Re: Oracle questions

1. Expense is not just measure in up-front cost, it is measured over the life of the system. This includes not only software/hardware costs, but also the costs of time, etc..
2. Oracle provides documentation in HTML, Adobe, and paper manuals. I use the Adobe versions all the time. The HTML documentation is very useful when you happen to be offsite and need to use someone else's pc or some similar scenario - if you can get to the net, you can get to the full documentation set.
3. As far as manual quality - the manual set that is distributed with Oracle reads as well as many of the books that are published on it and from my experience, far better than the documentation provided from any other RDBMS vendor.
4. I don't know about tool crashes. I don't do development work but the only tools I've ever had real issues with were when they've run on the Windows platform so who exactly is to blame? Even then, the toolset provided with Oracle is much more robust than any I've seen w/ other databases (compare the OEM toolkit with say SQL Servers ?toolkit?
5. As far as being arrogant - well if you've got it - flaunt it :)

Additional Note:

The one big complaint I do have is the greatly dimished quality of support from Oracle. It was bad for a long time, got a lot better, and lately has been
going into the dumpster again. I agree much of this is coming from the Metalink
push. I think Metalink is great but when I'm having a real issue or just need
something quick, I still want to call. I don't see Oracle reducing their support
fees so why shouldn't I expect the same rapid, quality service I was receiving
in the past. If they want people to use Metalink, why don't they offer a different
support tier where if you use metalink you pay X dollars and if you want premium
voice support you pay a higher tier rate or on a per-incident basis? I hope that
this trend gets reversed very quickly.

Joe Ramsey
Senior Database Administrator
Cintas Corporation
Cincinnati, OH

"Mystery" <u> wrote in message
news:974388807.15864.0.nnrp-13.c2d92da9_at_news.demon.co.uk...
> Ok
>
> If Oracle is so great why?
>
> Is it so expensive
> Is it not SQL92
> Does the ridiculous documentation come in useless HTML format
> Are the manuals so bad
> Are the tools so bad they crash on every platform (not a good sign for a
> software product)
> Is it just so dam arrogant?
>
> Answers on a post card to Mr Big Salary, Oracle House.
>
>
Received on Sat Nov 18 2000 - 15:24:00 CST