Re: Oracle versus MS Sql Server

Michael,
I've been watching this thread and I haven't said anything til now. It's obviously completely out of hand. I really didn't want to contribute to the madness here but your post below made it impossible for me to hold my tongue.

First off, I have to say that in the time it has taken you to so carefully and thoroughly respond to every single one of these postings you could have learned a good deal of what you need to know about Oracle. I would kill to have that kind of time on my hands but I have to get my work done. (With that said, the following tirade was written on my own time.)

It was your comment about GUIs that forced me to respond. It is precisely this type of thinking that epitomizes what is wrong with user expectations today. That this sentiment has been expressed by a software developer only makes it all the more pathetic. In most cases, the time it takes to learn the command line syntax is more than made up for by the increased productivity realized by using command line scripts. The more I work with systems the more I find myself hating GUIs because I'm forced to use them. They often come at the expense of more efficient, powerful command line features that the developers felt were not necessary to make available because god knows we all love Bill Gates. Its absurd to think that GUIs can or should replace all command line functionality. I'm sure you're going to respond that this is not what you suggested, only that the GUI should always be an option. The problem with that is, for one, GUIs can't always do that same things that commands do, and, two, just how many developers would actually agree with you? What I find most disturbing about your GUI comment is the implication that you might represent a group of so-called systems professionals who feel the same way. I'm sick of this point and click mentality... the truth is systems work is hard... and if you're going to do it right, you're going to have to think for yourself. You sound like my end-users who think we just wave our hands and programs magically appear on their desktop because all their GUI interfaces make their jobs so simple. You all have the same attitude as the high level managers at my company who make my life hell because they have no concept of what it takes to build solid, maintanable applications. You are perpetuating the idea that any idiot can use a GUI to build a database... you don't have to understand the product you're using, you don't have to know the language it uses, you can just point and click til it all works perfectly. Does your computer have a keyboard? I think you should try unplugging it and use your mouse to select each letter of the alphabet from a beautiful virtual keyboard on your screen as you compose your response to this post.... that would be a GUI "solution" to the "problem" of having to enter all this "command line" data known as the English language. How productive woud you be if you had to type this way? Better yet, you could have a list of every work in the dictionary and select each one by carefully scrolling down the list... no cheating by typing the first few letters either... that's not GUI enough for you... you have to click the scroll bar til you identify the word you want and then drag and drop it into your posting. I know I'm exaggerating, but the point is that GUIs don't always make sense. If developers go to the extreme with GUIs then they've wasted time and money on a tool no sane person would ever use. You complain that if you pay Oracle thousands of dollars for their product then by god it better have a GUI to save you time. GUIs are so basic to your needs as a user that it should be obvious it is essential for Oracle to build it. I'll be the first to admit that Oracle is not perfect... it has bugs like any program on the market, they make choices in designing their product that I wouldn't make and don't even understand... but how can you sit there and bitch about how much Oracle sucks when your project demands that you use it? It isn't Oracle's fault that you are being forced to use their product is it? They could tell you look, we don't think it's important to build the GUI tools you want, use someone else's product if it's that important to you. Now whom should you be pissed at? Oracle? NO! The people who are forcing you to use it. My company chooses tools all the time as our "corporate standard". I may totally disagree with the people who make those decisions and feel that their choices are bad products. I may get frustrated with the companies that produce these products I feel to be inferior because I am forced to use them. But who's at fault here? It's not the software company... it's the company I work for. So the only courses of action that make any sense are: 1. try to get my company to pay the software firm to develop the additional tools I feel are necessary to do my job efficiently 2. quit my freakin job and work somewhere i'll never have to use a tool i don't like (yeah, right)
3. deal with it and try not to make it everyone else's problem (like the kind people to actually try to help one another in these newsgroups, hint hint)
Again I'm being extreme, but my point is that just because Oracle doesn't have some tools you would like or doesn't make it mind-numbingly easy to do exactly what you want it to do, doesn't make it an inferior product. You've heard from a large number of people on here who use it everyday and, although we admit it's not perfect, find it the best tool available by far for enterprise database solutions. I'm not a total Oracle bigot... I even create Access databases for my users from time to time whenever I feel that a GUI tool like Access is appropriate given the small amount of data being worked with. There are times when it's totally appropriate given that we use the MS Office suite and Access make it easy to interact between these apps, etc. But by god I'm not going to suggest it replace our 60Gb Oracle database. No I'm not comparing Oracle and Access, I'm just pointing out that different tasks require different approaches and just because SQL Server is made to work on Windows with enough GUI bells and whistles to give you wet dreams for years to come doesn't mean it's the best tool for your particular job. Maybe it is, but as you've said in this case you don't have a choice... someone else decided on Oracle... deal with it and stop whining. I can totally relate to being forced to work with a product you don't like... If I had to work with MS SQL Server I'd be frustrated too I'm sure... but maybe I could recognize that it wasn't necessarily made to meet the needs I'm being asked to meet with it. That doesn't necessarily make it an inferior product (as you've repeatedly belabored the point about Oracle b/c it doesn't have a GUI import or double-click setup.exe, etc.) that just means maybe its not the appropriate or best product for my job.

It's clear that you've made me angry, but lest you come away from this thinking it's about Oracle vs. MS I want to end with this... I'm insulted as a systems professional and DBA by the heart of what you've been saying all along in your posts. The idea that you should just be able to double click and get a working, reasonably efficient, well tuned enterprise database without having to understand anything about how the product actually works is not only a gross underestimation of the project-specific considerations involved in creating such a database, it is complicit with what I perceive as a growing systems management perspective today which is why pay a professional who actually understands computers and knows how to think for him/herself when I can get a monkey to point and click for a fraction of the cost? I don't mean to imply that software should purposely be made hard to use or understand for the purpose of maintaining my own job security. I think good software is flexible software that allows me a level of control necessary to tune and adapt my database to the business purpose at hand. This implies that by definition the software will be complex and therefore "hard" to understand because it needs to be and not for the sake of being difficult. Sure, you've said you can build a GUI front end for your users that will be simple for them to use even though it does very complicated tasks behind the scenes, but to what extent can you allow them to control it and affect the underlying complexity without losing the simplicity of your interface? How can Oracle make it's interface dummy-proof without removing much of our ability to adapt it to our own needs?

"Michael G. Schneider" <mgs_at_mgs-software.de> wrote in message news:9r13ia$qss$00$1_at_news.t-online.com...
> "Niall Litchfield" <n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk> schrieb im
> Newsbeitrag news:3bd3e797$0$8512$ed9e5944_at_reading.news.pipex.net...
>
> > IIRC Then this is perfectly possible just by choosing a typical install
in
> > the installer. You shouldn't even need to get involved with enterprise
> > mangler.
>
> I wasn't able to make import/export work without Enterprise Manager. If
you
> log on to DBAStudio directly, it complains about not having a connection
to
> Enterprise Manager.
>
> I do know that there are imp/exp command line utilities. But (in my
personal
> opinion) if I pay thousands of dollars for a product, I want it to have a
> GUI. I don't have the time to learn command line interfaces. The last time
I
> accepted a command line was in the DOS 6 timeframe. Nowadays an
application
> has to offer a graphical user interface. There may of course be a command
> line interface, and sometimes it is very usefull, but it should not be the
> one and only way for interacting with the application.
>
> Michael G. Schneider
>
>
>
>
Received on Tue Oct 23 2001 - 19:29:54 CDT