What Oracle versions do we support?

[MJFShark]

I was recently doing some work in ZDbcOracleMetadata (to add table comments to the UncachedGetTables results) and needed to do some joins and noticed that we use the "newer" join syntax that was added in Oracle 9i in a few places (which is recommended for newer servers and I'm happy to abandon the old join syntax.) We also use SYS_CONTEXT which was also added in 9i. Is it ok to assume that we don't support Oracle 8? I had initially added some version checks (GetConnection.GetHostVersion >= 9002000) to use these features but noticed that we already use them. Are there docs for what database server versions Zeoslib should support?

-Mark

[aehimself]

This sounds extremely familiar and I think I did it; however I found no trace of it.
Metadata was updated in commit

1574d0607e989d7f23805b85b93dd2fc4fff870f
Oracle metadata to show field remarks (comments)
marsupilami79 on 11/22/2019, 10:29:24 AM

Now IF it was me I could only test it on Oracle 9 as that was the lowest version we had back then - and on that version remarks were empty.
If you want you can branch the query based on server version; I had to do the same for MySQL metadata some time ago to fix an access violation:

5b8beeb1f01fde5c9f036bbd3822c2a08bdb959d
By AEHimself: Fix MySQL 5+ cross reference metadata. Fixed tiny issues in MySQL Imported and Exported keys metadata.
marsupilami79 on 2/7/2023, 6:27:14 PM

[marsupilami]

Hello,

no, there currently is no official statement on what Oracle versions we support. I cannot test anything older than Oracle 12c. Since Oracle 9i is kinda ancient, I don't see a reason to support Oracle 8.

If you want me to, I can include a statement in the release notes that we don't officially support anything older than Oracle 12 or any other version you suggest.

What do you think?

[MJFShark]

no, there currently is no official statement on what Oracle versions we support. I cannot test anything older than Oracle 12c. Since Oracle 9i is kinda ancient, I don't see a reason to support Oracle 8.

I'm in complete agreement. I was surprised recently to come across a 9i installation at a customer site but I haven't heard of anyone using Oracle 8 in forever (thankfully!) Before last month I would have assumed that 9i was pretty much not in use.

If you want me to, I can include a statement in the release notes that we don't officially support anything older than Oracle 12 or any other version you suggest.

Knowing that we can use features that were added in 9i is helpful for development. I'm not sure about the official statement, I might just say 9i or 10 and up. I do still see Oracle 11 installations. Oracle has been pretty good about backwards compatibility in general.

-Mark

[marsupilami]

I added a note, that Zeos 8 doesn't support Oracle installations older than Oracle 9i.