Hate is too weak an adjective



  • I've been pounding on db's for a 12 years now.  Designed multiple enterprise class apps that were db agnostic.   I've found most of them (db's) to be useful,  and relatively compatible with each other,  at least at the datatype level.  And then there's Oracle.

    My greeting to the team was usually "Have I told you lately how much I hate Oracle"

    Been using using this staggering achievement of Bloatware since version 7.1.  100mb+ CLIENT ONLY installs when most pc were limited to 540mb disks.  Endless seldom used features set to ridiculous defaults requiring tweaking.  Shoddy tools.  Obsessive "extending" of SQL into a programming language,  rather than a Structured Query Language.   Non-standard datatypes.  Silly network configuration.  Insane Oracle Heterogenous Services (That's a whole other topic). 

    We usually had 1 dev branch for Oracle,  and one for everything else.  DB2 (wince) was easier to work with.

    Oracle

    Suffershudderwincecringe.

    Singed,
    An Oracle Victim



  • Hate is not an adjective. 



  • "Oracle" and "db agnostic" doesn't match. Either go the oracle way, making good use of the exclusive features, or use some other database.



  • @mooney said:

    Hate is not an adjective. 

    Guess you weren't at HateFEST '05 where (I heard) they had a barrel of monkeys with a cute, little litter of kittens.



  • @TomCo said:

    @mooney said:

    Hate is not an adjective. 

    Guess you weren't at HateFEST '05 where (I heard) they had a barrel of monkeys with a cute, little litter of kittens.

    I'm sorry, I don't speak jibberish.



  • I like how just the client libraries are 20 times bigger than the entire sqlite system (including source and library).



  • It could of course relate to the provided features - but if you're satisified with sqlite, why bother with something else?

     

    l.



  • @mooney said:

    @TomCo said:

    @mooney said:

    Hate is not an adjective. 

    Guess you weren't at HateFEST '05 where (I heard) they had a barrel of monkeys with a cute, little litter of kittens.

    I'm sorry, I don't speak jibberish.

    That's clearly why you don't think hate is an adjective, you're not speaking the right language.

    Another way at looking at the title is as a statement of the fact that hate is too weak an adjective because it is a verb.



  • @farquat said:

    I've been pounding on db's for a 12 years now.  Designed multiple enterprise class apps that were db agnostic.  

    How many of these applications actually needed to be db agnostic?  In my experience, most enterprises have some base standard for databases with maybe a handful of exceptions for exotic 3rd party or legacy applications.  In-house enterprise applications would be run on the enterprise standard database.  Most db agnostic stuff I've seen has been a developer driven thing with no business requirement and they always fuck it up anyway.  Just take a look at the difference in locking strategies & transactions between SQL Server and Oracle.  No amount of development effort can make them work the same - they work in fundementally different ways so any "compatibility" will fail at some level.  If you're building a product however you might have some excuse for ODBC compatibility. 

    @farquat said:

    [My greeting to the team was usually "Have I told you lately how much I hate Oracle"

    Great.  I bet you got a load of help from those guys.  As a previous poster said, Oracle is stuffed full of features.  If you're not using them then you're costing the company money by redeveloping features that already exist in the database or by whining that you have to use something you don't understand properly instead of just getting on with it.

    @farquat said:

    Shoddy tools

    Fair point.



  • We've taken the (increasingly common) approach of developing on HSQLDB and deploying on Oracle.   HSQLDB has nice features - such as simple to install and use on developers machines - easy debugging (you can see the SQL directly in the logs) - and stopping and starting it is a breeze.   Oh and it runs much quicker than Oracle (at least for some data loads).   ORM software such as Hibernate means being database agnostic is pretty simple.  (Before you ask - the integration server and test version all use Oracle)



  • The reason why something needs to be DB agnostic and run on Oracle, in our case, is:

    1: Needs to run on Linux and Windows.

    2: "We want to run it on Oracle" (since that's what the other stuff the customer had was using).

     

    The choice of database is most emphatically not up to us. If it were, we'd be having PostgreSQL/Linux as a requirement. Since we can't do that if we want to sell it to many places, we're stuck with DB and OS agnosticism. Works reasonably well for most things - even SQL Server will play nice if you do things the Redmond way. And then there's Oracle. 

    Do I *need* Oracle? Hell no, I much prefer PostgreSQL. But if you have no choice but to support it, it *stinks* in comparison with everything else.


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