Hi,
nice to find an Oracle Hater Forum. Some years ago, I was in a company developing an application using Oracle Database and the Oracle Application Server for Oracle Forms, Reports, etc.
During my work I had some bad experiences with Oracle Products, something I will write down here now, just to give you an example how bad the Oracle Products were.
Oracle Designer
When beginning Development with Oracle we were lucky to model the data with an Oracle Product called Oracle Designer. With this you could create ER-Diagrams and transform the database into a database. Really cool feature. So we modelled our database with this tool. Unfortunately the Repository for this tool crashed one day. Ok, that was not nice, but fortunately they had a reverse engineering option included that could read the Oracle database and create the ERD from it. Good to have such an option. So we used the option to recover the Repository, waited 1 minute, 10 minutes, tried again and again, everytime it seemed to crash. One day, when we tried again (at the evening), we went home, let the Tool run during night. And next day, the tool was still running. It seemed, that the Number of Tables was too much, because reverse engineering of about 10 or 15 Tables worked at a glance, but very slow (about 5-10 minutes). I recently thought Oracle was designed for professionals creating complex Structures, but maybe I dreamt of it? After this experience we downloaded a trial of Power Designer that created the complete model (about 150 tables) in a few seconds and we were glad to find this tool. I've never seen a tool with worse Performance than Oracle Designer.
Oracle Database 9i
At the beginning we had all the databases running in Windows, but our customer decided to migrate their servers to some kind of *NIX-System, so we tested migration to *NIX-Platforms. Due to lack of a Solaris-Server, we downloaded the official Linux-Oracle 9i Distribution. In Release Notes Oracle wrote that an installation is only supported on Redhat Server, Suse Enterprise and United Linux. So we downloaded United Linux and tried to install Oracle. As expected the installation was not successfull even though we installed on an officially supported system. Checking the logs, we recognized that the installation missed an important linking step, that we had to do manually with the linker. After that we still had some minor problems (some errors displayed, but they could be ignored). I'm asking, why Oracle supports a platform, where no standard installation was possible without manual linking of data. Not very professional in my point of view.
Oracle Application Server
For our (Oracle Forms-)Application we had to install the Oracle 9iAS Application Server. The installation had to be done on the customers Server, so we went to the customer, having the official Oracle 9iAS-Installation CD. The Oracle Application Server provides a lot of Services, but for our Application we just needed 2 or 3 Services from the Server. So when we installed the Application Server, there was an option to disable Services. Nice Option we thought, so we unchecked all the unwanted Services, especially those, that were not needed (e.g. Oracle Portal Server). Everything was OK, but at 99% the Installation hung but still responding. After some minutes, we stopped the installation, had a look at the installation logs, removed the installation, cleaned the registry, and tried again, about 2 or 3 times. Again all these installations failed, hanging at 99%. Very pissed of this, we just installed again in the evening. We thought, that the installation would take a little bit longer and we were only a bit impatiently, so we let the installation run during the night. Guess - next morning the installation - was still at 99%. After removing all Data, cleaning the registry we installed again, but this time we checked all Services, especially the Oracle Portal Service. And this time, the installation went successfully. That was really the worst installation of my whole life. Damn, why Oracle provided the option to skip the installation of different steps, when the installation hangs, when you skip it?
Oracle Reports Server
For our customer we created an application where a lot of reports should be printed to present it to the Management. The Oracle Application Server provided a Report Engine to generate such Reports. Because the application should be used by roundabout 300 people, we decided to create a cluster of two 8-core Servers using the built-in load-balancer of Oracle Application Server. That worked, till we generated Reports. I don't exactly know the process, how reports were generated internally, but reading Oracle Report Server specification they pointed out, that the report Server is such a nice product, that it runs in a cluster at a glance. Believing in this, we generated reports using the Cluster-URL (that uses the Load-Balancer to use the least loaded Report Server to generate the Report). After generation the Report Server provided an internal ID of the Report that can be used to display the report via Browser. And the real fuck was, that despite of the fact, that the Report-Servers were clustered in the way Oracle described, every Report Server generated it's own (not unique) Report ID. What the hell? So when calling the URL for displaying the Report in the destination format (PDF, HML, whatever) with the ID the Report Server provided, you had a 50/50 chance getting the correct Report, depending if the Load Balancer transfers your request to the first or the second server. Very stupid. Sending an email to Oracle the only response was some kind of: Hm, so it does not work - that's a pitty. The disgrace is, that they advertised this feature in the specifications and this feature at the end was absolutely useless.
Oracle Forms 10 and DBMS_SQL
Some day, we migrated our Forms 9-Application to Oracle Forms 10.We used a lot of DBMS_SQL-Package because when we began writing our application it was the only way to do Dynamic SQL-Statements.
When we started the compiler, all Forms could not be compiled. Very strange behaviour we thought, so we analyzed the error. First time we checked Metalink if there is something that could help. We recognized a bug entry that describes the problem and that there is a patch for it. But the disgrace was, that this patch, that was really needed to compile Forms containing DBMS_SQL-Calls was not public. Every Oracle-Customer had to open a tar, to get the patch. What a fuck. Unfortunately our company was only a partner, so we could not open tars at all. Thanks Oracle.
Some Database Installations
I remember, that the Database Creation Wizard of Oracle 10g R2 Database threw some errors, when creating the database, but as I remember these errors, just could be ignored. That looked not very professional at all.
In conclusion, at the moment I'm glad, not to use Oracle Products at the moment, because my experience with Oracle products was not the best.
Sincerely yours,
Crypti