151–160 of 277 posts
The thing that kills me about Oracle is that since the license does not allow benchmarking, we (or at least I) don't know how it actually stacks up to the competition. Of course, that's the idea, but it would be cool to have that data.
What?! How do they disallow people from benchmarking it? Do they just forbid people from benchmarking in legal terms? That sounds so fishy.
[0] https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...
The thing that kills me about Oracle is that since the license does not allow benchmarking, we (or at least I) don't know how it actually stacks up to the competition. Of course, that's the idea, but it would be cool to have that data.
What?! How do they disallow people from benchmarking it? Do they just forbid people from benchmarking in legal terms? That sounds so fishy.
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#The_%22DeWitt_Cla...
It's plainly illegal, but nobody who has built their business on Oracle DB wants to piss off Oracle the company with a lawsuit, and it doesn't appear any legal activists want to either.
It seems to be the general rule of thumb that, when you want to google for an oracle error message, then exclusion of both oracle documentation site, and developer forums is your first criteria on the search bar. Same applies to Microsoft (large parts of MSDN), and now Amazon Web Services documentation (at least some parts of it). That's the reason StackOverflow works - it really solves programmer's problems, instead…
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I'm not sure why the hate against MSDN - at least for .NET, I found the documentation to be one of the best in the business -even a decade ago. I'd only put Go's docs ahead in terms of helpfulness. I cut my teeth writing .NET code, then switched to Java writing apps on Android - the step down in doc quality was quite significant.
Win32 and .Net docs are great! Azure and Powershell docs leave a lot to be desired. A lot of the time parameters are vaguely documented, return values completely undocumented. You have to inspect the object returned by a lot of things to get to understand what members and methods it has, and what they mean. Examples illustrating what formats it expects inputs in? Forget it.
In contrast, Win32 which has been around for over 25 years is mostly stable now.
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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.
Sometimes I write the same script as PS and as bash script. For PS I usually need 3x more characters than for bash.
There are some features though that are really useful. But most of the time you won’t know about them when you need them.
It seems to be the general rule of thumb that, when you want to google for an oracle error message, then exclusion of both oracle documentation site, and developer forums is your first criteria on the search bar. Same applies to Microsoft (large parts of MSDN), and now Amazon Web Services documentation (at least some parts of it). That's the reason StackOverflow works - it really solves programmer's problems, instead…
Their sqlplus command-line tool for linux program was written in 1982 it says, and it still doesn't allow for use of the up arrow to retrieve history, and is very quirky with how it handles editing of code. Their Oracle Forms product is very klunky, too. I'm happy I don't need to set up Web Logic servers, because that looks like a nightmare, too.
A little work on tooling would go a long way.
I am partial to using joins in where clauses instead of ansi sql join statements, so I guess there's that.
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I'm not sure why the hate against MSDN - at least for .NET, I found the documentation to be one of the best in the business -even a decade ago. I'd only put Go's docs ahead in terms of helpfulness. I cut my teeth writing .NET code, then switched to Java writing apps on Android - the step down in doc quality was quite significant.
It's weird to read all the complaints about how bad https://msdn.microsoft.com/ is. For quite some time all the documentation including what was known as MSDN is now on https://docs.microsoft.com/ . While I'm sure the complaints are valid (or was in the MSDN days) I believe Microsoft is putting a lot of effort behind these pages. You can provide feedback on pages that will result in a GitHub issue being created. You…
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First you accept that null and an empty string are the same thing. Then you insert a null.
But they are not. Empty string means "we know this is empty", Null means "We don't know". For example, I have a second name. Some people don't have second names. And some records we might not even know if such exists. Null means "unknown". Empty string cannot be equal to null.
We need that again, another new 0 concept to add to 0, to distinguish between "set-to-0" and "not-yet-set".
Maybe 2 new concepts, since null is also different from 0. 0 is a value, null is the absense of a value.
Not just as an idiom or implementation detail in a programming language, but as a general concept that may be used anywhere in life.
Without it, we have exactly these confusions and ambiguities and differences of opinion about how to do something or what something means or what something should mean.
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MSDN isn't terrible, but for answers.microsoft.com 90% of questions are some outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow and not looking into the issue any further. Which makes it a huge pain for sysadmin type stuff, their developer documentation is much better.
answers.microsoft.com accepted answers are mostly accepted by the poor foreign support rep after OP have left disappointed. It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. Microsoft should be ashamed this pile of useless bits is public.