Niall's Oracle Pages

Release 2 of the Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio.Net is here. When coupled with Oracle Database 10g Release 2 on Windows, this makes building and deploying .Net managed stored procedures to the Oracle database a reality. Interestingly this confirms the prediction, but not the hopelessly incorrect dates, I made at the time of last years Open World that Oracle would support CLR stored procedures before Microsoft.

I guess the question for developers, and dbas, is So What?. In fact discussion around CLR stored procedures in the database world has been passionate at times see also Fabian Pascal here.

The good news (or was that bad news) for programmers working with the CLR on Oracle is that they already have an analogue. Oracle has had a JVM in the database since 1999 and the release of Oracle 8i. There is, at least to this observer, a good chance that CLR stored procedures will follow a similar evolutionary path.

1. People will try and write traditional stored code in the CLR.
2. They will be disappointed in the performance and reliability of it (Joe Celko and Fabian Pascal give some reasons for this).
3. Slowly people will start adding extra add-in functionality to the database and this will probably work acceptably well.

So as with the situation today PL/SQL (or T-SQL) will not be replaced as the language of choice for data manipulation but added functionality for the database, rather using the database to host application functionality, will likely use the CLR integration in the same way that UTL_SMTP etc have been implemented in Java.

Your position on whether this is a good thing or not obviously will be influenced by your position on the suitability of hosting this extra functionality in the database at all - I tend to think that applications should be applications and databases should be databases.