Re: Oracle Unleashed my arse!

    I have had similar problems for each Oracle product I've tried to install - the first time.
Eventually you figure things out and things go more smoothly the next time. There's
one consolation. You spend days of extreme frustration but end up learning quite
a lot about Oracle's bits and pieces and where they go.

    As a practical matter, no individual is going to get much (any?) help installing an
Oracle product obtained as a free download or in a book. This is probably a mistake
on Oracle's part. Once you've decided to let people demo your software why not
include five pages of cookbook instructions for novices?

    Your situation is not new. It's been going on for years. Oracle is aware of it and
at some level has decided this is the policy they want to follow.

Van

Terry Child wrote in message <355A400A.8AA9BD39_at_surveying.salford.ac.uk>...
>Hi All
>
>I needed to learn Oracle 7 and D2K so I bought a copy of Oracle Unleashed.
>The book comes with a trial copy of Personal Oracle 7 and Developer/2000.
>I would like to state for the record that this is the worst computing
related book
>that I have every attempted to read. There is absolutely no sign that the
book has
>every crossed an editor's desk. Each chapter is written by a different
person with scant reference to any other part of the book, and the chapters
>seem
>to have been inserted at random with chapters on database tuning and backup
coming before those on database design.. The writing itself is very poor,
>with the individual
>authors giving the impression that they are trying to prove to themselves
that
>they understand the subject matter, rather than trying to convey it to the
reader.
>All in all a truly awful waste of time and money.
>
>I thought that at least if the book itself was bad I could console myself
with being
>able to use the trial software. WRONG! The quality of the installation
documentation
>that comes with Personal Oracle 7 perfectly reflects the crappiness of the
book
>itself. There doesn't seem to be any single document which actually tell
you what you need
>to do to configure the thing. I have spent two days attempting to get
oracle forms to speak to the database with absolutely no progress at all.
>
>The first error I came across was ORA-03121. I tried using ":2" as the
database
>name as mentioned in the book but this didn't work. I thought I might have
made
>a mistake in the original installation so I tried to uninstall PO7 and
start from scratch.
>Unfortunately which I ran Oracle installer and removed everything it did
f*ck all, so
>I ended up having to manually delete everything and remove oracle from the
>registry.
>
>Eventually I went to Oracle's web site and found a link to a page for
support on installing PO7 but when I clicked the link I got:
>
>*** Error opening SSI file:

/u01/webapps/www/htdocs/support/products/po7/win95/html/index.html ****
>
>Great!
>
>I tried their search engine and found a couple of articles mentioning
something called
>SQL*Net so I read these and eventually guessed that I needed to install
something
>called a TCP/IP protocol adapter. I did this and the ORA-03121 error
vanished, only
>to be replaced by a ORA-12203 error. The readme.doc does actually mention
>this error, and suggests waiting a few seconds and trying again. This
doesn't work.
>I've just downloaded a huge chunk of text from Oracle's site which is going
to take
>me another day to understand, and then I have very little confidence that
it's going
>to work.
>
>I can't be the only person suffering like this. What are Oracle playing at?
>Out of interest I installed Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 at work. It took me
five minutes
>and half a dozen mouse clicks.
>
>I don't want Bill Gates to take over the whole software industry, but when
one
>of his main competitors supplies software which takes days to install then
they're
>handing him the industry on a plate.
>
>Okay, I've finished moaning now.
>
>Thanks for listening.
>
>Terry Child
>
>
Received on Fri May 15 1998 - 09:23:49 CDT