Re: Oracle Right or Wrong

Mike Dwyer wrote:
> That said, I've been active in a number of forums in my years but I've
> never seen the level of arrogance and closed mindedness that I see
> from some members of this forum. This posting isn't directed towards
> the people who put forward constructive advice and criticism. This is
> directed towards the people who seem to worship the Oracle God and
> spend as much time pontificating as they do giving advice (if any).
>
> Is it just me? I can't believe that I'm alone in this observation.
>

I have to agree with you in concept, at least. There are a few snobs on this NG ... but is that really so unusual? Back a hundred years ago (or so it seems), I was struggling to make an Excel spreadsheet download some data from an Oracle db. I was a complete novice in the VBA world, so I thought I'd post a question in the Microsoft Excel newsgroup (actually, it was on the Excel-L list server) and - boy! was that an eye-opener. I was rapidly blased by the "regulars" on the list server telling me I was unnecessarily wasting all of their bandwidth (as if their flames weren't) ... and why the heck (not exactly the word they used) didn't I look it up in the Help?

More recently than a hundred years ago, I started lurking in the Microsoft Flight Simulator NG. This time I checked Google to make sure I wasn't posting a "dumb" question that had been answered by the "regulars" a thousand times already. I must not have used the correct search keywords ... as soon as I posted my question about renaming a particular aircraft model ... the flames started. Honestly, some of the flames hit the NG so rapidly, I think some of the regulars had their flames composed before my question even arrived. Why hadn't I read the manual (yeah, the 23-page one)? Why didn't I check microsoft.com to download the 300-page SDK tomes?

I'm not sure what makes some of these "regulars" choose to flame every newbie who dares to come onto their turf ... but it seems to be quite common. I guess they're the sort who should never get a job in tech support ... or worse, at the customer service desk of some popular chain store (where I'm sure they'd smart-mouth every customer who tried to return something - did they read the manual before deciding it didn't work?).

However, I still lurk on several NGs because I can really learn a lot of stuff I didn't know. And even those on this NG who routinely badger newbies occasionally post useful info. I worked as an Oracle consultant for a while (for Oracle Corp), and we had to listen to father Larry from time to time ... telling us how many checkmarks we had on the feature list compared to Sybase or SQL Server ... and any that they had that we didn't have would surely be in the next version. Oracle is a great marketing machine, after all. Received on Tue Oct 08 2002 - 16:09:09 CDT