Aug 14, 2010

Dropping oracle support(at least DDL)

Hi,
I have decided to drop Oracle support.
Last time I used Oracle was many years ago and back then I had none of the experience I do today.
The reason? The extremely silly 30-character length restriction on identifiers.

Oracle restricts the length of identifiers to 30 characters, which is extremely strange, this being 2010 and all.
Large systems with lots of complex and specific data needs long identifier names. I once belonged to the school of abbreviation, where everything got abbreviated down to a length of about 20 characters. I have since met THE REAL WORLD of huge databases and realised that the only reason to abbreviate identifiers is that is looks better when you list them.
However, mapping them to their real-world counterpart data(rw_ctrprt_data?!?) will, for the next developer, be a error-prone and boring chore.

Recently, a collegue of mine came to me with an identifier which unabbreviated would become something like 120 characters long. I had to tell him to go with it, since there was no way around it.

The typical reason for an identifier to become this long is that it describes an exception of some sort, like: "add taxes if the counterparty's custodian has the same currency than the traders custodian".
Usually, it is some real-word legal rule that has to be followed.
And believe me, we use all the tricks, like dynamic structures and so forth, to avoid having to name columns like this, so don't give me any crap of "with the right design", because reality is different from school.
But many times, one have to do it that way. Yeah, one could use column description, but they aren't as useful as one might think.

Anyway, I will now drop Oracle support. Too bad I've already spent hours on making the auto-increment support.
Luckily, it was really straightforward to uninstall the Oracle software, kudos to them. :-)

EDIT:
Upon closer thought I will probably not drop Oracle support totally, but rather I will only have none or partial DDL support. It would be silly to exclude a very popular database from the databases supported by UnifiedBPM.

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