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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#231
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fair question. Keeping in mind that we literally had nobody who'd ever used Oracle in their careers (or at least beyond fairly basic uses a decade ago)...we had a fairly simple set of tables, one of which had a CLOB attribute. Every single export option available in Oracle SQL Developer truncated the CLOB field whenever it felt like, and half of the exported formats were exported without escaping content in th…

Based on your reply, you had a bad consultant and you used the wrong tool to load the data. Dealing with CLOB/BLOB fields can be a hassle sometimes but that shouldn't kill a project. Both Datapump and SQL-loader could have both been options. This brings me to one of my pet peeves, programmers tend to trash databases because most of them don't understand how they internally work. If you ask most corporate developers t…

Even if this is true, it kind of misses the point. There's no reason such a simple task should require this much knowledge in the first place.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#232
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your reply, you had a bad consultant and you used the wrong tool to load the data. Dealing with CLOB/BLOB fields can be a hassle sometimes but that shouldn't kill a project. Both Datapump and SQL-loader could have both been options. This brings me to one of my pet peeves, programmers tend to trash databases because most of them don't understand how they internally work. If you ask most corporate developers t…

The real problem is that there's something like a dozen different ways to import/export data and all of them do something just a little bit different, even when their accessed via pretty much the same interface. Datapump didn't work because there was a minor version mismatch between two of the dBs, something like a single letter in the version. We weren't using any features at all that distinguished our use of one dB…

Sorry to break this to you but CLOBs and BLOBs are sort of a magical type field. They are a special kind of field that can hold up to something like a couple of gigs of characters or binary data in them. I'm not a PostgreSQL or MySQL admin but I would assume that you would have the same issues with those database pumping data in and out of CLOB/BLOB field type from database versions that don't match.

Based on what you were trying to do, maybe writing a simple program to read a record from schema A and insert it into schema B would have been easier and cost less.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#233
post #3

Is support the only reason people choose Oracle databases over something free like MySQL or Postgres?

MySQL and Postgres have multi-master replication. They do NOT have distributed transactions (with the distributed locking system etc). For some customers it is important. Others have delusions that they need it. Oracle has other products as well. I am generally aware of couple used widely. Their ESB is one of the heavy players, and some sausage stands always need the most advanced ones. The funny thing is that with O…

Just saying : if Oracle has proper distributed transactions, then it is lying. Welcome to CAP. Or it has times when it will shit the bed and wait. For reaaaaally long time.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#234
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your reply, you had a bad consultant and you used the wrong tool to load the data. Dealing with CLOB/BLOB fields can be a hassle sometimes but that shouldn't kill a project. Both Datapump and SQL-loader could have both been options. This brings me to one of my pet peeves, programmers tend to trash databases because most of them don't understand how they internally work. If you ask most corporate developers t…

The real problem is that there's something like a dozen different ways to import/export data and all of them do something just a little bit different, even when their accessed via pretty much the same interface. Datapump didn't work because there was a minor version mismatch between two of the dBs, something like a single letter in the version. We weren't using any features at all that distinguished our use of one dB…

I have a MYSQL and MSSQL background. I never understood everyone's fear of using CLOB/BLOB data types. Then I started working Oracle.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#235
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fair question. Keeping in mind that we literally had nobody who'd ever used Oracle in their careers (or at least beyond fairly basic uses a decade ago)...we had a fairly simple set of tables, one of which had a CLOB attribute. Every single export option available in Oracle SQL Developer truncated the CLOB field whenever it felt like, and half of the exported formats were exported without escaping content in th…

Based on your reply, you had a bad consultant and you used the wrong tool to load the data. Dealing with CLOB/BLOB fields can be a hassle sometimes but that shouldn't kill a project. Both Datapump and SQL-loader could have both been options. This brings me to one of my pet peeves, programmers tend to trash databases because most of them don't understand how they internally work. If you ask most corporate developers t…

> Based on your reply, you had a bad consultant and you used the wrong tool to load the data

My experience is that the tools and the "experts" leave a lot to be desired.

I wanted to move schema and data from the customer's server to my server so I could troubleshoot and issue the users were having.

The customer had 3 full time Oracle DBAs and I contracted a few high priced consultants to help with this job.

It took 6 days to move it.

Oracle isn't hated because people don't understand how databases work, it is hated because it is difficult to work with. Things may be different now (we were using 10g) but it feels like the most basic tasks take days of work.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#236
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a little known fact for you: OpenLDAP is a commercial software made by a company called symas. https://symas.com/ The open-source edition is only a facade with highly stripped features. If you want any decent replication, HA, performances or bugfix. You have to pay for their OpenLDAP gold edition, which last I checked was $100k for a site license.

Depends on your definition of highly stripped, decent replication, performance or bugfixes. If you don't pay Symas money then no, you won't get support, or bugfixes developed for you. However I doubt there is a large performance difference, it's already very efficient so it would be in the single percentage points. As for replication you can do almost anything with the open-source version by combining syncrepl/delta-…

[deleted]

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#237
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me in prod with Oracle. Lost a critical optimization in prod because my case of a table changed from upper to lower.

If you changed the case of a table name, this means you had to change whatever was generating the SQL since mixed or lower case requires table or column names to be surrounded by double quotes. So, you changed code and didn't test it. Yup, definitely Oracle's fault.

Having a poorly thought out query planner as the cornerstone of their product is a sign that the product is not that good.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#238
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me in prod with Oracle. Lost a critical optimization in prod because my case of a table changed from upper to lower.

If you changed the case of a table name, this means you had to change whatever was generating the SQL since mixed or lower case requires table or column names to be surrounded by double quotes. So, you changed code and didn't test it. Yup, definitely Oracle's fault.

Except that's not what I'm referring to. As with any cost based optimiser, it's only as good as the statistics it has to work with, and if you've finally carefully tuned your database with an appropriate histogram on a critical table, and found that after an upgrade they "tweaked" the CBO to fix a statistics calculation then you are right back to looking at explain plans to fix your performance issue.

Sometimes you just aren't going to pick up this sort of thing in testing as you'll only know about it under full production load. Their CBO is pretty powerful, but by and large it's often difficult to know why it makes certain decisions. And that's even when you use their full suite of profiling tools!

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#239
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you changed the case of a table name, this means you had to change whatever was generating the SQL since mixed or lower case requires table or column names to be surrounded by double quotes. So, you changed code and didn't test it. Yup, definitely Oracle's fault.

Having a poorly thought out query planner as the cornerstone of their product is a sign that the product is not that good.

In all fairness, I can't really blame Oracle on this one. That's a fairly well documented issue, because Oracle places the hash value of each query into the shared SQL pool, and if CURSOR_SHARING is set to exact and you've stopped the query from aging out then Oracle will see it as a different query.

That's not even really a CBO issue. But I hear your pain :-)

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#240
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that there's something like a dozen different ways to import/export data and all of them do something just a little bit different, even when their accessed via pretty much the same interface. Datapump didn't work because there was a minor version mismatch between two of the dBs, something like a single letter in the version. We weren't using any features at all that distinguished our use of one dB…

Sorry to break this to you but CLOBs and BLOBs are sort of a magical type field. They are a special kind of field that can hold up to something like a couple of gigs of characters or binary data in them. I'm not a PostgreSQL or MySQL admin but I would assume that you would have the same issues with those database pumping data in and out of CLOB/BLOB field type from database versions that don't match. Based on what yo…

> Based on what you were trying to do, maybe writing a simple program to read a record from schema A and insert it into schema B would have been easier and cost less.

Yup, that's basically the lesson learned. Oracle's tooling is terrible, it's just easier to write your own most of the time.

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