Watch out - maybe your Oracle is not supported!

Recently I reported to Oracle support some minor problem with OCI headers (my organization bought support of course). The answer was amazing:

"Oracle will not handle my support request because they do not support the compiler I use (in this case Compaq C++ 6.2 on OpenVMS)!"

Let me also mention that we have never been told that Oracle places any limits of this kind...

When I started to press them a bit (Hmm, have you placed this limitation in our support agreement? Have you written it somewhere where I could read it? So what compilers do you suport?) I have been given some _unofficial_ dirty HTML page with "supported compilers". From the thing most interesting to me (according to this page): the newer supported C++ on VMS is DEC CXX 5.6 (current version is 6.2), there is _no_ C++ compiler supported on Digital Unix, on Windows you can use only Visual C++ 6.0 and Borland C++ 5.0 (with Oracle 8.1.x only Visual C++) etc.

BTW: Oracle works fairly well with Compaq C++ 6.2, there are some minor macro bugs (one need #define __STDC__ before including oracle headers and #undef signed after that but that is all). We do not have technical problem. But we have marketing problem - our configuration is "not supported"!

I write that mainly to warn people: ask your Oracle support whether they support environment you use. Let them write somewhere that they fully support your configuration before you give them money. Stop paying development support if your configuration is not supported.

                                Regards

• Marcin.Kasperski<at>softax.com.pl, Marcin.Kasperski<at>bigfoot.com
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