Oracle support – as good as it gets



  • At one of my previous jobs I was the DBA of an Oracle Warehouse. At one point we were evaluating different warehouse tools. Naturally, one of the tools we looked into was Oracle Warehouse builder.

     
    The procedure was simple. One by one different representatives from different vendors would come and get a week to install their product (on a replicated environment) and then demonstrate its capabilities.

    Oracle sent us a guy who later became the technical lead of their support team (or whatever the job title is). Right from the start we noticed that he wasn’t exactly an “expert”. Questions about made up startup parameters, inability to cope with Unix instead of the all familiar windows OS and a bullshitting ability which might be featured on the next X-Men movie all made us wander if this guy has any clue as to what he’s doing.

     

    And then we had the following phone call:

    Steve: Ahhh… Did you know your database is broken?

    Me: Excuse me? Broken?

    Steve: Yeah, it doesn’t work.

    Me: Wait a second…well, I’m pinging it and that works so the listener service is up… There, I've just connected through SQL*Plus. Looks fine to me.

    Steve: No, it doesn’t work.

    Me: Wait a second. Tell me exactly what you’re doing.

    Steve: I’m trying to connect through SQL*Plus with scott/tiger and it won’t log me in. See? It doesn’t work!

    At once, our worst suspicions were validated.

     

    P.S. In case anyone doesn’t know, scott/tiger is the username/password pair for Oracle’s demonstration schema.



  • Perfect timing, an horror story for Halloween.

    PS: Aarrrrrrrrrrrrgh !


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