Official Membership Thread -- Just Reply Here!



  • When I found the IHOC I had to join - this database has made my life a living hell for over a year now and I need to know I'm not alone!



  • Oracle is the Devil.



  • Oracle == garbage

    Ooh!  Ooh!  Pick me!  Oracle is a frickin' steaming turd.  Larry Ellison, the installer, tnsnames.ora, SQL+, Booleans, underhanded sales practices, absurd pricing, empty strings, crappy UI, ridiculous resource requirements.  Need I go on?  Oracle apologists claim that it performs better than the competition (after being tuned by an army of consultants, I guess).  Even if this is the case, how many Oracle clients have the load to justify the attendant pain?  Last I recall, hardware is cheaper than wetware.  God, I hate clueless managers who get suckered into this crap because it sounds 'hard core'.  I swear, to make such a user unfriendly product seems like it would require a concerted effort.  Does Larry hate his users or just like keeping consultants in business?  Even the most adament Microsoft basher has got to be happy that Mr. Ellison ain't #1.

    I think that the appeal of Oracle shares much with that of Linux, C, Perl, Emacs, etc.  What better way for an ass to establish his alpha male status?  Find some complex piece of software and lord your skillz over the losers who lack the ability, time or inclination to become experts.  With some tools (like the aforementioned), the steep learning curve is merely a necessary side effect of an effort to build something powerful.  With Oracle, it's more like a sick joke.  And they've had decades to put some lipstick on this pig but have made zero effort to make the product more usable.  WTF?

    PS One good thing about Oracle -- the cafeteria.  I encourage anyone who works in the area to sneak in (it's easy).  Since meals are subsidized, you'd be doing your small part to sink that crappy company.



  • So where do I go to have my membership number tattooed on my forehead??



  • I'm In



  • request for membership.


    Cheers



  • I'm in.And I use the AS keyword in any damn place I want.



  • Brilliant:

    "I don't like working with databases that much anyway"



  • knockknock* let me in !!
    Sitting in front of  this crapy s***, wasting days & night.
    Oracle stored Procedures, prepared Statemets & callable Calls with Java
    I hate it.  



  • @ndb said:

    knockknock* let me in !!
    Sitting in front of  this crapy s***, wasting days & night.
    Oracle stored Procedures, prepared Statemets & callable Calls with Java


    How's that? Never had a reason to complain about Java+Oracle, except for the BLOB thingy.



  • Thank you for the group.  I feel better now.  I got somethings off my chest.

    Farquat

    Member of OA (Oracle Anonymous)
    The first step is admitting you have a problem



  • <FONT face=Arial>I work on Oracle 360Commerce point-of-sale development.  The product was bought by Oracle, not originally an Oracle product, but I've dealt with my fair share of WTF's in the code.</FONT>



  • I'd like to join as well. I really admire Oracle for its data expansion
    capabilities (expanding a 50MB dump into a 2GB database), as well as
    for its built-in delay loops at database creation.



  • @ErikEngerd said:

    I'd like to join as well. I really admire Oracle for its data expansion
    capabilities (expanding a 50MB dump into a 2GB database), as well as
    for its built-in delay loops at database creation.


    You can easily expand a 500K dump into a 20GB database. Just export an empty table with the right storage parameters.



  • Count me in as well. Oracle just friggin sucks.



  •    A coworker sent me a link to this group today saying, "This sounds like you."  He couldn't have been more right. 

       I've been converting a product upgrade for MS SQL 2000 to Oracle 9i for months.  What drudgery!  Do you wonder how bad it could be?  Reading some of the signups for membership to this group made me laugh so hard tears came to my eyes.  When a 40 year old man can laugh so hard that he fears busting a gut over his peers shared misery, something is truly wrong.  Is it me or is it Oracle?

      About 40% of our customers use Oracle for their RDBMS.  Our application can persist data in either MS SQL or Oracle.  When I first interviewed for this job I said "I don't have any experience in Oracle, why would you even consider hiring me?"  They said my knowledge of MS SQL was good enough that they thought I would easily be able to get a grasp of Oracle and manage the syntactical differences.  I thought, "... cool, I'll get paid to learn Oracle. Having that Oracle experience will look good on the resume..."  I had no idea what I was getting into.

       The other day I had to sit in on a call with a customer who are Oracle bigots and listen to one of our implementation specialist tell the customer that all other databases are inferior to Oracle.  My fingers were turing white holding onto the edge of my chair as I imagined strangling him for the heresy of saying Oracle is the best.

       I could go on for days but rather than bore you with pointless anecdotes, just join me up.



  • I'm in. When my last job upgraded from 8i to 9i (just a couple years ago, gov't agencies are always the last to go) we had a problem with VPD's, something was causing any query that hit a vpd (which was almost all of them) to lock up the processor, and never complete. (When I say never, i mean, I never actually tried to wait it out for more than an hour or 2). We got dicked around Oracle Un-Supportive for weeks, and were told they couldn't recreate the problem, even when I sent them a sample of my data, and all the scripts we used to build the VPDs. We kept asking if the were running the same environment RHEL 3.0, and were told yes. Unfortunately, they lie. Finally they did set up a duplicate of our environment, and lo and behold, they could recreate the problem, and we got the patch shortly thereafter. The problem was it took 3 months to convince them there was a bug. And this was on a production system. The work around was to disable VPD's, and hope no one noticed. Luckily, none of the data was super secret classified, but I don't think that Auditors would have appreciated it if it had happened while they were on site.




  • Make me a member! Sit me on the front row of the jury! Let me pull the switch! If I could run this product over I'd reverse back over it and pee on the squashed turdy ofal that would remain...

    Technology is there as a tool to get a job done. It's meant to make things easier. WTF! These self absorbed barstards seem to take pleasure in writting crap you can't use unless you're in the secret Oracle society. I've fought with some inaccessible rubbish in my time, but never has it been worse than Oracle. I've searched the net, I've read the manuals, I've spoken to the company experts, but no fucker can make the vaugest sense out of this monstrosity.

    There's probably a barstard handshake amongst these insecure fucks who feel it neccessary to write something you can't bloody install in less than a fortnight. They meet up in mountain hideouts and rub linseed oil into each others bum cracks whilst inventing new names for configuration settings.  "I know lets have a role called a DBAENDQUSERFLOATSTAKER, we'll make them the only user who can use the letter "Q" in a four line sentance" - BARSTARDS!

    Oracle how about something you can install and use, with advanced configuration settings that come ... and here's the big pitch ... after you've been using the basic functionality.

    I see it like this. There was this guy: incoherant, anal, pedantic and lonely, with a tiny shlong - to the point of just being undetectable to a person skilled in brail. So he decides to create a database program. He decides to make it complex and unneccessarily pissy. He decides to do it in such a way that no one will be able to use it. That way he'll feel very important. He'll be the only person who can use it and he'll forget about his crappy life. That would be good, it'd distract him from evil naked women on the internet for just a few hours. So he does it. He builds his beast. Soon he is joined by another lonely guy who thinks technology is about his own fragile ego - as opposed to doing stuff - He blows the first guy and as a reward gets his own DBA login and a decoder ring the size of a twin tub.

    Keck knows how man years later here we are, and there it is, the poo blocking the toilet bend of data management "Oracle". The car with the steering wheel locked in the trunk and an engine that will only start using a key that you were never given!

    Breath! Breath!

    Man - and what's with the case sensitivity and namine shit! And why the distinctly crap GUI interfaces - that never work, so I always end up doing it from the command line in SQL*Plus! And why with the packaging the wrong documentation with your downloads!

     Do they want us to use it? Even the form to download the fucking product doesn't work! Why build something nobody can use - Why waste your life doing that Oracle... Unless you have no life to waste you insecure technoperverts...
     




  • Ohmigoodness, just finding this site has made me feel better already. 


    I HATE ORACLE! We're using an Oracle Portal for our PUBLIC WEBSITE (????!!!!???) and it makes me alternately want to throw my computer out the window and sob uncontrollably.

    Please add me as a member to this fantastic club, although I'm probably the least techy of the bunch (I'm a lowly graphic designer forced to use this piece of poo)



  • Totally agree. Oracle is the most over-complicated pile of junk I have to work with.

    PL/SQL is so badly thought out. It seems to that each new feature is the result of an engineer having a good idea on the way to work, implementing it and then afterwards checking to see whether it had been done before. Coming from a Java background I find the collections implementation is Oracle just plain weird.



  • Count me in.



  • @Flynn said:

    PL/SQL is so badly thought out. It seems to that each new feature is the result of an engineer having a good idea on the way to work, implementing it and then afterwards checking to see whether it had been done before.

    There are some examples where they did it somehow in one version only to do it right in a later version. 

     

    Coming from a Java background I find the collections implementation is Oracle just plain weird.

    True, but a PL/SQL program mostly uses the database to store information; excessive use of collections might be an indication for bad style...




  • I just have to be in this club.

    I have only been working with Oracle for about a year, but in that time, my soul have slowly been drained. The system I'm currentlly assigned does not only use Oracle for the database (as that wouldn't be insane enough) - it uses Oracle forms as well; wtf is that all about? I used to have concepts as "model view seperation", "N-tier" and "database layer", but now its all in the database.... and don't get me started on the syntax in packages....





  • @Lizard of Oz said:

    it uses Oracle forms as well; wtf is that all about?

    Oracle Forms is... probably not something anyone wants to use anymore. 

     

    I used to have concepts as "model view seperation", "N-tier" and "database layer", but now its all in the database....

    Forms is a relict of the Client-Server era. 


    and don't get me started on the syntax in packages....

    This is ADA-style. IMO it's a lot better than T-SQL .

     

     



  • @ammoQ said:

    Oracle Forms is... probably not something anyone wants to use anymore. 

    Well - seems there are still some systems out there - especially since forms was integrated into an applet... but as I see it, the architecture is plain evil. I have just been working on a new form, which took me 7 hours to create (approx 1/2 in visual studio would have accomplised the same). Of course some of it is because I'm not that confident with Oracle Forms yet, but still - it is quite difficult creating a good UI in a short amount of time.

    @ammoQ said:

    Forms is a relict of the Client-Server era. 

    Yep, and it will not be up to date, since not much have happened the last couple of years (if we look besides the fact it have been moved to an applet)

    @ammoQ said:

      

    This is ADA-style. IMO it's a lot better than T-SQL .

    Well, it's kind of like discussing syntax as I see it, cause some love VB and others love C# syntax. The spec/body thingie frustrates me the most, since I have to make changes in both places.



  • @Lizard of Oz said:

    it is quite difficult creating a good UI in a short amount of time.

    Quite difficult? Nearly impossible!

    Yep, and it will not be up to date, since not much have happened the last couple of years (if we look besides the fact it have been moved to an applet)

    Which has put the nail into the coffin of forms. Fortunately.

    The spec/body thingie frustrates me the most, since I have to make changes in both places.

    True, but PL/SQL is not the only language doing it like that. 



  • @Lizard of Oz said:

    The spec/body thingie frustrates me the most, since I have to make changes in both places.

    Well, it is really so that when you push code into production, once other objects are refering to a package, if you find a bug, or need to add new functionality, you can replace only the code while leaving the spec identical and valid, which, in turn, keeps any dependant objects from becoming invalidated, which means that they will continue to be open and available in production. Really good if you ever were unfortunate enough to have circular references (pkg A calls pkg B calls pkg A)...believe me, its out there.
     



  • Command line tools per se aren't a bad thing. But the ones Oracle produce suck like black holes - I mean has anyone at Oracle actually bothered to update the functionality in SQL*Plus in the last 20 years! Talk about curses! But get with the times dlosh, Oracle now produce several several GUI and web based tools (which suck just as badly).



  • Everyone hates Oracle.

     

    Even if you are a DBA, guess what? You'll end up hating Oracle and everything about it! 



  • One month working with Oracle, and i hate it with the intensity of a thousand suns.

     

     



  • If you had to be trapped on a deserted island who what would you take with you?

     Oracle or Windows Vista?

    personally i'd drown myself.
     



  • I hate you. I hate you sooo much.



  • You know what I'd really like to join?

    PIZZA HUT     HUT      HUT



  • I'll play in your club, but I can't hate Oracle -- I was an employee for 15 years and I now work with it as part of my livlihood. Maybe I hate the corporate attitude, the bad decisions and directions, more than the technical aspects.  I was on the support phones for nearly 8 years.  Then development got really excited when I wrote a product for the support group using one of their less popular products and I was a developer, (it was a requirement that you *must* have studied from one of the top 10 universities in America to be hired as a developer back then). Most of my fellow developers were Harvard business grads. I got sucked into what eventually became Oracle Portal, (but it was hijacked by a bunch of consultants from back east who wanted their hack turned into a product and it ended up displacing everything else).  Ended up floating around marketing for a while, (because obviously marketing is the best group to maintain the website???).  Then, when the waves of layoffs came in the early part of this decade, I begged my boss to add me to the list, (which has more perks than just quitting).  Met a lot of interesting people. I used to hash out ideas with Ken Jacobs, (I still think read-only tablespaces were my idea), or Rick Allen on security when I met them, so it was a good experience anyway.

     My advice to people working with Oracle?  Just use the database, networking and tool utilities.  Avoid anything written in Java like the black death, (not because there is anything wrong with Java per-se, but because Oracle couldn't keep good Java developers around for long).  Use the open source stuff instead, (I wrote the first Windows port of "oraperl" which was one of the first Perl-to-Oracle interfaces and became very popular in the early days of the internet).  I've had the experience of building the Oracle core and have seen some major WTF's -- one time I did a count of about 27 "strlen" functions in the NLS module.



  • @Magnus_Adustum said:

    One month working with Oracle, and i hate it with the intensity of a thousand suns.

     

    I wrote this quote on my project whiteboard last month - now one of my team says that every hour or so and cracks the rest up. That's not just because it's a silly comment; they can relate because not so long ago they thought so too. Now that most of them are approaching two years working with Oracle they think Oracle is just swell, but it took close to a year for them to get the conceptual model of a DBMS. Note that I'm only talking about the Oracle DBMS, and no, I don't think SQL Server or MySQL is relevant experience.

    Responses to some other recent comments:

    • Oracle Forms (and Reports and Discoverer) dates from the time that there were very few languages for bad programmers. Forms made it easy to do screen layout and navigation and it mostly does the edits and other hard stuff automatically. As Oracle Corp updated the toolset over time it tried to beef it up for good programmers, with predictable results. It is arguably still acceptable for bad programmers, so if you don't like it you must be... a good programmer?
    • PL/SQL is just about the perfect language for data abstraction layers, so it works great as part of the Oracle DBMS. PL/SQL is a dialect of Ada, so there is not much of a case that it's "weird" or "foreign" or even "proprietary". PL/SQL will beat any OO language in encapsulation, and it's especially good for model view controllers.



  • Sign me up.  I especially love that you have to install the client tools for ODBC connections.  Which I hate as well but I have to support someone else's code -- I'm stuck with it.  



  • I love to hate Oracle.

     Now on to the I hate Crystal Reports club.



  • I just had the site pointed out to me.   This site is awsome.

     Oracle is such a drag.  I was asked to admin an Oracle DB a few years ago, without knowing any better I agreed.  Had to deal with it for about a year.  I'll never make that mistake again.  That's for sure.



  • I'm in... Oracle developer/dba...but the whining humor here... will be worth it alone.



  • I'm in too



  • Oooookaaayyy....

     Been working on Converting an app w/ a SQL server back end to an Oracle back end (and never has the term 'back end' been more appropriate...)

     OracleDB is remote to me and managed by a guy who actually likes the thing.  For some reason I can't change my own password once it expires, so yesterday I had this conversation (password changed to protect, well, me.)

    DBA: Ok, your password is now "abcd_1234"

    Me: Is that upper or lowercase?

    DBA: Doesn't matter.

    Me: ...

    Me: What?

    DBA: It's not case sensitive.

    Me: Wait: you're telling me that text searches are case sensitive and passwords aren't?

    DBA: It's only case sensitive if you use quotes.

    Me: ???

    Me: No, I mean like 'comparing text fields' is case sensitive

    DBA: Yes.

    Me: But passwords aren't...?

    DBA: No.

     

     

    Really, WTF???

    I was ready to be in this club before, but that conversation was worth getting a login here to join officially!



  • @BlueKnot said:

    Really, WTF???

    I was ready to be in this club before, but that conversation was worth getting a login here to join officially!

    Unfortunately, that is legacy. Once upon a time, it was case insensitive. In Oracle 11, case sensitive passwords can be enabled, but prepare for compatibility issues.



  • @ammoQ said:

    @BlueKnot said:

    Really, WTF???

    I was ready to be in this club before, but that conversation was worth getting a login here to join officially!

    Unfortunately, that is legacy. Once upon a time, it was case insensitive. In Oracle 11, case sensitive passwords can be enabled, but prepare for compatibility issues.

    Good to know, but the guy is running 9i.


  • I hate the Cheap I.T. Bastard that won't spring for Quest or even Toad and says "Didn't we pay for a SQL+ license?"



  • @TunnelRat said:

    I hate the Cheap I.T. Bastard that won't spring for Quest or even Toad and says "Didn't we pay for a SQL+ license?"

    Must be an idiot. SQL Developer is free and almost a reasonable tool. Definitely better than SQL*Plus, though not as feature complete as Toad. (I wonder why "Toad" rhymes with "bloat" ...)



  • Oracle SQL Developer is ok...

    Toad sucks... Did i mention Toad cost 1000 dollars and is the most unstable piece of software i have ever used in my life, it makes windows 95 look rock-solid!

    And oracle windows services seriously slow you down.

     

    I want in :) 



  • I'm in - can I have member number 12154? :)

    Did the DBA thing 6/7/8 years ago with versions 7 and 8i.  Did some fairly extensive Y2K upgrades.  One night, about 2AM, I remember deleting a data file before dropping a tablespace, and there was no way on earth Oracle would let me recover from it without doing a full restore.  Walked away from the whole product shortly after, and started evangelizing SQL Server, which is a much much better RDBMS.  I didn't mind the technical challenge of Oracle, but when it was in areas that didn't need to be challenging, it just got silly.  Keep the simple stuff simple is what I say.

    Pet hates?  The installer (at least it's improved from the old Oracle 7/Developer 2000 days, but that's not saying much), TNSNAMES (management flat out refused to even consider putting them in a directory service or on a network share, so I ended up having to cook up a logon script to copy new TNSNAMES.ORA files to client PCs), the way you can never really be sure what ORACLE_HOME 3rd party software is using (I spend a lot of time troubleshooting those problems for our developers), Forms and Discoverer, ADI (it never worked and was incompatible with their other products when installed on the same machine), JInitiator (or anything Java based, for that matter), the old proprietary IP stack, having to interoperate with GW-BASIC (now there's a WTF all on it's own) for some ghastly mess one of our senior developers brewed up once, the extraordinarily high levels of maintenance required, and the whole general arrogance that surrounds the product.

    Does it still not support identity columns?  Add that to the list, if so.
     



  • I'm in.  Curse the motherless dog that came up with Commit!



  • I'm in. I had hair before I encountered the beast.



  • I gotta join this club. Started my IT career in '95 - did my first oracle install in 2005 - it's been the most inscrutable software i've ever encountered.
    I so regret getting it. In a windows environment i would challenge anyone to give a good reason to run Oracle instead of MS Sqlserver. I used to love bashing Microsoft, i never thought i'd actually be dreaming of the day when i could 'upgrade' to the Micorsoft offering.
    Oracle is a windows sysadmin's nightmare. I've had 3 periods of downtime each of over a week in the last 2 years. Has been the most stress i've ever encountered in my job. The best bit was that each time it turned out to be a fix taking less than 1hour. Not only do i feel dumb, exasperated, p1ssed off but i run into this Attitude everywhere i look for Oracle information. I call it the Oracle attitude and it goes like this: 'You shouldn't need to ask any questions cos all the answers are in the book, you lazy idiot, why can't you take a year off and read all the manuals and then you'll be able to use our beloved database. All Hail The Oracle!' (At this point you're supposed to get out your 3foot thick oracle manual and kiss it).

    i'd like to wipe my 4rse with the oracle documentation. i used to write manuals and readme's - in fact i still do sometimes. i've never seen so many circular references in official documentation before, or spent so much time searching for HOW to do something (which i think at least should be relatively simple). I am looking at it from a sysadmin point of view. I'll probably never create a database from scratch in my life. I look after networks, maintain hardware, sort out routing, that kind of thing. Right now i spend 2 hours a day over looking my network then i sit down with the Oracle O'Reilly take a deep breathe and read that for the rest of the day. Cos i've given up on Oracle support, on Oracle documentation and the courses are for someone who's dedicated to oracle and nothing else - i did the first course but it was like a crammer course, you need to go away and go over all the notes again before it sinks in.

    Last issue i had about 2 weeks ago, i escalated it with Oracle support after about a week - i couldn't connect to one of my databases, i was sure i'd done something silly and messed up the config - and if i've learned one thing its that oracle is very very fussy and the config has to be just right (which is why i backed up all my config b4 changing anything). Anyway after a week and a half and talking to half a dozen guys and running tons of diagnostics which didn't apply to my trivial situation, i gave up and called a contractor.

    He fixed it over the phone in 50 minutes. (half an hour of that call was talking about money). Oh, i should say to be fair that i had already sent him my old listener.ora file and my current one. Cut and pasted 4 lines from the old to the new and it all worked. The relief to be able to see my database again was amazing. The worst thing was i KNEW it was something to do with my listener.ora file, i told oracle support that, i even sent them the old and the new. (One of their guys advised me to drop all my tables and start again rebuilding the database). The other 2 down times were equally trivial - (although having downtime was definitely not trivial). So i felt truly dumb, the whole office was stressful cos one of the main servers was down, and that contractor made in less than 1hour half of my weekly wage.

    I think it has been worst mistake of my IT career when i listened to the salesman tell me that between oracle and sqlserver the maintenance overhead was about the same but oracle was more advanced and had more features and i believed him! So i'm suffering for that naive mistake. It has literally doubled my workload, i've never encountered such shocking support, (i have worked in support off and on many times, 1st line, 2nd line and 3rd line), and i don't think we gain any advantage as a company by having this app.

    I'm sure that oracle is brilliant - if you're ebay or amazon, but not otherwise. And don't believe the marketing hype - it is totally at odds with the support culture.
    It will probably take me a while to migrate all my databases and i'm sure it won't be easy but this database is a waste of time for a guy like me. And once i get approval i'm off out of the land of Oracle :-)

    Just one example of what i consider a typical waste of time on planet Oracle: You install on windows2003 server and you have to manually create environmental variables - if you want to be able to connect that is - and it doesn't say this in the windows2003 install guide? How could they miss out something so simple yet so critical? Stuff like this happens time and time again - even on the course the teacher was telling us things which she just happened to know which weren't documented.

    It's not stupid to ask someone how to do something rather than read a manual for 4 hours. Nor is it necessarily a sign of intelligence if you know something obscure that no-one else knows because it is so hard to find out.

    What i rate as intelligent is the ability to design something that someone else can learn and use relatively quickly, and then in subsequent versions to make it yet more intuitive and logical to use (tho i must admit 10g Enterprise Manager is a great improvement on the 9i one). I can't rate intelligence as the ability to pour scorn on all criticism and tell them to go away and read the book. I'm going to go away and install something else.

    I admit i don't know the intricacies of databases, i'm sysadmin, but i'm not going to be intimidated by the Oracle Attitude anymore, maybe it is the greatest database in the world but who cares? Wasn't Betamax technically better than VHS? When i started in IT we used to replace Netware servers with NT4 boxes. Technically netware was definitely better - quicker, less restarts, needed less resources but who won that battle?

    Laugh as much as you want at MS Sqlserver oracle gurus - it's not just about being technically the best. What about usability? learnability? Interoperability with your O/S? All convoluted obscure solutions with high learning curves and requiring high maintenance will always be replaced - eventually.

    Well I didn't mean to write so long - guess i have 2 years of frustration to get out!



     


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