Introduction
Wouldn't life be a lot easier if everyone used the same operating system, the
same Internet browser software and the same relational database? Unfortunately
things aren't that simple, so we need to be as flexible as possible. This book
introduces all the main databases and data sources that you, as an ASP developer,
may come across. Here, we will cover one of the most important relational databases
– Oracle .
In this chapter we will cover the basics of configuring a web server to connect
to a remote Oracle8 or Oracle8i database, although many of the techniques apply
equally well to previous versions of Oracle 7.x. We'll show you how to use the
common ODBC Drivers and OLE DB Providers in conjunction with ActiveX Data Objects
(ADO) to manipulate data stored within an Oracle database from within an ASP
application.
We'll build upon each area by creating a collection of ASP scripts that will
use the sample scott database schema showing how to retrieve and update data
in a flexible and more importantly, scalable manner. We will finally cover the
(unfortunately), advanced concept of retrieving recordsets from an Oracle
stored procedure. Don't worry though, it's relatively easy to use scalar INPUT
and OUTPUT parameters to return individual parameters from an Oracle stored procedure
– which we'll also be covering in this chapter.
All of the SQL and ASP code
for this sample application can be downloaded from the Wrox web site at http://www.wrox.com.