good for the garden

My first exposure to Oracle has me somewhat mystified. We're in the process of setting up an experimental Linux server (we're mainly an NT & As/400 shop), and sent for the Oracle 8 Linux evaluation. After two days of messing around we almost have it working. Undocumented incompatibilities are bad enough, but when you have to learn about "secret" patches through the Linux news groups -- patches that are not reachable through visible links from the Oracle site -- that certainly is a cause to wonder about the quality of the product and the integrity of the company. One has to wonder what kind of marketing genius decide that this kind of brittle package would somehow induce the evaluator to send money to the perpetrator

By comparison, installing our DB2 evaluation was a snap. Point to the .rpm, press the button, and there you go.

Coincidentally, we had an opportunity to experience Oracle's wonderful implementation on Windows NT at almost the same time. A client had us install Oracle Client to support one of their programs, then told us we'd have to remove it in order to install Oracle Lite.

Guess what? Oracle has no uninstall capabilities! (Guess they're unfamiliar with the concept of "windows compliance") No problem, we thought, we'll simply delete the whole c:\orant directory. WRONG! Components are in use. Okay, stop EVERY system service. Kill every running non-system process. Try again. Forget it. Okay, iterate through the registry and delete every key that refers to \orant. Restart the system. Stop all services. Kill all processes. Still no go. "This thing is like Herpes!" my partner observes. (Actually, it's more like gonorrhea, if you ask me.)

Sorry, but no level of performance on earth is worth this kind of aggravation, not to mention the principle of not sending money to a company who has so little regard for their customers that they sell this kind of shoddy product. If SQL Server or DB2 can't match the performance, then I'll throw more hardware at it.

Now I'm sure most readers of this group are either Oracle devotees, or have no choice in the matter, but for those who may yet be in the decision making process, save yourself some grief and try something else - unless, of course, you're looking to enrich your garden - Oracle should be quite appropriate for that purpose.

db Received on Thu Feb 03 2000 - 08:28:52 CST