Re: Do you love Oracle?

In article <34hb2c$4ou_at_hermes.is.co.za>, gfmd_at_apollo.is.co.za (Goldfields Mining Development) writes:
> Hi
>
> Opinion - do you use / love / hate Oracle?
>
> Why?
>
> Alan
>

-- 

I use it, but I hate it.  In general I find it to be a mine field of
little gotchas and special cases that can only be learned by years
and years of experience that I do not have, and do not have time for.
At first, I reserved my criticisms because I was a total ORACLE idiot
novice.  Now, after 18 months using it (still no expert by a longshot,
but better off), I still find their installations appalingly
complex, error-prone, and silly, their documentation too often flawed,
and their code examples and mentality too much of a throw-back to
1965 FORTRAN.

But, ORACLE provides many powerful features, good execution speed,
and lots of handy nifties like ALERTS, distributed transactions,
hooks to other vendor db's, etc, so I would overlook all the
shortcomings if ONLY I could count on their support.

When I call for support and I have paid for it, I expect to get a
knowledgable person on the other end, or at least a useful
call back, in a few hours, or at least that day.

Every TAR I log is lost in an abyss for weeks.  And I mean weeks.
I am still haggling with them over a TAR I logged on August
2, 1994.  I cannot get a knowledgable engineer to call me
on the phone and help me.  I get FAXes with suggestions that
do not work - so I begin another round of FAX/telephone tag, and
I still have no solution so a problem that could probably be
overcome in 20 minutes if they would just TALK to me.

Finally, after I
call back 5 or 6 times, someone calls me.  Invariably, it is someone
who can do nothing more than say "Hmmm, it shouldn't be doing that,
I'll have to talk to a developer".  

I also get calls promising me that I will get a callback that
afternoon... which never comes.  I would have to spend all my days
chasing and harrassing to get attention, and I cannot nor do I
WANT to do that.  I am sure that the support people are up to their
behinds in alligators, so I would only be making a nuisance of
myself.  The problem seems to me that there is just a hopelessly
undersized staff to handle the volume of problem reports that come in.

So anyway... I don't know that any other big DB vendor would be any
better... but the support thing is what steams me.


Max Magliaro
MMM_at_ICF.HRB.COM
Philipsburg, Pennsylvania

"He may look like an idiot, and he may sound like an idiot, but don't
 let him fool you.  He really is an idiot." --- Groucho Marx