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by skissane 1280 days ago
Does it need to be a fork, as opposed to just an extension?

I understand why upstream Postgres might not want to put Oracle compatibility in the core, since it would be adding a lot of crud which only a minority of people would benefit from. However, making sure the Postgres core has the extension points necessary to support extensions providing compatibility with Oracle (or DB2, MSSQL, MySQL, etc), is something they might be more willing to entertain.
1 comments
chasil 1280 days ago
The postgres 15 manual has a chapter on Oracle compatibility.

I don't know where to find it on their website, but the docs RPM that they provide bundles the PDF.

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skissane 1280 days ago
You are probably thinking of ECPG's "Oracle compatibility mode", which makes it behave more like Oracle Pro*C - https://www.postgresql.org/docs/15/ecpg-oracle-compat.html

However, few people actually use Pro*C nowadays. I spent almost 10 years working for Oracle, and I never once came across anybody using it. I think almost all use of it is in legacy applications which date back to the 1980s, first half of the 1990s at the latest. Obviously still enough use for Oracle to keep on supporting it, even with some occasional minor enhancements, but rather fringe all the same.

I don't think many people use ECPG either. I'm sure some people must, but I myself have never seen it. Probably most use is in porting existing applications from Oracle Pro*C, or its equivalents such as Informix E/SQL. Actually, it is interesting to observe that the section on ECPG's Informix compatibility mode is a lot longer than the Oracle equivalent. I don't know if that's because less compatibility is required (maybe Pro*C is closer to ECPG already), or if that's because Informix compatibility has received more investment.

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thorin 1279 days ago
I've used pro* C for a couple of things (in banking and utilties, 1990s) where people wanted interactive batch functionality for something more complex than you'd generally put in a shell script. I think most of the pro* C usage came from pre Oracle 7 when PL/SQL didn't exist.
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