Like a British sports-car

memorex

When it runs, it runs lovely.

When it runs.
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My favorites: (occasionally fixed by later versions)
* Millisecond handling in timestamps and your ability to query based on them

* Changing the DLL names for -EVERY DAMNED, STINKING, FLIPPING, CROTCHGRABBING- version of the client drivers.

* LOTS of hours wasted on trying to install 8i to directory "c:\program files\", getting to 99% complete on it every time to finally fail when starting something or other. The install program didn't bother telling me that java doesn't like spaces in its directories...

* TNSNAMES.ORA. On -EVERY DAMNED, STINKING, FLIPPING, CROTCHGRABBING- C/S desktop.

* 15 seconds to create a new connection (circa 1998) . WTF WAS IT DOING?!!

* Page locking halts everyone who's trying to use that table at the same time.

* Connections: you want more than 350 or so? TOO F'ING BAD!! (This may have been due to DBA (lack) of knowledge or tweaking or who knows?)

* You want blob's? We got blobs! We got them in blue, red, long, raw, cooked, not so long, character-based, fried, short, female, baboon, gibbon, prehensile, new-world, old-world, 3rd-world, 5th-world, bonobo, spider, lemur, ape, great ape, golden tamarin, chimp, macaque, and Canadian Fire Monkey. And they're ALL going to be a bitch to work with.

* "Hey Oracle- you wanna keep those index-stats up to date so that your optimizer doesn't turn a <1s query into one that never returns?" (Orcl makes an unintelligent sound here that implies you should not be pestering it) "Oh- ok, well thanks anyway, I'll just tweak every query I have to ask it to not hassle the optimizer. Then everything will work faster."

*** My all-time, nothing can beat this, favorite: VARCHAR2! I've only been able to get a vague history on this one.
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After working with it for a bunch of years as a developer who sometimes filled a DBA role, I've learned to live with it.

There are a couple small things I like but not many.

memorex

Another that stood out as the most bizarre installation issue I've come across:

You wanna install the 8.whatever client onto a Pentium 4 machine? Nope, we're going to have the installer crash.

But at least there was a workaround- nuke file X and then it'll install with an error, but work.

memorex

Dear God there's more!

Apparently, Orcl has NO PROBLEM allowing you to set up permissions for a user so that you can log in, but you can't create a session... I'm sure there's a "reason" behind this idea.
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Another punchline: DBA accepts the default max extents for a table...
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Rollback segment exceeded: Nondeterministic sweeping of transactions... smart.

Me: It says we're out of rollback segment space- AGAIN!! The users are revolting, the Director is PISSED and is mailing every VP in the building.

DBA: You're kidding- we've got 10 segments and they're all set to X gigs...

Me: Wanna see the screen shot?... (looking at the segments) Each of them has 600 megs of dead transactions, why isn't it reusing any of them yet??

DBA: Dunno... guess I'll reboot it...

Me: (to myself) Brilliant solution...

DBA_From_Hell

I have been in industry over 15 year, and all the time I have had to suffer from Oracle. In the past it was better since their tools were more up to date, and the competiotion had not picked up. Nowadays Oracle sucks big time. The Installer is a joke. The bundled tools are buggy and unusable. And don't I just love that Java UI feeling, "Click,...,...,..., "Hello World!"".

Count me in!

ChrisRLong

@memorex said:

Page locking halts everyone who's trying to use that table at the same time.

Not sure what you were smoking when you wrote this one - this is a SQLServer issue - definitely not an Oracle issue. Oracle has never had page-level locking.

@memorex said:

 TNSNAMES.ORA. On -EVERY DAMNED, STINKING, FLIPPING, CROTCHGRABBING- C/S desktop.

.. so don't use TNSNAMES.ORA.

@memorex said:

* 15 seconds to create a new connection (circa 1998) . WTF WAS IT DOING?!!

It was a bug - it happens

@memorex said:

Connections: you want more than 350 or so? TOO F'ING BAD!! (This may have been due to DBA (lack) of knowledge or tweaking or who knows?)

DBA issue on that one.

@memorex said:

You want blob's? We got blobs! We got them in blue, red, long, raw, cooked, not so long, character-based, fried, short, female, baboon, gibbon, prehensile, new-world, old-world, 3rd-world, 5th-world, bonobo, spider, lemur, ape, great ape, golden tamarin, chimp, macaque, and Canadian Fire Monkey. And they're ALL going to be a bitch to work with.

So having options is bad?
...and I remember them being a PITA to use in SQLSErver as well, although that certainly could be better by now.

@memorex said:

* "Hey Oracle- you wanna keep those index-stats up to date so that your optimizer doesn't turn a <1s query into one that never returns?" (Orcl makes an unintelligent sound here that implies you should not be pestering it) "Oh- ok, well thanks anyway, I'll just tweak every query I have to ask it to not hassle the optimizer. Then everything will work faster."

If you want stats refreshed all the time - make a 2-line call to create a job to do it - not that much of a hassle for that one.

There are certainly enough valid things to bust on Oracle for without making stuff up - let's have a fair fight, now ;)

- Chris

memorex

Certainly nothing's being made up, and Oracle implemented row lock in v8, iirc.

Never the less, we're ultimately all coming up with questions of how much complexity is too much and how much do we need to do FOR the database itself vs how much it should worry about for us.

SQL Server tends to take care of things for you and be less tunable vs oracle which pretty well wants you to do everything for it and will allow you to tweak just about anything.

But like I titled my post- Orcl runs well, when it runs... if you don't have at least 1 full-time mechanic, you're asking for a load of fun.

Mike_Dimmick

@memorex said:

Rollback segment exceeded: Nondeterministic sweeping of transactions... smart.

Me: It says we're out of rollback segment space- AGAIN!! The users are revolting, the Director is PISSED and is mailing every VP in the building.

DBA: You're kidding- we've got 10 segments and they're all set to X gigs...

Me: Wanna see the screen shot?... (looking at the segments) Each of them has 600 megs of dead transactions, why isn't it reusing any of them yet??

DBA: Dunno... guess I'll reboot it...

Me: (to myself) Brilliant solution...

Uh, were you performing full backups or transaction log backups? SQL Server 2000 won't discard old log entries if it thinks you're keeping backups of your database; the log space will only be reclaimed once the database or log is backed up. It starts out in minimally-logged mode but switches to maintaining complete logs once you've performed your first full backup. If you don't want to back up transaction logs, turn on SIMPLE logging.

Many other enterprise servers, e.g. Microsoft Exchange, maintain the required logs since the last full backup by default. If your data disk fails but the log disk is preserved, you can back up the log, then restore the last full backup to a replacement disk, then restore the log with recovery to roll forward to the point where the disk failure occurred.

Mind you, rebooting should not cure the out-of-log-space problem!

memorex

I've never run into a problem like this in SQL Server, oracle's a different animal in this respect I think. From what I understand, the DBA's configured the oracle server running on NT (in this case) to keep a separate log from the rollback segments, so I don't think this should have been an issue. In addition, at any random point, the RB segments would have different amounts of usage from the day before (let's say)...

Another reason I'm glad I'm not an Orcl dba...

badger

@memorex said:

Another that stood out as the most bizarre installation issue I've come across:

You wanna install the 8.whatever client onto a Pentium 4 machine? Nope, we're going to have the installer crash.

But at least there was a workaround- nuke file X and then it'll install with an error, but work.

Well... that's a Java 'feature' and not an Oracle one... death to P4 and symjcit.dll!

Lorne Kates

At least it isn't Discourse.

pydsigner

@Lorne-Kates said in Like a British sports-car:

At least it isn't Discourse.

At least the thread wasn't 15 years old.

dkf

@Lorne-Kates said in Like a British sports-car:

At least it isn't Discourse.

Just imagine if Oracle was ported to run on top of Discourse on top of Ruby on Rails…

After all, if it can run a bug tracker, it can run a major corporate database!

pydsigner

@dkf said in Like a British sports-car:

@Lorne-Kates said in Like a British sports-car:

At least it isn't Discourse.

Just imagine if Oracle was ported to run on top of Discourse on top of Ruby on Rails…

After all, if it can run a bug tracker, it can run a major corporate database!

Needs more MS Bob.

But, that's basically DynamoDB, so you might be on to something! oracle.discourse.org/oracle/v1/insert/my/tTable9/datums