VERSION 1.3

Time for an upgrade

By Garrett J. Suhm

A lot of exciting things are happening in the world of Oracle development. With the impending release of version 2 and the support of Windows NT and Windows 95 with version 1.3, it's a great time to be an Oracle developer. If you haven't upgraded to version 1.3 of Designer/2000 and Developer/2000, now is the time to make the move. It's an easy upgrade, because version 1.3 .FMB and .RDF files are backward- and forward-compatible with release 1.2.

The magic number is 32

The most obvious enhancement is the native 32-bit capability. If you develop under Windows, you no longer need to suffer the lack of stability and other limitations of the 16-bit subsystems of Windows NT or Windows 95. Now you can take advantage of true multitasking, long filenames (up to 32 characters), and better performance. And, if you have enough memory, using Designer/2000 with a local NT or Windows 95 database is now a quite viable option.

The little things

Oracle has made a lot of minor interface improvements that will make your daily development tasks even easier. The most recently used files now appear under the File menu for all the products. You can now send your reports directly via E-mail if your mail system supports the Microsoft Mail application programming interface (MAPI). In Designer/2000, the Database Design Wizard now lists entities in alphabetical order, which can make life much easier when you have a large system with hundreds of entities.

Performance

On top of the obvious performance benefits of the 32-bit implementation, other less-obvious changes have been made. To conserve memory, Oracle has moved many subsystems to dynamic link libraries (DLLs), which aren't loaded until needed. This feature can save up to a megabyte of RAM at startup. In addition, the debug code is no longer automatically built into the runtime forms, which saves even more memory. Debug information can still be included if needed.

The registry

Gone with the 16-bit version is the ORACLE.INI file. The settings it contained are now maintained in the Windows registry, which is invoked with regedt32 on Windows NT and regedt on Windows 95. As you can see in Figure A, the SOFTWARE folder, which contains the ORACLE folder, is located under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE folder. The 32-bit version uses the same variable names from ORACLE.INI. You'll have to manually add any changes you made to your old configuration file.

Figure A: The Oracle settings are now maintained in the Windows registry.

A glimpse into the future

Think of release 1.3 as a stepping-stone to the future. A lot of really neat features are going to appear in the Oracle tools, and this release provides a great foundation for them.

Garrett Suhm is the Editor-in-Chief of Exploring Oracle Developer/2000 Designer/2000. He is also a senior consultant with Tactics, Inc., an Oracle consulting firm based in the Southeast. You can reach Garrett via E-mail at gsuhm@tacticsus.com.

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