Re: metalink still unuseable the 2nd day ...

From: Steve Howard <stevedhoward_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:57:58 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <10e53961-f61c-4991-b241-c4008c1978ff_at_p32g2000vbi.googlegroups.com>



On Nov 12, 7:48 am, MBPP <mpacheco_bra..._at_hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 11, 4:05 pm, Noons <wizofo..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Nov 12, 1:38 am, MBPP <mpacheco_bra..._at_hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > IE also worked fine (version 8). I also noted they call the SWF
> > > directly without a "wrapper" to check Flash version, etc. My Flash
> > > version here is 10.0.32, try to upgrade if you have version 9, maybe
> > > it can help? I read somewhere that they demand 9.0.115 or greater I
> > > think.
>
> > Oh great!  So now, besides having to figure out all the db versions
> > and patches to make things work, we also are supposed to track the
> > "consistency" of browser version and flash version?
>
> > Welcome to the brave new world of dba2.0: spend all your time trying
> > to get the "easy, time-saving UI" to work!
>
> > I'm on 10.0.32 Flash and latest FF and still having minor nagging
> > problems with it.  It'll go away, I'm sure.  But did it really need to
> > be like this?
>
> Of course not, I too think the new interface could be simpler and
> faster. Disclaimer, I don't work for Oracle but I work with Oracle
> databases as a DBA and developer for +14 years. Note, the idea behind
> RIA interfaces is to make the applications more interactive and faster
> to navigate since you don't (re)load pages for every navigation and
> you don't need to mimic visual effects using tons of CSS/Javascript.
> The visual "appealing" in my opinion is a secondary consideration that
> must be touched only after the application meets all its functional
> requirements. For the past 2 years I am working with Adobe Flex
> (Flash) creating RIA applications for customers that use Oracle as
> database. Our architecture on the Oracle side is based on PL/SQL
> stored procedures that dynamically generate XML via EPG or MOD_PLSQL.
> This is in fact the same method that the old Metalink was using but
> generating dynamic HTML. But now it seems they are using a Java middle
> tier so most likely they recoded big portions of it. In my opinion if
> they would have continued to use MOD_PLSQL they would just need to
> adapt the output to XML (via a parameter) and things would be much
> simpler and faster. They would be able to run both versions in
> parallel without the need to migrate any data. Once users are happy
> and it is stable you turn the old off. On the interface side they
> could just keep more or less the same general interface as the old
> Metalink in version 1 and enhance it visually in the next versions.
> Apparently they did too much in one shot and the results are here for
> everyone to see. This is something I saw many times in the past, the
> development/management team is induced with "hype" technologies and
> make things much more complex than they should be.

I don't know about the most of the people on this board, but I use Metalink almost exclusively for searching issues I am currently encountering. Fix that first, as it is absolutely awful, even if it didn't come from a database company. I mean atrocious.

I was on a call with a support analyst from Oracle yesterday (an absolutely fantastic one, BTW), and he said he had just googled something for an answer. That's all I needed to hear. Download Google's home search page and see how many bytes it is. Received on Thu Nov 12 2009 - 09:57:58 CST

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