I'm interested to know if there's anyone out there using the new SQL Layer developed for 5.5. Has the SQL Layer/OCI connectivity to Oracle been re-written?

If the above is true, has anyone benchmarked it against the old SQL Layer/Oracle OCI, and what, if any, improvements have been made. Is it quicker?

Why was a new SQL layer written in the first place?

Ta
Doug

Anyone running 5.5r208 or above will be using the new SQL layer. There are also a couple of customers with earlier kernels that have the new SQL layer patched in. The easiest way to determine whether you are running the new SQL layer is to enable tracing using TRACESQL=1 and then connect to a database. If you see lines in the trace file that begin with chevrons (< or >) then you have the new SQL layer. The SQL layer sits between the OCI/ODBC layer and the PROIV kernel. Consequently, the OCI layer has not been changed at all. However, we have made a number of improvements to the PROIV ODBC drivers, including adding support for a couple of new databases.

I will leave it to others to comment on the relative performance, as I have not performed any in depth quantitative benchmarking.

The SQL layer was rewritten primarily to address a number of issues that affected ODBC database connections. We also took the opportunity to improve the tracing within the SQL layer, so that any problems that may occur in the future will be able to be resolved more easily.