Tony Summers wrote:


"I assume all vendors of such tools would be prepared to publish how fast
their software is at delivering data back to the calling application.
:)

Let me guess the answer ... "It depends".

The fundamental point is .... that trying to use Cursors on a RDMBS will
never give you the performance you can get from native SQL approach.
Indeed most books on SQL, including M$soft SQL advise against this
approach. "

I agree with you Tony.  However, I would suggest that in the contexts we
have experienced the above does not matter.

1) Customers don't seem to care about theoretical relative performance
numbers, all they seem to care about is that the can achieve what they think
of as acceptable performance for THEIR applications.  All of our customers
seem to have clear ideas about that and they put that expectation in
contracts.  We meet those contractual obligations.

2) As I mentioned previously, fast machines are really inexpensive today.

Therefore, if a customer can achieve the performance they feel they need for
their application and the hardware is really cheap, why would one care about
relative performance of pure SQL access versus cursor based access?

3) It is more expensive in terms of labor costs to redesign your application
to perform faster.  For example, a migration that cost $100,000  going the
simple route using cursors, could conceivably cost as $300-$500,000 with a
redesign!  Moreover, any redesign is more risky than a simple migration.

Customers who like our approach are first and foremost risk averse.
Secondly, I think it is difficult today to find a customer who will spend
$200,000 in labor to avoid spending an extra $10,000 on hardware.


Charles Finley
619-795-0720

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