Our team came to the realization that we were not going to make our first delivery of the software. A quick analysis determined the problem holding us back was the code to retrieve and store data to the database. Current efforts were being done using the Active Template Library (ATL) database classes. The developer doing the work had never used ATL before. Thus the delay.
My team lead asked me for suggestions. I said that my plate was full so I could not take over the task. And even though I had done ATL programming before, it has been a long time. ATL was the initial choice because the work is an addition to a small app that was written with ATL. A couple other choices were MFC database access and Pro*C. My recommendation was to go with Pro*C because that was the second most used database access technology in our application suite.
There is potentially a huge amount of data being retrieved from the database in the new app. So the function written to get this data could not get it all at once. We ended up having one function to initialize the data retrieval, and another function which got one record at a time. The back end Pro*C code used a trick to make the retrieval code easy with only one open cursor. I have provided the details in a later post on Pro*C Cursors.
