bizTalk Oracle Adapter Limitations

Adapter Limitations

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The following are known limitations of the Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for Oracle Database.

• Array binding is not supported because it is a performance issue. According to Oracle documentation, if you include a large amount of data in a single Biztalk message to the adapter, you gain performance because there are fewer network round trips between the Oracle database and the adapter; however, the Oracle ODBC driver tries to minimize these network calls when array binding is not used.
  
• BFile is supported as an IN parameter only.
  
• BFile and BLOB cannot be used with the Table methods, Insert, Update, or Query.
  
• Large object (LOB) types are supported as IN parameters only. When they appear as INOUT, RETURN and OUT, the procedure is not displayed in the browser, and therefore is not callable. LOBs are supported in tables in the Insert, Update, or Query methods.
  
  There are two types of LOBs: a character LOB (CLOB) and a binary LOB (BLOB). The remove method on the table is available on CLOB tables because BizTalk Adapter for Oracle Database does not have to know the types of the columns in the table to remove all data.
  
• When a table contains columns of types that are not supported by the adapter for that database system, the table only shows the Remove method.
  
• Some PL/SQL stored procedures have a parameter of a user-defined data type for an Oracle Table. Packages that contain PL/SQL using a cursor or a ref cursor, as in some native APIs, do not generate the schema.
  
• Records and cursors are not supported as return types as either input or output of stored procedures, as the ODBC driver does not define the metadata for these.
  
• User-defined types (objects) are not supported for stored procedure in/inout/out/return types.
  
• Empty strings and strings with only white space characters are treated as NULL string by BizTalk Adapter for Oracle Database. Oracle also treats a character with a length of zero as null.
  

Literal Number Support

Oracle treats literal numbers differently. Internally the database requires numbers to be formatted with the semi-colon instead of the period. Refer to Oracle documentation for more information about how Oracle treats literal numbers: www.cs.umb.edu/cs634/ora9idocs/server.920/a96540/sql_elements3a.htm#3411.