[Mono-dev] System.Data.OracleClient in Mono

[Leszek Ciesielski]

On 10/10/06, Daniel Morgan <monodanmorg at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hey Leszek,
>
> Thanks for responding.
>
> >
> > On 10/4/06, Daniel Morgan <monodanmorg at yahoo.com>
> > wrote:
> > > Do you know parsers like yacc, jay, or bison?
> >
> > I had some basic experience with bison ...,
> > and with javacc
> >
>
> Main reason I was asking because I do not know jay nor
> other compiler-compilers.  Any ideas where to start?
>
> >
> > You are suggesting a load of work for me, aren't
> > you? :-)
>
> Only because I thought you might be interested. :-)
>
> It is time consuming to maintain.  Mainly, it takes
> time to figure out OCI and marhalling between OCI and
> the managed world.
>
> > > Also, there are shortcomings in
> > > System.Data.OracleClient that have been addressed
> > in
> > > Oracle's own provider, such as, Changing of
> > passwords.
> > >
> > > Would you be interested in creating such a
> > provider
> > > for Mono?
> > Tricky question. I came here mainly because there
> > were OracleClient I
> > could not get around in my work, and noone was even
> > checking the
> > patches I submitted. I can quite easily find time to
> > write a test case
> > / regression for a bug or examine a patch. From time
> > to time I can
> > dwell into one to find a solution on my own. But I
> > don't have enough
> > spare time to work on extending OC too much.
>
> I guess that was my fault. I have been maintaining it
> every now and then.  The hard part is getting mono
> built on Windows.  On recent distribution of Linux
> with Gnome, ir's easy.  However, Windows is the best
> place to test it because you can also use your same
> test on .net's csc too for comparison.
>
> > >
> > > Is there any missing features in
> > > System.Data.OracleClient you would like
> > implemented?
> >
> > I'd like to get 1.1 / 2.0 compatibily, for a start.
> > It seems to me
> > that mono 2.0 OracleClient is not compatible with MS
> > even on interface
> > / inheritance level, not to mention funcionality.
> > Also getting the
> > examples from msdn to run correctly (something like
> > this recently
> > popped on the list) would be good. More exotic
> > functions are... well,
> > exotic.
>
> Yeah, I should get around to implementing those bits.
> I have been more concerned with 1.1 compatibility.
>
> >
> > My nearest plans are to handle the unicode string
> > problem, then get
> > the test from Mainsoft integrated into normal test
> > execution...
> >
>
> Yeah, I haven't done much with unicode testing because
> I have no idea how to test unicode functionality.

Things no longer look so bright. I launched Mainsoft test suite, and
now I know why you were asking about parsers... Tests that do not
segfault mostly fail because of data-description-mining lacks in
OracleClient. Unicode is a bitch - strings get translated first
between mono and binaries, then upon entering OCI, then between OCI
and server, then on server before being stored in database. And most
segfaults happen with OCI character-translation routines - somewhere
there is a huge bug lurking in the OCI marshaing code..

Could anyone advance in Marshaling take a look into OracleClient tests
marked as NotWorking?