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Problems with Oracle SQL

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Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#191

Post by abledon »

sschueller wrote: post #169
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

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 ru…

sheer dominance in their tech space using 0 tests, absolute CDD

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#192

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

zaat wrote: post #88
HideousKojima wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers.

“How is babby formed?"

[EDIT] Corrected quote

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#193

Post by segfaultbuserr »

HideousKojima wrote: post #70
torginus wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

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.

> outsourced foreign support rep telling the user to run sfc /scannow

Sysadmin story. Recently I had a really strange problem after a disk migration - defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD), it just quits without any messages, as if it's /bin/false. GUI had the same problem.

The first search result was a thread at answers.microsoft.com, they give the same canned "sfc /scannow, dism /restorehealth, chkdsk /f" response. But OP finally solved the problem on their own, the "Optimize Drives" service was somehow been stopped, restarting it solved the problem. I tried it, it didn't work. Having no options, I decided to give the seemingly useless solution a shot (why did I bother to try? This was after a disk migration, I felt filesystem corruption could be real). It finally worked after "chkdsk /f"...

I was genuinely impressed. It was the first time ever that it actually fixed a real problem for me. Presumably defrag.exe detected a filesystem anomaly and refused to run.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#194

Post by S_A_P »

torginus wrote: post #63
vjust wrote: post #14

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…

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.

As far as OEM notes go ms is probably among the best but it’s not saying a lot. I find that most MS notes rarely explain the how very well if at all. They usually just explain the what. Sometimes that is enough, but usually I want to see examples of how to use code to perform a task. For me at least seeing examples of real world use helps infinitely more than here is an object. Here are its public methods. Here are its public fields and properties.

Stack Overflow excels at showing implementation examples which, while the best way is not always highly rated, at least shows a way. When I was more junior I would sometimes take SO answers verbatim but I think now it at least gives me something to think about improving.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#195

Post by tialaramex »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #183
Zababa wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thing that helps with Rust, in my opinion, is that the language is statically typed and people mostly write functions. That makes it easy to glue the pieces together in my head. So even if the documentation isn't great, I can find a way to do what I want.

Also, people don't overuse polymorphism like they do in Java and C#.

There's still lots of polymorphism in Rust. Take for example the way reqwest handles HTTP headers. Reqwest cares that it's technically possible (albeit a bad idea) to write arbitrary bytes into an HTTP header name even though those bytes are ASCII case crushed. This being understood, and Rust's strings necessarily being UTF-8 and not arbitrary bytes, a header's name might not be a string in Rust (though of course the vast majority are) and so Reqwest carries around a whole marker type for things-that-might-be-plausible-header-names, knowing that all any non-bad-guys will care about is a few simple ASCII strings but needing to correctly handle much more.

The two obvious things work, if you say the name of a header, you get that header, and there are constants like HOST defined for the most common headers to avoid typos, but you can do crazy stuff, and importantly if a hostile peer sends you crazy stuff Reqwest promises to cope.

Maybe it's that Rust's polymorphism is more explicit through Traits.

If Pigeon, Duck and Emu are all Birds, and further more Animals in C++ it's unclear what exactly this Bird superclass does for me, still less Animal or when I, knowing I have a Pigeon here, should consult the documentation for Bird and/or Animal rather than or in addition to that for Pigeon.

Whereas not only does the Emu not implement Fly, I can feel comfortable guessing that the code implementing Fly generically or for my Pigeon is unlikely to be related to my problem that this Pigeon says "quack" and I should instead look closely at the AnimalSound trait, given away by the fact I had to explicitly name that trait to get the "quack" noise from the pigeon.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#196

Post by uberman »

lixtra wrote: post #35
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…

Unless "table does not exist" does take precisely the same time as “access denied” you still leak the same information by replacing the latter. For logged in users I would prefer logging with explicit error messages. Like that you can tell if someone is poking around or was hacked. And still get clear error messages.

Sure, if "table does not exist" actually means that, which it does not. It means you have no access to such a table if it exists or not

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#197

Post by initplus »

Spooky23 wrote: post #78
torginus wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

The thing I find most annoying about Microsoft documentation is that many old versions are still locked behind an msdn paywall.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#198

Post by initplus »

liversage wrote: post #125
torginus wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

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…

This just isn’t the case. Docs for many older releases are still stuck behind a paywall on msdn, or even available offline only.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#199

Post by worik »

So many comments here about MS and Oracle. Mēh! I have an intellectual affinity for the suffering. But it has been 20 years since I wrestled with the Beast from Seattle.

Most of those twenty years were spent doing my own things in Linux, Perl, and R. In glorious ivory tower isolation from the real world consequences of serving a master who's goal was to extract revenue...

Here I am for the last year serving Apple (the Beast from Cupertino?).

The problems are the same with documentation. Yesterday I found an example in some Apple documentation. It saved me half a day, and I almost dies from shock. I have never before seen an actual example...

Their main documentation is videos. Fucking videos. Videos of what looks like actors pretending to be developers, that go on for ages, have no transcripts....

And then the tools: At least the MS and Oracle tools work! (Do they?) In Apple you cannot believe what the debugger tells you about the state of your programme with out double checking in at least two other ways, because their tool chain is very buggy, and they will not fix it.

There is no money in fixing tools. We developers pay them SFA money, brighter colours on the App store, deeper dark arts in getting you to fork over $XX for shiny apps that is where their development resources are going.

SO... They are all the same: APple, MS, Oracle, Google.... We developers are their bitches, we will crawl over broken glass to get things done, so there is no need to spend any resources on us....

Come back RMS!! All is forgiven!!!

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#200

Post by p1necone »

habeebtc wrote: post #143
torginus wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

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.

Azure powershell docs are the worst. All you get told is the name of fields, no indication of what they mean, or the expected inputs/outputs.
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