Summary
That just about brings us to the end of
this guide to connecting to an Oracle database from an ASP application. We covered
quite lot of ground here:
Installation and configuration of the Oracle8
client software, Net8
Using the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Oracle
Using the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC
Using Oracle Objects for OLE (OO4O)
PL/SQL fundamentals
Creating a sample ASP application based on
the scott
account
Showing that it is possible to retrieve an
ADO Recordset
from an Oracle stored procedure, using both PL/SQL tables and reference cursors
Before we finish this chapter, take look
at the chart below comparing each of the common methods
of data access for Oracle. I added an additional 7000 records to the emp
table and then used each of the methods to retrieve these records and display
them using an ASP script. Each method was executed three times and after each
test I rebooted the server machine so that there would be very little chance
of data being cached by either Oracle or the web server (for this test the web
server also doubled as the Oracle database server to cut the time taken to shutdown
and restart).
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In these tests, MSDAORA was
used with a standard SQL SELECT
statement, as was the ODBC Driver for Oracle and OO4O, and
finally I used the ODBC Driver for Oracle in conjunction with PL/SQL tables,
and Oracle's Oracle Provider for OLE DB with a reference
cursors as just described. The Y-axis shows the amount of time taken to complete
each test in seconds. I also monitored the CPU and memory usage and they were
all very similar for each test.
You can see that there is not that much
difference between each method. When choosing which method to use, the underlying
factor will always be good database design and coding practices.
Don't forget that you can download all of the SQL and ASP scripts for this
chapter from the Wrox web site at http://www.wrox.com.