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Problems with Oracle SQL

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Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#131

Post by irrational »

munk-a wrote: post #8

I've worked with databases for a while now and I've never advocated for moving to Oracle (I have advocated for postgres though). The long term organizational costs is a big factor - but an almost equally large factor is the fact that 1. I have never actually used their dialect and have heard absolutely terrible things about it 2. There is no non-enterprise DBMS available that uses something close to their dialect so…

The problem is the Oracle dialect was created BEFORE the SQL standard was written. For backwards compatibility they never changed it after the SQL standard was written. Personally, I think they should have had a flag so you could choose whether to use standard SQL or Oracle SQL.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#132

Post by pas »

tartoran wrote: post #67

Beside the regular complaints or praises I find oracle extremely ugly, unaesthetic and inconsistent. I understand it is old and has backwards compatibility but why would anyone choose oracle over a newer modern RBDMS such as PostgreSQL or MSSQL for a new project? Besides, Oracle is very expensive and very hard to get rid of. It is also a bit of an issue that they don't have a default IDE, I worked with Rapid SQL whic…

There's Oracle SQL Developer :D

but as others mentioned, it's sold to executives, not to technical personnel.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#133

Post by tracker1 »

cygned wrote: post #72
tartoran wrote: post #67

Beside the regular complaints or praises I find oracle extremely ugly, unaesthetic and inconsistent. I understand it is old and has backwards compatibility but why would anyone choose oracle over a newer modern RBDMS such as PostgreSQL or MSSQL for a new project? Besides, Oracle is very expensive and very hard to get rid of. It is also a bit of an issue that they don't have a default IDE, I worked with Rapid SQL whic…

> MSSQL T-SQL is just so a weirdly ugly language and the feature set of SQL Server is super weird. If we can, we go with Postgres or MySQL.

There are definitely aspects of MSSQL I don't like... for the most part I don't mind it. I will say, if you're willing to pay the cost, getting advanced features setup and running in MSSQL is easier than any other RDBMS I've ever tried.

That said, still inclined to use PostgreSQL. I do not like MySQL at all, and every single time I've used it, I feel cringes of absolute pain... starting with "utf8" isn't UTF8, "utf8mb4" is. Or that indexing a binary field isn't case-insensitive (ie, binary) by default.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#134

Post by munk-a »

namdnay wrote: post #97
munk-a wrote: post #8

I've worked with databases for a while now and I've never advocated for moving to Oracle (I have advocated for postgres though). The long term organizational costs is a big factor - but an almost equally large factor is the fact that 1. I have never actually used their dialect and have heard absolutely terrible things about it 2. There is no non-enterprise DBMS available that uses something close to their dialect so…

> but the private on Oracle was massive in the private sector 10 years ago, and it probably still is once you dig past the surface layer of nosql Don’t forget that for a long term it was either Oracle or DB2

I haven't ever worked at a giganto company myself - even though I've worked with largeish amounts of data... from multi-teribyte pyradmically stored JPEG2000s to 50GB tables of raw rows parsed from ridiculously long documents. I suspect some big places are indeed using Oracle - but notably large companies are still using MySQL or Postgres to great effect (i.e. Facebook).

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#135

Post by tracker1 »

smartmic wrote: post #95

A completely prejudiced and highly reduced view on SQL implementations, but one that could reflect the general mood: in the camp of the good: PostgreSQL, SQLite; in that of the bad: Oracle SQL, MSSQL. Somewhere in between with a tendency to good: MariaDB

I'm not sure I'd include SQLite as particularly good... Same goes for mySQL/MariaDB, too many oddities.

I do like PostgreSQL. MSSQL neutral to positive (nice to administer/setup).

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#136

Post by irrational »

JaggerFoo wrote: post #58

Oracle SQL is not the devil. I can code up SQL easily and find errors. I use sqldeveloper and granted It's not as helpful as say coding Dart on Android Studio IDE in pinpointing where a problem is and making suggestions. But I've been able maintain single sql statements 800 lines long, perform knapsack in a single sql statement, and develop complex packages in Oracle. If you really want to see super complexity, downl…

You really should try Postgres. I was a professional Oracle developer for 15 years, then we had to move to Postgres since we simply couldn't afford the Oracle licensing fees anymore. It took 2 years to move our database over - mainly because we had to rewrite thousands of queries from Oracle sql syntax into standard-compliant sql syntax. Anyway, I truly expected Postgres to by worse than Oracle. I was wrong. The performance has been equal to or greater than Oracle. The documentation in Postgres is so good it almost makes me weep. I had no idea the Oracle documentation was so bad until I had something to compare it with. Installing and managing Postgres is so much easier. Backups, replication, etc. are far far easier and less error prone than Oracle. I've literally not found a single thing to complain about in Postgres. Now I wish we had moved years earlier.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#137

Post by omnicognate »

pas wrote: post #115
hangonhn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSDN and the whole ecosystem around it is a gem. MSFT isn't great at some (or even many) things but I've always felt MSFT really put a lot of effort into developer experience. I don't miss much about moving away from the MSFT orbit except for MSDN and their development tooling. I kind of got some of it back with Visual Studio Code but I still really miss the Visual Studio level of experience.

Well, PowerShell docs are next to useless. Maybe the other parts are better. But I think this mythos of great docs for proprietary MS stuff is just that, a myth.

They're not as good as they were. The win32 docs are a a thing of beauty. I used to actively enjoy writing win32 code, in stark contrast to my experiences with Core Audio which is a similar sort of C API but documented by Apple, which is to say not at all. It is hell on earth.

Powershell, though. I don't know how you could even document powershell. It's insane.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#138

Post by tux3 »

simonw wrote: post #118

There was a comment on here a few years ago from a developer with experience working on the Oracle database codebase which put me off it for life: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

Oh no. What fresh biblical hell is this codebase.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#139

Post by MrStonedOne »

myohmy wrote: post #69
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you insert an empty string into a NOT NULL column? Please don't tell me that it's not possible.

Honestly that's bad db design anyways. If empty string is a valid value then you don't want NOT NULL anyways. This is a table structure constraint, not a variable declaration. NOT EMPTY would have been a better syntax imo but that's a whole can of worms.

Empty string means "we know its blank" null means "we don't know".

When it comes to datatyping, (the whole point of data types in a db), null is its own datatype, so forcing the allowance of nulls to get blank strings is kinda stupid and only causes software/application level bugs.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#140

Post by ntoshev »

uberman wrote: post #22

From a security perspective, keep in mind the errors like "access denied" or "password invalid" are typically bad not good when compared to more generic "table does not exist" or "failed logon attempt". These errors tell you something positive about the existence of something you don't have the rights to know about and that is a defect in my opinion. I not saying good error messages are not valuable or that Oracle's…

Came here to find the thread discussing this. You stated what I'd think is the conventional wisdom and I expected this to be the top thread.

However, this thinking comes at the cost of UX (or Developer eXperience). Much more mundane instance of the same thinking is hiding elements of the UI you are not allowed to use. This often gets me thinking - is there a way to do this that I'm not allowed to see, or is it just that I can't find the function in the UI?

A solution for the DX issue is logging the real error somewhere only accessible for an admin. Has this been implemeted anywhere in the wild? For UIs, just be honest and show the menu items disabled.

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