Re: Is Oracle the worst-documented product of all time?

>Steve Phelan wrote:
>> ...
>> Look, to get back to what we've been trying to tell you: Oracle is a
>> large and sophisticated product, so get some training and/or some
>> consultancy - it really won't kill you, take my word for it - and buy
>> the Oracle Press books (if you REALLY want to LEARN, that is?)
>
>We have a great deal of sympathy with Mr. Burton's original argument.
>While Oracle may be large and sophisticated, there are many larger, more
>sophisticated and more complicated software systems that are
>sufficiently well documented that it is not necessary to hire a
>consultant who knows what is necessary to operate the software.

My thoughts exactly. People like Phelan obviously make their living as a result of the unnecessary complexity ingrained into Oracle products. Other people, myself included, have a job to do, a specific objective to attain and all we seek is information (preferably well organized and centrally-located) that can help us use the tools to achieve our goals.

I've never been one of those 'traditional consultants' who makes money by keeping clients in the dark and coveting information. I suspect this is the underlying motivation for many DBAs such as Phelan to vehemently oppose any attempt by people such as myself to call attention to documentation disorganization. He knows the system and obviously any attempt to make it easier for others to learn quickly threatens his livelihood.

>I believe a worth conclusion one may draw from Mr. Burton's original
>message is that it is wasteful and pointless to deliver such a system.
>Were we to produce software so ill-documented, such unprofessional
>products would send us out of business. On the other hand, Oracle has a
>bit of a lock on this part of the market (after all, we do use the
>database -- and so do you), so Oracle need not document it well.
>
>
>While some might commend Mr. Phelan for his tenacity in pursuit of
>Oracle details, that is exactly what we do not seek. The company for
>which I work does not (nor does it want to) make money by knowing the
>intricacies of a particular database. Instead, we make a product which
>uses a database as a tool for storing information; the less that gets in
>the way of effectively doing so, the better. Smarter documentation
>would be one way for us to achieve that. The sorry state of Oracle's
>documentation is an impedement.

Unfortunately, I agree with you.

>Mr. Burton gave several such examples of documentation pitfalls for
>novice users. He is not alone in problems encountered, even for
>experienced users. On an installation of Oracle for NT in spring, we
>noted more than 40 errors in the manual of the installation process (we
>would not have overcome them except for experience with Oracle on three
>flavors of Unix); while we sent a detailed accounting of them to the
>Oracle address asking for comment, we heard nothing in reply and expect
>that we never will. This kind of list can go on endlessly: consider the
>many internal "cheat sheets" that Oracle support uses themselves and has
>had to fax to us when we got into a well-known abyss of
>non-documentation -- why not just provide that sort of information with
>the shipped product? The problem in those circumstances was not that
>the software is large and sophisticated; the necessary material was
>simply absent.

What I really find rather ironic - I received a book in the mail recently - A NINETY-ONE PAGE BOOK, entitled, "Oracle U.S. Guide to Customer Support"

Do you really need a book telling you how to obtain customer support? Doesn't this seem excessive and ridiculous??

>Regretfully, this deficit makes professional database software seem
>another candidate for takeover by the Evil Empire. While we hate giving
>them money, we expect that SQL Server -- with its marketing force, ease
>of use and simpler explanation -- will take over an unexpected part of
>the traditional database market for small and medium commercial users.

I hope you're wrong. However, I also agree with you. MS has made great strides into various marketplaces by making their products easy to get going, and not requiring some human 'technical wizard' to offer assistance.

I think, technically speaking, Oracle products are excellent. I think in-between, the cracks, is where the problem lies. The bloated and chaotic support infrastructure, the large number of anomolies and inconsistencies across platforms and products, etc. Oracle is trying to expand into more horizontal markets, and as they do, the people attempting to learn their products won't be making a career out of this knowledge, and therefore don't have the patience to spend several months learning the tools. Received on Fri Jul 11 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT