Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!ncar!uchinews!news
From: kit@delphi.bsd.uchicago.edu (Kit Transue)
Subject: Re: VisualWorks2 and Oracle
Message-ID: <1994Nov7.165946.14615@midway.uchicago.edu>
Sender: news@uchinews.uchicago.edu (News System)
Organization: University of Chicago -- Academic Information Technologies
References: <mikek-0411940937460001@franklin-tty13.jvnc.net>
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 1994 16:59:46 GMT
Lines: 39

In article <mikek-0411940937460001@franklin-tty13.jvnc.net> mikek@krt.com  
(Michael Kranzdorf) writes:
> Hi, Has anyone out here created (or working on) a database application
> with VisualWorks2 and Oracle or Sybase? How do you like it? Any great
> problems or concerns? I'm especially interested to hear how an app  
scales
> with the size of the back-end database, i.e. once you add over 100  
tables
> to the VW Data Model. Also, how robust is the ObjectLens technology (any
> gotchas)? I can't think of all the questions to ask so any comments  
about
> this combo are appreciated. I'm playing with an eval copy of VW and so  
far
> I like it very much. Thanks for your input,
> 
> Mike Kranzdorf                   mikek@krt.com

I'm working on my first PPVW application, and only my second Smalltalk  
project.  Still very much a newbie.  So all this should be taken with more  
than a few grains of salt:

The ObjectLens is pretty productive, when you're working within its  
limitations.  The limitations that I come across so far:

* Multiple database access.  The data modeller appears to only look at one  
database at a time.  This appears to complicate situations where you want  
to access two databases within the same application.

* Unlimited text fields.  I'm working with the Sybase adaptor.  The  
modeller seems to set things up pretty well, suggesting that the column is  
of type ByteString/Text.  However, it won't retrieve any rows from the  
table, throwing some kind of "unable to retrieve one or more rows"  
exception.

I don't know how serious these are, or if there are straightforward  
workarounds.  And I won't have a feel for the scalability performance  
until I find a workaround....

kit transue
