Do sites actually install Oracle themselves ? What a nightmare...

I got lumbered with installing an Oracle server and clients (Developer/2000) on our HP-UX systems here and I'm amazed at the incredibly poor documentation and general installation procedure, which includes:

• Missing steps in the installation. The worst of these was how to convert upper case CD-ROM filenames to lower case (you run the START.SH script, but neither the CD booklet nor the installation manual tells you that !).
• Very poor flow of installation steps - files are often mentioned before they even exist on your system yet and much to-ing and fro-ing through the manual is required.
• Manual calculation of memory usage. Why can't you just type in the number of users you want to support, select the products and have the installer work that out for you ?
• Failure to use shared libraries or even to strip the binaries that go into $ORACLE_HOME/bin (I asked Oracle support if it's OK to strip the binaries once everything is installed and working and they said yes).
• No support for HP-UX 9.X with the latest Oracle Server release (7.3.2.1.0). We asked for 9.X CD-ROMs throughout and got a 10.X server CD-ROM and older (7.2) 9.X/10.X client CD-ROMs.
• When you want to install the clients from the Developer/2000 CD-ROM, you *have* to re-run the START.SH script on the CD-ROM, which duly deletes the nice Motif installer and replaces it with a curses-based one :-(
• One stage in the installation of the Developer/2000 CD-ROM (Oracle Reports install) actually *falls over* if you've selected the Motif client option (I did both of the options, char-based and Motif). Examination of the Makefiles indicate there are, incredibly, NO DEPENDENCIES for most of the Makefile rules, so the body of the rule can theoretically refer to a binary which hasn't been built yet and without the dependency, it spectacularly falls over.
• Oracle ship a Web server and client on the CD-ROMs and yet their on-line documentation is in some compressed proprietary format that requires Oracle Book to read it. Er, what about supplying the docs in HTML please ?
• When installing the Developer/2000 CD-ROM (which clearly states it's for 9.X and 10.X) and choosing *not* to relink executables, the installer does so anyway for the clients (I understand it has to do it for the server, but it shouldn't need to for the clients). The Oracle Web Browser Makefile actually has the line SHELL=/bin/sh in it, which causes failure on a 10.X system without transition links.

So am I alone in the universe in actually installing Oracle all on my own ? Do other sites call in an Oracle engineer at great expense to install it ?

Either way, Oracle looks like one humungously bloated piece of software that I'm dreading to think how much RAM I'll eventually need for it. What's even worse is that I have to support a mixed 9.X/10.X environment (10.X server and virtually all 9.X client machines), which is another nightmare to think about.

Richard K. Lloyd,           E-mail: rkl_at_csc.liv.ac.uk
Connect,                       WWW: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/users/rkl/