PRO C

[bdn]

can anyone give me a good starting place to learn how to work with PRO C. Not quite sure what it is or what performance gains/restrictions are associated with it.
Any help would be appreciated..

[Chandra]

PRO * C is nothing but C and embeded SQL.
if has got its own advantages.

[balamv]

Its is mainly used in batch processing, reading from a flat file validating the record before taking them into oracle database.

You can find sample file with .pc extension .

If need more on these let me know.

Rgds
BMV

[bdn]

thanks for the replies. one further question on this.
currently I use sqlldr/utl_file and a few perl scripts
I've written to do all my flat file processing and moving
of data. I've become very familiar with these processes.
I'm still learning oracle, is PRO * C something I should
dive into to further my performance and efficiency. I have
some C background(not much but I can get by).

Thanks again.

[rotem_fo]

Hi,
I am a newbie Oracle DBA and a very experienced C/C++/JAVA developer.
We use PRO*C in our Application for DML purposes.

Pro*C is a great tool for writing DML phrases without knowing the structure of SQL in C/C++.
For Example:

EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION;
char chr[10];
short srt;
EXEC SQL END DECLARE SECTION;

EXEC SQL AT <db_name>
SELECT <VAL1>,<VAL2> into :chr,srt
from <some_table>;

EXEC SQL COMMIT;

.
.
.
This is an example for using Pro*C to write DML.
You can use Pro*C to execute packages and procedures directly from the database.

[pwoneill]

Pro*C is probablly more geared twoards large, repeated production batch processes where performance is an issue.

If you're just parsing a few flatfiles and inserting into your database once or twice, I would also just use Perl and dump it to sqlplus. Pro*C is overkill and much more work for quick things like this.

However if say you have 200,000 record flatfiles sent from a customer every day/week/etc which need to be validated and imported into your database, or a large program which generates a 200,000 record flatfile to be sent to some other customer, Pro*C is probablly the way to go.

Check out oracle's documentation at technet for examples, and other places where Pro*C would be useful.

[bdn]

Thanks for all the information everyone. This is exactly what I was interested in. Much appreciated.