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I am employed as a developer, but the only application development tools I have available to me are Access and Excel (i.e., VBA). Fortunately, I have good access to our Oracle DB, but that took some persuasion! It's been a while, but I can write good, albeit vanilla C (amongst other, less relevant things) and am familiar with the OOP model.

The problem I've come up against is that VBA with ADO isn't robust enough to suit my needs. So, my question is: how realistic do you think it would be to migrate from this environment to C++ (say, using Visual C++) with Oracle's C++ call interface, given my experience? Would the learning curve (C++, which I've dabbled in briefly, OCCI and, ultimately, Windows GUI coding) be too steep to justify?

That is, could I learn this stuff on the job to a production level in a short amount of time?

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A less difficult path might be C# and .NET – Raynos Dec 7 '11 at 15:32
@Raynos Indeed, but what about OCCI? I have a feeling that ADO.net will probably suffer the same problems as it's old school brother. – Xophmeister Dec 7 '11 at 15:50
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@Xophmeister: Not so, ADO.Net works, period. (Especially if you install Oracle Provider for .Net, that way you're not going near old ADO or ODBC) – Binary Worrier Dec 7 '11 at 15:55
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@Xophmeister: I've had brief exposure to .net and Oracle, and that was 6 years ago now, so I can't remember specifics. However the Company I was contracting into had numerous in house .net apps that all spoke to a seriously large multi-gigabyte back end database. The company was a large player in the financial services sector and reliability was one of their major selling points. It worked flawlessly then, I dare say it works better now :) – Binary Worrier Dec 7 '11 at 16:07
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@Xophmeister If you're still interested in going the C++ way, take a look at Ocilib (orclib.sourceforge.net). It's way nicer than OCCI and has amazing performance. C++ + Qt + Ocilib is a really smooth choice. – Vitor Braga Dec 8 '11 at 19:28
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Where ever you're from, there are people in a city near you that will pay you good money to let them beat you black and blue. Arrange to meet them on a weekly basis, it'll be a faster and more effective way to generate lots of pain and will leave you more or less able to do your job, and will generate a little extra income.

If generating chronic debilitating pain for yourself is not a requirement here, I'd go for C# (ADO.Net comes with it), or any .net language (you're also familiar with VB Syntax so Vb.Net may be a runner either).

I'd go so far as to recommend Java before C++, C++ is very good for lots of things, and it can indeed to Front Ends and Database access, but it makes everything painfully complicated, and I say that having loved & worked with C++ for 5 or 6 years.

Save yourself a lot of pain and heartache, go C# & .Net.

My two cents.

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