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Oracle Performance Tuning and Optimization
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): Edward Whalen
ISBN: 067230886x
Publication Date: 04/01/96

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Chapter 35
Using GUI Builders

To rapidly deploy applications in a variety of different environments, it is often more efficient to use GUI application development tools rather than writing applications from scratch. This chapter describes some of the application development tools currently available.

This chapter describes some of the applications development tools currently available. There are several advantages to employing GUI development tools:

  Rapid deployment of applications. By using application development tools, you can develop functional applications very quickly.
  Applications can be deployed in a variety of environments. Some tools allow the same application to be compiled for Windows, Mac, and UNIX.
  Applications can be easily modified. Development tools can facilitate the transition of development from one developer to another. By knowing the tools, it is easier for a new developer to pick up where other developers have left off.

Several excellent third-party and Oracle tools are available for application development. This chapter takes a general look at how application development tools can be optimized and then takes a specific look at some of the application development tools in use today.

In particular, this chapter examines the Oracle application development tools (Oracle Developer/2000 and Oracle Power Objects) and these popular third-party tools: PowerBuilder from Powersoft, Delphi from Borland, and SQLWindows from Gupta.

Tuning the Application

When you develop an application using an application development tool, you can do quickly what would take years to do if you programmed by hand. The function of application development tools falls into two areas:

  GUI development. This involves building the Graphical User Interface and includes determining what data is to be displayed and how it is to be presented.
  Database access. The second function of these tools is to access the database and perform certain functions based on what the application is designed to do.

It is this second function that is most important to the focus of this book. This doesn’t mean that the GUI cannot be a bottleneck—it certainly can. But there is little you can do to speed up the GUI portion of your application (typically, you cannot configure or modify that portion of the application). You can, however, modify the SQL statements generated by these GUI builders. So that is where we will focus our attention.

First-Generation Graphical Application Development Tools

When the first generation of application development tools was introduced, the tools were notorious for creating good-looking applications that were extremely slow. There were several reasons for this:

  Badly formed SQL. These early tools typically built the SQL statements dynamically at run time and usually were not very efficient.
  No stored procedures. The early tools usually did not take advantage of stored procedures, nor did they help you develop them.
  Interpreted code. These tools built the application using an interpreted language, which caused the application to execute slower than would a compiled version.
  Reliance on ODBC. Many of these tools required the use of ODBC rather than using a native Oracle interface; ODBC reduced performance.

Modern Graphical Application Development Tools

As graphical application development tools became more mature, many of the early performance problems were eliminated. In fact, now the features of almost all these application development tools include the following:

  Improved SQL. The quality of the SQL statements generated by these application development tools has increased dramatically since they were first introduced. And you now have the option of modifying the SQL statements manually.
  Stored procedures. Either through the development tool itself or by modifying the SQL statements manually, you can take advantage of stored procedures.
  Compilation options. Now, not only can you quickly run your application while developing it, you can compile it for deployment.
  Native RDBMS support. The development tools now allow you to use ODBC or a more efficient direct connection using SQL*Net.

Because of the improvements in the tools, there are no longer any specific ways of magically tuning the applications these tools create. This chapter shows you ways to access the SQL statements within the applications. Once you have access to those statements, you can determine whether these statements are efficient and can be improved.

How To Test and Improve Automatically Generated SQL Statements

Probably the best way to go about tuning SQL statements that have been generated by an application development tool is to extract the SQL statement from the application and tune it separately. You can do this using SQL*Plus and tools such as SQL Trace and EXPLAIN PLAN. Once you have optimized the SQL statement, you can insert it back into the application.


CAUTION:  If you take this approach, make sure that you have not altered the return values in any way. When the SQL statements were created, the application was modified to expect certain data back from those statements. By changing the return values, the application may no longer function properly.

By extracting the SQL statements from the application, you can optimize them separately from the application itself. By timing the responses from Oracle, you may be able to determine how much time the application takes to process the GUI. Remember that these values are only approximations and may not be extremely accurate.

The following sections describe some of the application development tools on the market today and how to tune the applications they create for optimal performance.


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