
in-buillt / ready made functions are available compared to sybase. In
sybase always there is a workaround to do a specific task which oracle
can do.

The issue is to know where these two databases have to be used. Under
what context / environment / application we can decide that sybase /
orcale would be better??


Any idea....

Thanks,
Subind.


DA Morgan wrote:
David Kerber wrote:
In article <1167067378.72059@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, damorgan@xxxxxxxxx
says...

...

You are correct in the sense that both products allow you to create
numeric surrogate keys but, as I said in my original response, the
place where you will see significant differences is if you move into
high transaction volumes and large databases.

One excellent example is an object Oracle calls a sequence that can
be used for purposes of generating surrogate keys. Sybase has no
equivalent technology and while this is not an issue at small to

At a fundamental level, how is this different from the autoincrement and
global autoincrement default values that Sybase's SQLAnywhere product
has had for many years? I realize that a sequence has a few
capabilities that an autoinc doesn't, but for generating surrogate keys,
it can do that just fine.

....

Very substantially different. Here is what a SEQUENCE object can do.

Count by any increment or decrement.

Start at any arbitrary value selected by the developer/DBA.

Can cycle through a set of values and return to the original.

Can have a maximum value.

Can cache, in memory, an arbitrary number of values, eliminating
serialization.

Is not tied to any specific table so can be used to increment any single
object or multiple objects. (this can allow for a unique and sequential
identification of everything that happens in any Oracle schema (Sybase
database).

Can be set to any arbitrary value when required (by dropping and
recreating).

Syntax allows selecting into a variable or column the current sequence
value as well as the previous value from the same session.

Here is the complete syntax:
CREATE SEQUENCE <seq_name>
INCREMENT BY <integer>
START WITH <integer>
MAXVALUE <integer> / NOMAXVALUE
MINVALUE <integer> / NOMINVALUE
CYCLE / NOCYCLE
CACHE <#> / NOCACHE
ORDER / NOORDER;

One that emulates autoincrement might look like this:

CREATE SEQUENCE mysequence;

Which would create on that begins incrementing by one, with one, and
will cache 20 values in memory.

It is an object type Sybase has needed for a very long time.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(replace x with u to respond)
Puget Sound Oracle Users Group
www.psoug.org

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