[R] ROracle 0.5-0 package update

[David James]

An update to the ROracle package is now in CRAN.

Version 0.5-0

* This version has an experimental dynamic SQL binding to data
  frames.  SQL statements can be "prepared" (parsed and cached for
  improved performance), and columns of data frames bound to them
  for automatic data transfer).  For details see the help() for
  "Oracle", "dbPrepareStatement" and "dbExecStatement".

* Host arrays are now operational. These are buffers used by Oracle's
  internal implementation to reduce network traffic and speed
  up fetches and prepared statements.  Currently fetches use a
  default buffer size (host arrays) of size 500 (previous version
  did no buffering).  **Very preliminary** results suggest performance
  improvements on fetching of about a factor of 2.
  (Note that the maximum size of these buffers is limited to about 
  65K bytes per column.)
 
* dbCommit() and dbRollback() are now explicitly implemented,
  but save points are not (but you may code them through dynamic SQL).

* The precompiler ProC/C++ is now used with the option PARSE=none
  to avoid bogus C errors with some compilers and/or platforms
  (e.g., Mac OS X).

-- 
David A. James
Statistics Research, Room 2C-253            Phone:  (908) 582-3082       
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies              Fax:    (908) 582-3340
Murray Hill, NJ 09794-0636