RE: Do you ask the question: How do I work with Oracle Support....?

    You seem to have opened the proverbial "can of worms", and bravo for doing so.  

    OTS is one of those parts of Oracle that one has a love-hate relationship with. First off, I'm perplexed by the form that they ask you to fill out. I normally do what is asked to get a tar number & then update it with much more relevant information, but for some reason most analysts aren't capable of understanding what is going on. Take iTAR 3-2833852791 for example. I'm using 11.1.0.7.4 as the database on both sides of a datapump job that is run via the PL/SQL API instead of the command line utility and that was very clearly explained in the tar, yet the analyst asked for the expdp and impdp command lines and log files. Humm, that's redundant. Next even though I only highlight one occurrence of the problem and included that it's rather random in nature yet they ask for a description of the specified table??? We're get the wrong number of rows imported for the given table, usually it reports 1 row when several thousand were actually imported. Then for some unknown reason some other analyst "reviews" the TAR and we start all over again from the beginning, Bother. OH, BTW, in this case the second analyst was less than professional in his correspondence, and yes I know that written correspondence is harder to work with than oral. Thankfully the original analyst is back on the job.  

    On the other side of the fence is another analyst who actually called me to verify that the issue had been fixed before he closed the tar even though I had indicated so in the last update. Wonderful person, would that all OTS analysts were of that caliber.  

    OH Yes, one last thing, it seems to be a mantra in OTS that if your not on the most current patch set, that's what will fix the problem. Thankfully Oracle has one of the best support sites I think. 99% of the time a simple search with the error your seeing reveals the issue, just the returned result set is not always as narrow as it could be. But I guess it's better to hand over more information than too little.  

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA/NA Team Leader  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Robert Freeman Sent: Wednesday, April 06, 2011 5:45 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Do you ask the question: How do I work with Oracle Support....?

My new itch of late is Oracle support and trying to help customers work effectively with Oracle support. I hear a lot of people complain about support. Sometimes the complaints are valid but just as often I find that people don't understand how to work the support organization. As a result of these observations I thought I'd share a few tidbits over the next few weeks for you to review and comment on. Note, I don't work for the support organization and I'm well aware that people have had great experiences and not so great experiences with support. I find though, in general, the more you know how to work with the support organization, the better the results you will get.

With that, today I'd suggest that you log into Metalink and review Oracle Note 166650.1 for additional information about the My Oracle Support Portal and Working Effectively with Oracle Support. This note will give you a good over view of working with the Oracle support organization.

Also Oracle is starting a series of "Adviser Webcasts". The webcasts will cover a number of topics over time to help you leverage Oracle support and several key features found in the my Oracle Support portal. The first of the webcasts include Certification searches for database product certifications and the ORA-600/7445 troubleshooting tool. Please take a look at note 1300014.1 for more information on these and future webcast events.

I'm posting this over to my blog (see my siggy below) and I hope to find the time to get my blog rolling again as time permits.

Cheers all!

Robert G. Freeman
Master Principal Consultant, Oracle Corporation, Oracle ACE Author of various books on RMAN, New Features and this shorter signature line.
Blog: http://robertgfreeman.blogspot.com

Note: THIS EMAIL IS NOT AN OFFICIAL ORACLE COMMUNICATION. It is just the opinion of one Oracle employee. I can be wrong, have been wrong in the past and will be wrong in the future. If your problem is a critical production problem, you should always contact Oracle support for assistance. Statements in this email in no way represent Oracle Corporation or any subsidiaries and reflect only the opinion of the author of this email.

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