Re: Why "metastink" {or "fetidstink" !} ??

On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, hemantchitale_at_charteredsemi.com wrote:

> Why do a large number of postings refer to "MetaLink" as "MetaStink"
> (or "fetidstink") ?

Oracle, a company that advertises its products as "Unbreakable," runs Metalink, a site that is plagued with problems of availability, usability, reliability and performance. During a period in late 1998 when they "upgraded" to "v.2" of their site, Metalink came back up extremely broken, then was was unavailable for a period of months. This outage was the beginning of a three-year stretch of reliability issues.

Using Metalink, you will constantly encounter unexpected results such as error pages that contain the complete Oracle error from the database that Metalink relies on. For a while, we were all getting ORA-4031 from their database. Other times, an error page will appear that just says, "operation failed, try again." No matter how many times you try, it still fails. Just try finding the right way to report a problem with Metalink. If you get a response from them, I would be very surprised.

Metalink has a history of being poorly designed, poorly QA'd, poorly managed and unreliable. Opening a TAR is ridiculously tedious.

They will have to run the site competently for some significant length of time before I will stop making fun of it.

OTOH, you can get some really great information from Metalink, with some effort, when it is working. In the most recent few months I have only opened a couple TARs reporting problems with Metalink.

YMMV

--
Jeremiah Wilton
http://www.speakeasy.net/~jwilton

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
-- 
Author: Jeremiah Wilton
  INET: jwilton_at_speakeasy.net

Fat City Network Services    -- (858) 538-5051  FAX: (858) 538-5051
San Diego, California        -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists
--------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).