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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…
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 are fine, but the answer should never be that error messages tell you information about something you don't have permission to know about.
This is missing my favorite oracle quirk: Empty strings are equivalent to null. Trying to insert an empty string into a NOT NULL column will fail, which took me a while to understand the first time I saw it happen.
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…
Oracle it not that bad anyway, it's just stupidly expensive. I'd choose Postgres any day, but I worked with Oracle a lot and it never was a main culprit in my work. It has its issues, sure, but they're solvable.
Probably a security issue. If you tell a user “table T exists, but you don’t have rights to write to it because you can’t increase sequence S”, you’re leaking the information that a sequence with that name exists.
It’s the same reason a good login system will say “invalid username or password” instead of “invalid password” and its recovery screen “if that’s a valid user name, a mail has been sent to the address associated with it”.
Probably a security issue. If you tell a user”“table T exists, but you don’t have rights to write to it because you can’t increase sequence S”, you’re leaking the information that a sequence with that name exists.
It’s the same reason a good login system will say “invalid username or password” instead of “invalid password” and its recovery screen “if that’s a valid user name, a mail has been sent to the address associated with it”.
Yes Virginia, Oracle is the Devil.
This is missing my favorite oracle quirk: Empty strings are equivalent to null. Trying to insert an empty string into a NOT NULL column will fail, which took me a while to understand the first time I saw it happen.
So how do you insert an empty string into a NOT NULL column? Please don't tell me that it's not possible.
....
sorry
not possible (can't store empty string in a NULL col either)
for reals
I have worked with the Oracle database for six years and haven't had any major issues with error messages, in fact I'd say Oracle did a really great job building an amazing database.