Re: Is Oracle deliberately difficult?

"Jay M. Scheiner" <jxs_at_wolpoff_nospm_law.com> wrote in message news:39abbdce.233371016_at_news.erols.com...
> Based on my 3 years experience with a mainframe database (Unisys
> DMSII) and my 1 year self-taught and part time experience with Oracle,
> I can give a few specific examples of things about Oracle that I am
> finding difficult. Perhaps they are second nature to more
> experienced, or more formally trained, Oracle people, but here they
> are:
>
> 1) Rollback segments and related issues.
>
> I don't know if it's an ANSI standard, or just the way things
> developed, that when you do a SELECT it is supposed to be consistent
> with the state of the database when the query started, but I don't
> think it makes the best sense. Say you're going to look through your
> whole customer list for everyone who has a bill over 90 days due and
> send them a nasty letter. You start the select, then someone in
> bookkeeping posts a payment on an account. However, your select
> doesn't see that. I KNOW that it could have happened that the
> statement was past that account by chance anyway, but if it WASN'T,
> then why is the Oracle way the best way?

It's just a choice they made I guess. But what else is it supposed to do? Skip the record entirely? Or give you the record if you force a 'dirty read'. Either approach sounds distinctly dodgy to me.

As for the bill stuff -I guess your objection is that our customer is going to be sent a reminder letter despite the fact that they've paid up. That sounds like normal business practice to me: "Payments received after Xth September will be included on your next statement" is a phrase I see constantly. Along with "If you have already made payment, please disregard this reminder".

>
> 2) Space management
> Oracle makes you do too much work with worrying about extents, block
> sizes, etc. You can justify some of it by saying you can tweak your
> performance, but not for what the effort seems to be.
>

I don't know about effort. But then I take a cavalier approach to these things: I aim for one giant extent per segment, and am happy to rest content with all that space sitting there empty for most of the time, knowing that it will be used eventually. Hard disks are cheap, and I'd throw more hard disks at the problem rather than worry about extent management. All extents within a given tablespace should be the same size anyway, and 8i's local management of tablespace makes that a painless task these days.

The point I guess is that rationing of extents is available for those who need to ration. If you are living in the land of milk, honey and abundant hard disks, who needs to ration?

And there's really no debate about block size these days (despite what some people would have you believe). For most Unixes it's 8Kb without thinking, and same for NT. www.ixora.com.au has the details.

> 3) Process management
> It seems to be someone of a chore to deal with who is locking the
> database, what is running at what priority, batch vs. online
> transactions at the same time, etc.
>

Can't say it's ever been a problem for me. Certainly not locking an entire database!

Anyway, I appreciate the thoughts.

Regards
HJR
> I know there are solutions to these, but they are some of the big ones
> that I have dealt with.
>
> On Mon, 28 Aug 2000 22:16:25 +0100, Sid_James <sid.james_at_virgin.net>
> wrote:
>
> >I've been learning Oracle for a while now and I do think of it as quite
> >challenging in an enjoyable way. I don't use Enterprise Manager, I'd
> >rather get to to know the 'nuts and bolts'. However, having done a SQL
> >Server administrator's course, I can't help thinking that Oracle is
> >rather more difficult to use than maybe it should be.
> >
> >Sensible, rational responses that shoot me up in flames are always
> >preferable!
> >
> >e d
>
>
> _______________
> Jay M. Scheiner
> Programmer/Analyst
> Wolpoff & Abramson, LLP
> remove _nospm_ from email address
> Opinions are my own only!
Received on Wed Aug 30 2000 - 04:01:52 CDT