Re: Why Oracle does not allow rollback of DDL statements?

Thomas Kellerer wrote:

> Well Oracle made it vanish from the market to begin with.

Nope. Market forces made it vanish from the market. If RDB was generating enough profit, DEC would still be alive and well. You're talking to an old VMS hack who was, at one point in his life, a VMS system admin and teaching others how to tune VMS 5.5-2 and earlier versions. I was a DEC admirer and was attending DECUS in Cannes, France every year until 1992. DEC was, at one point, number 2 in the computer industry, second only to the mighty IBM. It vanished like a puff of smoke, devoured not by Compaq but by market forces. Sad truth was that a PC with 66 MHZ i486 was running circles around VAX 4200, a $50,000 machine. Then there were stories with VAXbi I/O bus,DSSI, the DEC version of SCSI, and closing the XMI bus. People invested a lot of money into MIPS based DECSystem and then DEC told them to scrap that and buy alpha with OSF. It didn't fly. DEC has hit the ground because of its own stupidity and lack of marketing strategy. DEC stupidity has sunk many other companies which have centered their marketing strategy around Q22 bus and VAXbi. Emulex and Sabre were among them. Gazillion of companies that were making VT420 and VT520 compatibles also went under. Worst of all, EVE, by far the best editor that I've ever worked with, vanished from the market.

>
> Only because something is old, doesn't mean that it didn't have good
> features. I think rdb had data partitioning built in (e.g by index) long
> before Oracle was even thinking about it.
>

>> Why would they do that? To look more like SQL Server?

I have never worked with DB2 so I can't make any comments about it. PostgreSQL is a great little database, seriously lacking debugging, tuning and profiling tools as well as the methods to influence performance, like hints or toying with the optimizer. PostgreSQL is miles behind Oracle RDBMS. It would at least need wait interface to become really useful. PgSQL is useful for small packaged applications for really small shop. If the data model is OK and the application is well written, it will provide excellent performance. It also has the ability to skip the first N records in the fetch and start fetching from an offset in the cursor. That ability is worth its weight in gold when it comes to producing web pages. Oracle still cannot do that. If, on the other hand, the application is generated hastily, using some code generator and an inadequate data model, it is exceptionally hard to make it right because of the lack of debugging, profiling and tuning tools. In other words, PostgreSQL is not there yet.

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