At 06:26 PM 3/29/00 -0000, you wrote:

>From: "Kim Madsen" <kbm@...>
>
>
>I know several of you are flaming Oracle... but its actually a quite
>fast and stable database widely used (why.... because it actually
>does work), and I think IB should compete against Oracle more than it
>should try to mimic Access!
>
>Why to reinvent the wheel when somebody has allready shown how to do
>it.
>

Because the wheel that Oracle invented wasn't round. Of course,
one of the arguments in favor of square wheels is that they are
stable.

Among the arguments against making case sensitivity a session
mode:

1. You can't tell what a query is going to do by looking
at it.

2. It doesn't handle indexes in a useful manner.

3. It can't mix mode. In specific, the following statement

select * from people order by lastName nocase, lastName

orders duplicates by case, which is generally what you want.
Making the general case architecturally impossible is not
particularly perspicuous.

The only thing going for Oracle's implementation is that it's better
than Sybase's. This is like saying something is softer than a rock.

Jim Starkey