Oracle Support Experiences

What are peoples experiences of Oracle support like? The reason I ask is that whilst I have had a number of good experiences over the years the last two calls I have logged have not been quite up to the standard I'd expect.

In the first case we hit a known intermedia bug in 8.1.6 which is fixed in the 8.1.6.1 patchset for intermedia. It turns out that this patchset is just not available for windows platforms. We therefore had to reinstall intermedia and recreate all of our text indices. We would have to do this every time we hit the error. Naturally two days later we hit the error on a second instance. This time I phoned support thinking perhaps that the patchset was available on cd just not for download. This was not the case but the analyst did some investigating and found that the bug could be fixed by applying some scripts from the solaris patchset. This fix is (according to the analyst) noted in hidden text in the original bug report and resolution!

In the second case we hit the bug pointed out by Herman in his reply on this newsgroup last week. There are evidently similar bugs in some Oracle versions on *nix. This bug was not noted by oracle support despite my asking for an explanation of the problems we had. To say the least I consider a bug that results in dataloss because of hitting arbitrary datafile sizes serious enough to be imprinted on the minds of support analysts and also really ought to come up in a search of the bug database.

I think what I am saying is common is that known bugs and fixes exist and are documented but appear not to be being given as answers to TARs. This concerns me somewhat.

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Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK
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Please include version and platform
and SQL where applicable
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