RE: Is the AWS support for Oracle enough good?

From: Mark W. Farnham <mwf_at_rsiz.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2017 13:13:29 -0400
Message-ID: <0b3401d33621$9d57e440$d807acc0$_at_rsiz.com>



And just so you know,  

  1. AskTOM is basically public, so it doesn’t matter (in that regard) where you get your support, and as it was already threaded, AskTOM is not a support site, but a dandy! group now with the name The Oracle Masters (TOM) has replaced our friend Tom Kyte in this role. These are really good people, especially for how to describe your problems and avoid doing really stupid things when easy, clear, performant methods are easily available.
  2. Jeremiah is probably one of the persons Seth referenced, and if he happens to not immediately know something or suspect there might be a better way than immediately comes to his (pretty brilliant) mind, he is a MEMBER of the Oaktable.net network. You’re probably not going to stump Jeremiah in the first place, but you are REALLY unlikely to stump the entire Oaktable. And if Jeremiah passes something along as a “stumper” I bet it will be really interesting and therefore get wide and prompt attention in that network. If it turns out to be an actual BUG though, that will depend on Oracle publishing the bug fix or someone figuring out a work-around to achieve the purpose whilst avoiding the bug.
  3. In general, sometimes support requests get closed by support organizations when they should not get closed. This may be corporate policy in some cases or human error in others. Defending no one for such closure or lack of answer, I hope you re-raise and escalate any question if it is not answered in a timely fashion. It seems like if a question went unanswered for 4 years, something went wrong somewhere on both sides. That is simply not going to happen now that Jeremiah is personally aware.

I’m President of Rightsizing, Inc., and while I’m not interested in annoying either Oracle or Amazon, I don’t directly make money from either of them. I think having both these support options in competition is healthy for the user community.  

And I hope everyone took great humor in MLADEN’s last post, especially the Onion reference.  

Best wishes, you’re in good hands now,  

mwf  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Jeremiah Cetlin Wilton Sent: Monday, September 25, 2017 12:33 PM To: jcdrpllist
Cc: Oracle Mailing List
Subject: Re: Is the AWS support for Oracle enough good?  

Juan Carlos,  

This is great feedback. We do strive to do each of the things you mentioned, but it sounds like there is a specific area where you were unable to find the right answer on our site. As I mentioned, if you can point me at specific forum questions that remain unanswered, I will make sure that is fixed. The specific question about certain dbms_% packages not being available in 12c is one that we will get back to you shortly on, both on this list and directly with you.  

Please do let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.  

Regards,  

Jeremiah    


From: "jcdrpllist" <jcdrpllist_at_gmail.com> To: "Jeremiah Cetlin Wilton" <jcwilton93_at_earlham.edu> Cc: "Oracle Mailing List" <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Monday, September 25, 2017 8:14:45 AM Subject: Re: Is the AWS support for Oracle enough good?  

Jeremiah, thinking about it I think the problem reside in the fact that I have the opinion that you can't leave an answer 4 years without answer, as a serious service:

  1. you drop the question, to avoid people losing t ime reasing question without answer and getting a bad impression of amazon, the true is that creates a bad impression of amazon himself, and asks yourself if something similar doesn't happens in the other services of amazon.
  2. you create like a metalink note answer, and a link where there is the answer
  3. you answer them.
  4. you add to documentation

The reason because I still I'm asking my chief to see other service, is because there are not answers for the common problems, after all these years amazon is working, they should be in the documentation, or there should be something like metalink notes, that are periodicalyl updated with new information.

In the forums there should be something saying if you want a faster ansewr they could go to cheap payed service too, even when I see this must be there I didn't received the message as you told me.  

I think you have documentation, you have metalink notes, you have yoru asktom where you know you will receive an answer, that has a limit of question, you have the forums that you every year drop very old question, you have your premium service.

I think that could solve your problems.  

:) thank your f or your help.  

2017-09-25 10:50 GMT-04:00 Juan Carlos Reyes Pacheco <jcdrpllist_at_gmail.com>:

Thank you Jeremiah again :) I have the impression you work for amazon, my opinion is the following:

I think you should have something like an Ask Tom, the reason because we continued with Oracle, was because Tom really loved his work and compromised in answering the question, in a time where some topics like session_cached_cursors, statistics, etc. was not really clear.

We was in a hole where we couldn't solve performance problems (in oracle 9i) and he solved them, of course now the situation is completely different in the database.

But thanks to him we stay in Oracle, most of the performance problems were idiots problems, once we understand them, but in that time we really didn't have a clue to solve them, and one of the reason was too the limitation of oracle developer.  

I'm going to share what I send to my chief, about my position aws, based on the experience of sudden bugs we have and the way we need to test to fix them. I'm not a real dba, I'm better than some dba and worst than others I'm a developer-dba, but when there is a problem I must find a solution in one or in other way, we couldn't se sr to oracle, so we need some freedom to find fast solution; i.e. suddenly temporary tablespace starts to grows and can't stop it; or a view can't compile and we need to see what can be done, or one time every decade something weird happens.

  • The mail I sent:

The database compile, but there are many question in aws without answers, in example about dblinks there are suggestion, but not a definitive solution  

 <https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=476671>

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=476671

This says something we could see with ***

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=382386

"My problem was that I had one of the RDS instances set to be publicly accessible and one was not. When I set them both to not be publicly accessible, the link worked. It was based on the answer that Wanderley gave about limitations on outbound connections. Almost 4 years later, but this was the only thread that I found that was remotely close to my problem. I hope it helps somebody. "  

My impression based on what I had found in the aws forum is more like a help between users, not is liek amazon has set of professional ready to solve and see the customers are satisfied, is more like amazon made a software and let their customer find a solution between them, and if they don't they don't care.  

I even found a comment from a user complaining that she didn't received answer from the payed support.  

The database that had been useful to upload files to imporat, doesn't works to query, that means that the problem is not in the creation of the link.  

In the other hand there are limitation , like you can't download files, really I'm not sure if aws of amazon deserves the effort to migrate there, and the only one reason is support.  

if we don't have the sureness that we are going to receive an answer, and without the option to take emergency tasks, I think the only one solution will be to download the database to make it work locally.  

But if the customer accepts that possibility that if there is some problem they will have to download to a local serve, with all the implications it has, maybe we coud do.  

I strongly suggest to see other service out than amazon, that gives us more control in emergies and bugs, that doesn't happens all the time, but happens, and whtn they happens we must find the solution the fastest we can.  

---

Hope be useful and thank you :)

Jeremiah





 

2017-09-22 17:45 GMT-04:00 Jeremiah Cetlin Wilton <jcwilton93_at_earlham.edu>:



Hi Juan Carlos,

 

If you see something not answered on the forums, please let me know, and I'll make sure someone addresses it. If you need to speak to someone on the service team, I can help with that too.

 

I'm in the belly of the beast, and we're all old Oracle-heads here. We don't want any customer unhappy.

 

For critical systems, you can see the response times here:

 

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/enterprise-support/

 

Are there any specific questions you need answered right away?

 

Regards,

 

Jeremiah

 


_____
From: "Juan Carlos Reyes Pacheco" <jcdrpllist_at_gmail.com> To: "Oracle Mailing List" <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Friday, September 22, 2017 2:09:37 PM Subject: Is the AWS support for Oracle enough good? I had been moving a database to aws amazon, and I found a lot of questions without answers, I expected something special A very rpotected databases and a real good support like asktom But I see there are some questions not answers more than one year ago. Some people says he had found after long time of research and shared that knowledge. I got the impression that is not really as good as it seems. And in a emergency you are not going to receive the support as soon as you need, or not enough qualified. Or I'm wrong and is only my impression? Thank you :) -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
Received on Mon Sep 25 2017 - 19:13:29 CEST

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