Re: Why does oracle support suck so much?

On 27 Apr 2006 17:15:10 -0700, "Joel Garry" <joel-garry_at_home.com> wrote:

>Netcomrade wrote:
>
>>Over the years I have learned to rely less and less on oracle support,
>>because quite often you get someone who is either incompetent or
>>thick-headed.
>
>I don't think this has changed much overall.

except the 22% 'support' fee we have to pay every year..

>
>>"It's impossible for us to give you an estimate on when your backport
>>patch will be ready, since we have no control over it. It's in the
>>development 'queue', and it updates daily. It's the nature of software
>>business to have such uncertainty"
>
>Frankly, I consider this an honest answer. I would much rather they be
>careful with the backports, as with all patches, in fact, I wish they
>would do more final QA before releasing stuff that obviously doesn't
>work.
>
>I'm pretty sure that beating on developers doesn't help productivity
>much.

You don't have to 'beat on developers', if you have enough developers. You can also at least give the customer at estimate. ANY company should be able to do this. If they have no idea what's in their queue, then they obviously have big problems with management and process.

>Development needs to be insulated even from customer support. There
>needs to be communication between the two, getting the balance right is
>hard (read expensive).

There isn't much of a communication going on when (I am told) that development doesn't give any estimates to support analysts. So for all I know, it's going to take anywhere from a day to eternity to fix this. The last I heard from a 'director' level support rep, is that 'it might take a week' (she wasn't 'sure'), but she just pulled it out of her butt to shut me up.

>That said, your job ownership issue sounds like someone just didn't do
>a very good job. The "give some answer and hope they go away" crap.
>It _is_ tough to replicate some scalability issues (IIRC your problem).

I offered to give them an exp dump, they didn't want it (they want me to 'reproduce' it, while it's not really reproduceable (problem doesn't happen every day).

Anyway, we did away with crontab's for now. .......
We run Oracle 9.2.0.6 on RH4 AMD
we are currently looking for a DBA
remove NSPAM to email Received on Fri Apr 28 2006 - 12:37:51 CDT