Re: Oracle's bad business practices
Date: 1996/08/05
Message-ID: <1996Aug5.182748.24831_at_hrbicf>#1/1
In article <4tnrp4$9ui_at_chaos.wg.com>,
vhills_at_utdallas.edu (Randy Hills) writes:
> In article <aak2.838616056_at_Isis.MsState.Edu>,
> aak2_at_Ra.MsState.Edu (Atif Ahmad Khan) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>> 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 "Obstacle" as some of us refer to Oracle. Wait until
> you try using the phone support or try to enroll in a class. This is not a
> customer oriented organization. I am both an Informix and Oracle DBA, and it
> mystifies me how Oracle can treat their customers in such a fashion. As for
> their database itself, it is not in the same class as Informix's (compare
> hot backups, parallel processing, fragmentation <striping -- on Informix
> you can do fragmentation by the value of a field or some other algorithm --
> no such control on Oracle>).
>
> - Randy Hills.
Hear hear! I have used Oracle for about 2-1/2 years now, and they are nothing short of a disgrace when it comes to the way they treat us. We have bronze support (had silver and dropped it because it didn't pay off), and still, getting technical help out of them is hopeless.
During the time we had silver support, we got CDROMs with their bug database on it. Surfing that database was a real eye-opener. I observed that:
- If you are a huge company with tens of thousands of employees (like an international bank) you get some serious attention. Otherwise, your TARs and bugs are treated as second-class.
- If you do not repeatedly pester them, they will simply quit working on a bug, even if it is catastrophic and crashes your system.
The bug database included all the exchanges between
the analysts and the customer call-backs, and on many of them, they end with remarks like "cannot duplicate the problem here... TAR closed", or worse, they trail on and on with remarks about the different approaches tried (none of which solve the problem) and then suddenly... nothing. Some of these bugs were 2 years old and were still not closed. They simply forgot about them... either because the customer gave up and learned to live with it or found their own work-around.
Never mind that simple courtesies of sending out known bug lists, patch notices, and new version upgrades automatically as these things come out. They do absolutely NOTHING unless you repeatedly hound them.
-- Max Magliaro MMM_at_ICF.HRB.COM Philipsburg, Pennsylvania "It ain't over 'till it's over" --- Yogi Berra Well, Yogi, as far as the Grand Game of Baseball is concerned, it's over.Received on Mon Aug 05 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST