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

>> >Your one months experience of Oracle on your own with just the Oracle
>> >Documentation CD ROM and no hardcopy manuals IS NOT ENOUGH ALONE for
 you to be undertaking what you seem to be undertaking, an 'award winning
>> >software developer' (your words, not mine) or not.
>>
>> In the case of Oracle, you may be right. In the case of just about
>> any other software product or system I've ever experienced, from
>> Novell, AutoCad, 3D Studio, C++, dBase, FoxPro, Clipper to Informix,
>> Sybase, MS-SQL and others, this wouldn't be the case.
>
>That is complete rubbish - and exactly why a company like mine would not
>employ you.

I hate to break it to you, but I'm not planning on sending you my resume, so I think we can drop the ongoing, "You won't work for me" dialogue... I'm sure I'm missing a tremendous opportunity but I'll live with it.

I suspect a 'company like yours' bills by the hour, and it's obviously in your best interests to drag things on as long as you can. I have a job to do, and I can get up to speed very quickly. I'm sure you want to continue to propogate the myth that systems like Oracle require tremendous investments in time to learn - and therefore, they're best left to "specialists" such as yourself. I disagree with this philosophy.

I'm 8 weeks into Oracle from scratch, and I already have over 20 large databases ported and designed; I have the WRB and Oracle Webserver running beautifully and have everything integrated into the web nicely; I'm also cranking out lots of useful stored procedure packages, etc. I'm up-to-speed on a variety of their tools and I'd be here a lot sooner if the docs were better. Now I am nowhere near claiming to be an "Oracle expert" by any means, and to be honest, I have no inclination of achieving that goal. I suspect that I could spend half my life learning about all of Oracle's technology, but that's not my objective - I have specific projects I need to address, and my programming background has taught me solid principals I can employ to learn the intricacies of systems - first to get things up and running, and thereafter to tweak and improve performance and flexibility. I have no doubt that the huge gaps in my knowledge may translate into inadequacies over how I may implement something in the interim, but I've taken that into account in designing the systems to be modular and portable so I can enhance the databases as my knowledge increases. You might consider this an irresponsible approach - but you don't know how deep my experience is in general database design and low-level technical and machine knowledge - I can compensate to a great degree as a result. Besides, what we're talking about is a _database server_. I ask for information and it gives it to me. Essentially, it's pretty simple - if you don't get bogged down in all the other 'features'.

Unfortunately, I've had to write some of my own utility libraries because Oracle's were buggy. I.e., their UTL_FILE package has bugs and inconsistencies in the documentation - exceptions they claim to support aren't supported, etc. Ironically, the bugs invade into their online technical support documents as well. Of couse, it appears to me, that a lot of this code was extrapolated from various sources, including the Univ of Chicago NCSA base. I helped debug much of this code for Apache's implementation - I hope if they used this code, they used some newer stuff...

>Still, if you don't like the Oracle Manuals, the Oracle Press books, the
>Oracle Training option, the Oracle Consultancy option or the thought of
>some third-party Training or Consultancy then I really don't see anyway
>for you to go.

The point I'm making is that these options for learning are not autonomous, nor are they consistent in their complimentary educational nature. They are all little disjointed pieces of a big pie, that apparently takes an unreasonable amount of time to put together and digest.

> And bitching about the Oracle documentation and ignoring
>all the replies - some very good - that you have been given in this
>newsgroup isn't helping you at all.

I'm not ignoring any replies. I'm raising an issue, and I seem to see a lot of people agreeing with my agruments. Received on Fri Jul 11 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT