I am still a lowly CS student (hides from the barrage of cabbage and assorted spoiled fruits), and I have dared venture into the rabbit hole of Oracle.
So far, there has been ups and downs. Well.. mostly downs, but when I finally get an 'up' that just makes it feel so much better. Solving a particularly troublesome problem is by far much better than solving a trivial problem.
First, I tried the XE, but it lacked the features needed for our data warehouse. Then, I went with the Enterprise. Installing isn't bad - uninstalling is a different issue, but nothing too bad (renaming/moving a few files and deleteing them after a boot).
So far, I've managed to get the data warehouse running, with a few spatial dimensions. Sure there are a few things that are different from other databases. One thing that didn't dawn on me immediately was the permission management - that each user has it's own namespace etc. But given an instruction of a few sentences, it all makes sense.
Writing the actual spatial queries is a bit of a mess, I admit, and actually requires *shudder* reading documentation.
I do however fail to see many people grievances - the biggest problem
with Oracle IMHO is that it is mindnumbingly complex. But I think it is
hard to be anything else with the sheer amount of built-in features.
When reading some of the WTFs on this site, I think it is
actually quite a feat to build a DBMS with such a large feature set and
still have it work without swallowing your soul. And the cross-platform portability is impressive to say the least.
Now, installing Enterprise on my old laptop with 512MB RAM was a bit optimistic, and I still wonder what it uses >600MB of RAM for when no data is in any table in the system, but then again - I doubt it was ever intended to be used in the way I am using it atm.
So, what are peoples' problems with oracle?
- Aside from having a type called VARCHAR2, of course..