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
Malbolge: the enterprise edition
Problems with Oracle SQL
161–170 of 277 posts
Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, I’ve tried a handful of Microsoft products and MSFT’s docs are ok for tutorials, but I’ve often found it hard to find useful reference documentation: e.g. the tutorial bits of Appcenter’s Codepush and UI Testing documentation are ok, but the reference documentation for both is ambiguous and/or incomplete.
With Microsoft, generally the documentation around the edges isn't great. The edges being the "Microsoft condoned solutions and generally anything coming from the Office/Enterprise side. On the Enterprise side they often have fantastic documentation but they have an amazing talent for making it unfindable.
It's like they hire an army of noob-level interns who churn out "getting started" articles, with the end result being that you have to dig 5 pages deep into Google result to get meaningful documentation (4 of those pages are of people asking questions on Microsoft Connect or the-site-that-shall-not-be-named or something).
Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#163My "favorite" Oracle experience (not):
> select count(*) from mytbl;
ORA-12986: columns in partially dropped state. Submit ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMNS CONTINUE
Well, OK then...
> ALTER TABLE mytbl DROP COLUMNS CONTINUE;
SQL Error: ORA-00604: error occurred at recursive SQL level 1 ORA-01654: unable to extend index SYS.I_OBJ4 by 128 in tablespace SYSTEM
The table was completely unusable, we needed to restore the DB from backup.
Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don’t work with Microsoft stuff as much anymore, but my big beefs with Microsoft product documentation are: - It is was often unclear what version of the “thing” was in scope. An article from product version X will reference X-1 documention. - Microsoft will gaslight you. If you interact with them on a significant issue, you need to snapshot their product docs. I’ve worked with Premier on issues when pushing produc…
Microsoft is a complex and big entity. While most of it is doing a bad job whatever it is, some parts are quite good. In particular now that the C# stack is fully open, it's very easy to report a bug (on GitHub) and developers are reactive from my experience (submitted a bug impacting the dotnet SDK).
Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#165Oracle SQL and PL/SQL is the better side of Oracle. Having to install and maintain Oracle software is the real hell. You sometimes need a patch for the installer (I kid you not, the OAM 12.2.1.4 installer needs a patch to work on Oracle Linux). The syntax for Advanced Rules in OAM is not completely described in the manual, the examples are wrong, and you have to disable the parser in version 12.2.1.4 because it is do…
We had an extra optional curriculum on university, and to pass you had to successfully install Oracle.
Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Back in the day MS SQL was Windows-only and Postgres was not mature, so the choice was Oracle or DB2. And Oracle was more popular, because it used more progressive model (versions vs DB2 locks). Plenty of people who don't closely follow recent trends associate database with Oracle, so when they have a word, they'll choose it. Oracle it not that bad anyway, it's just stupidly expensive. I'd choose Postgres any day, bu…
> so the choice was Oracle or DB2 Sybase, Ingres
Our Vendor offered Sybase in the mid 200x's as a choice for our college middleware, but they used 'case-insensitive' sort, which the linux version of Sybase did not work with.
Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#167It 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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Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#168Well, I used to work with Oracle Databases and that "old man" (Donald Burleson) website has saved me quite a few times. I even remember the "Learn Oracle at the Sea" advertisement. But that's the state of affairs and I try to avoid them as much as I can. Amazon seems to think similar [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4
My goto was Tom Kyte ( https://asktom.oracle.com ) for learning the 'why'. Burleson is an interesting character, but not always correct either.
Last I've heard of Tom Kyte: https://archive.is/20150928144011/http://www.oracle.com/tech...
His answers were sometimes prime examples of what is today known as seriously unwelcoming. But I remember I un-learned the "best practices" meme reading one of his answers. In fact it was just one sentence, some concise version of "if the 'best' setting existed, nobody would bother to make it a configurable option". But it clicked.
Burleson's more advanced answers were of limited usefulness, because they have never mentioned the exact oracle version. They often have been only valid for antiques like Oracle 7.
Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#169There 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
OMG, comment right after would explain why we have a chip shortage....
"Sounds like ASML, except that Oracle has automated tests.
(ASML makes machines that make chips. They got something like 90% of the market. Intel, Samsung, TSMC etc are their customers)
ASML has 1 machine available for testing, maybe 2. These are machines that are about to be shipped, but not totally done being assembled yet, but done enough to run software tests on. This is where changes to their 20 million lines of C code can be tested on. Maybe tonight, you get 15 minutes for your team's work. Then again tomorrow, if you're lucky. Oh but not before the build is done, which takes 8 hours.
Otherwise pretty much the same story as Oracle.
Ah no wait. At ASML, when you want to fix a bug, you first describe the bugfix in a Word document. This goes to various risk assessment managers. They assess whether fixing the bug might generate a regression elsewhere. There's no tests, remember, so they do educated guesses whether the bugfix is too risky or not. If they think not, then you get a go to manually apply the fix in 6+ product families. Without automated tests.
(this is a market leader through sheer technological competence, not through good salespeople like oracle. nobody in the world can make machines that can do what ASML's machines can do. they're also among the hottest tech companies on the dutch stock market. and their software engineering situation is a 1980's horror story times 10. it's quite depressing, really)"
Re: Problems with Oracle SQL
#170I'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…
Oracle is a decent product with all the features that you could want if you are an Enterprise and in addition they have the support for all that. Postgres has most if not all of them at this point, but if you want support you have to pick from one of many vendors.
Having used many RDBMS, one thing I very much liked about Oracle was the bitmap index. Very very useful for some performance issues that a b-tree cannot solve.