Re: Is Oracle the worst-documented product of all time?

rburton_at_rohms.com.NOJUNKMAIL! (Richard Burton) writes:

>I'm about a month into Oracle, and I feel somewhat obligated to
>document some of my frustrations and opinions on various issues. I
>have no intention of slamming the company or its products, but at the
>same time, I can't help but be appalled at how unnecessarily difficult
>it is to go from zero-to-twenty.

I think anyone who thinks Oracle documentation is the worst ever must be too young to have experienced IBM MVS JCL documentation. It was generally necessary to refer to a half dozen manuals, each of which was written in turgid prose, at best, just to write a DD statement. (And remember 'This Page Intentionally Left Blank'?)

Nevertheless, I do have to agree with the general premise that Oracle documentation could be a whole lot better. In the 'old days', three or so years ago, you got a couple boxes of manuals with each new release, at one time I had multiple complete sets of virtually identical manuals, with the exception of a release document or two.

Somewhat like the IBM documentation, it was often necessary to leaf through multiple manuals to get an answer to a single question, in part because Oracle is a multi-platform and very complex product so there is platform specific information in one manual, SQL in another, installation information in another, design information in another, error messages in yet another manual or two, etc.

And there are a number of things that weren't even documented in the Oracle manuals, especially dealing with some of the more arcane aspects of PL/SQL or procedure writing, such as the PRAGMA statement. (Steve Feurstein's book is the only place I've seen much information on this, and even it isn't as complete as it should be.)

When Oracle went to documentation on CD-ROM, I was more than a bit upset and frustrated, because Oracle Book MAY WELL BE one of the worst products I've had the misfortune to use, and it is nearly impossible to switch from one manual to another with it. (By contrast, Cisco also puts its documentation on CD-ROM these days, but in html format so you can work through it with your web browser.)

Yeah, you can still get the manuals, but at a hefty price. And I notice my Oracle Support fee didn't seem to go down noticeably when they stopped shipping me 100 lbs of paper with each new release, in fact it went up rather dramatically that year, so it sure appeared to me that any savings weren't being passed back to the customer base.

I will say, however, that there is no short cut for becoming an Oracle 'expert', it takes time, and for most people the best route is to take classes and read books about Oracle, then experiment with a test platform to see what really works and what doesn't. (Myself, I read virtually the entire Oracle manual set cover to cover about a half dozen times, then played around with a few trial applications until I felt comfortable, but I've sent some of my staff to Oracle classes and conducted a few training sessions of my own, especially on optimization techniques.)

Regarding 3rd party books, I buy and read books on Oracle all the time, I probably have two or three bookshelves full of them. Some are better than others, too many try to be 'comprehensive' and as a result waste a lot of my time discussing things other books have already covered, often much better. But I've learned something useful from every book I've taken the time to study.

I estimate it takes about six months of hard work to become proficient in Oracle, and for some it may take a lot longer than that. It's like playing the violin, you don't get to perform in Carnegie Hall after a few lessons.

--
Mike Nolan