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

Here is what I think is an instructive story.

In one of my former jobs I was hired because I had both sysadmin and Oracle DBA and programming experience. They had an Oracle database that was pretty inert because no one knew how to use it.

I was pretty busy at that job but did manage to create two web applications that accessed the database.

About a year after I left I dropped in for a visit, and found that one of the two is still happily in use, but the other... well, the people who asked for it decided they needed some changes, but no one around knew enough Oracle, so they got SqlServer and ActiveX, and one of the graphic artists
(not a technical person) whipped up a version of the application
I'd done using Oracle (it was a directory of names and phone numbers that could be searched and sorted in different ways). Then he started teaching others how to do it.

The web development suddenly blossomed, because since they no longer had to wait until one person (me) had the time to do their project, they could do it themselves and dick around with it to their heart's content.

So I thought, here is something that Oracle just doesn't understand. What can they offer these people? Now they are all pumping out whatever the heck they want or need
(admittedly not very complicated apps, but still...).
If they went back to Oracle they would lose all the freedom, ease and speed that they now enjoy.

My point is NOT that SqlServer is a great product. I don't even know how to use it. The point is that Oracle is not by any stretch of the imagination user-friendly or easy. Microsoft products in general have the characteristic that a beginner can make the thing at least work, and the more time you put into it, the more things you can make it do.

the difference is that MS sells software; Oracle sells a way of life. And with Oracle there is no easy way in. You have to go in at the deep end. And because of that, Oracle has nothing to offer in situations like the company where I used to work. While it's probably true that these applications probably won't scale or be as robust as they would be in Oracle, they don't need to be.

Anyway, to tie this back to the general topic, part of the problem is that Oracle documentation usually doesn't include an overview. It's only in the past year or so (if I'm not mistaken) that the Overview of Sql*Net came out. Although virtually everything may be in the Oracle docs, a beginner would have no way of knowing the relative weight of each topic or element.

Kevin Kelleher Received on Fri Jul 11 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT