Re: Oracle's bad business practices

In article <aak2.838616056_at_Isis.MsState.Edu> aak2_at_Ra.MsState.Edu (Atif Ahmad Khan) writes:
>
>I spent 2 weeks trying to install Oracle on Solaris x86 2.5.1. I was
>constantly getting the same error. "Not enough disk space to install
>Oracle". This was driving me crazy as I had more than 3GB "gigabytes"
>of free space available. I re-installed Solaris at least a couple of
>dozen times slightly changing the settings everytime but nothing helped.
>Oracle people kept insisting that I was doing something wrong.
>
>I finally decided to post on this newsgroup to see if someone else had
>the same problem and a nice gentleman told me that it was a bug in the
>install script where it would "Not enough disk space" error if there was
>more than 2GB of free space available where Oracle was to be installed.
>Also this is not just pertaining to Solaris but also affects other Unix
>users. I filled that partition with alot of junk and sure enough Oracle
>was happy after that. Such a nasty bug !!! I have already reported this
>to Oracle but I dont see them removing the trial version from their ftp
>site or changing the help file to warn unsuspecting users of this bug.
>I cannot imagine the horrors that a new user would have to go through.
>
>I have also installed the trial version of Oracle Enterprise server on
>NT and personal Oracle version for Windows, both of these distributions
>are missing important files. Now that I have Oracle running under Solaris
>one of the process "tcp listener" is taking up 100% of my CPU. I have
>already read posts from other users in this newsgroup experiencing the
>same problem.
>
>I guess Oracle wants people to start pulling their hair and subscribe
>to their expensive tech support options to get patches. I sure didn't
>see any on their ftp site.
>
>Why does Oracle want to do this to their existing and prospective customers ?
>
>How do people trust their extrememly valuable databases with a company that
>cannot even write simple install scripts ? I am seriously beginning to
>question the quality of software that comes out of Oracle.
>
>Atif Khan
>aak2_at_ra.msstate.edu

Welcome to the World of Oracle! I complained about bad Oracle installation scripts at least 6 years ago, and it wasn't new then. Fortunately, most of the rest of Oracle isn't quite so bad. Just think of the installation problems as "security by obscurity" and be glad they don't have any bad licensing software. All database software has bugs/design limitations/ misfeatures, but Oracle is so big they do tend to be found. How well the solutions are communicated in a timely fashion is another story.

You'd think that the marketing people would scream for the techies to at least make the first impressions favorable. But they seem to make lemonade out of lemons by selling more expensive support.

Trust is extremely important for mission-critical and financial systems. Somebody should tell Larry Ellison.

-- 
Joel Garry               joelga_at_rossinc.com               Compuserve 70661,1534
These are my opinions, not necessarily those of Ross Systems, Inc.   <> <>
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