[Info-vax] Final Orace release on VMS.

[Craig A. Berry]

On 11/15/20 10:23 AM, Marc Van Dyck wrote:

> By the way, with the kind of Oracle licenses we have, the oracle client
> on OpenVMS costs us nothing. It's just part of the total package.

One thing I don't think you've said is exactly how you use the client,
though this may just be my ignorance about what "Oracle client" means to
people who use it.  Do you have embedded SQL and are using precompilers?
That's a pretty deep requirement that is hard to satisfy any other way.

But if you are making library calls, then in principle, calling a
different library, or shims that sit on top of another library, could be
possible. There are various commercial ODBC drivers, and I think at
least some of them implement the wire-level protocol rather than relying
on the Oracle client library underneath.  There appear to be a couple of
open source ODBC drivers. No idea how good they are.

JDBC is hard to call from non-Java, but if all you need are command-line
tools, then there are options that use it, e.g.:

<https://github.com/julianhyde/sqlline>

No personal experience, but those are the sorts of things I'd be
exploring. We survived the demise of Sybase on VMS in 1998 by switching
to FreeTDS clients and are still using them today.