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Problems with Oracle SQL

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Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#211

Post by gvenzl »

ericbarrett wrote: post #17
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…

Oracle sells to executives, not technical staff. Training on Oracle tech is via certified classes, provided “free” by your employer as part of their licensing deal; not online discovery. Source: sold to and worked with Oracle Inc. for several years, got a front row seat at the sausage factory.

Besides training for Oracle University, Oracle has a couple of free learning and training resources out there on the web too.

https://livesql.oracle.com --> A SQL scratchpad that also includes scripts and tutorials.

Oracle Live Labs (https://apexapps.oracle.com/pls/apex/dbpm/r/livelabs/home) --> Granted, while it's easier googled as "Oracle Live Labs" than to remember that URL, it does, however, provide free Hands-On Labs for users.

https://oracle.github.io/learning-library/ --> The instructions for the Hands-On Labs above and more can be found in the learning-library

asktom.oracle.com --> I fully free Q&A portal where you can ask Oracle Database employees for help. Furthermore, it offers regular "Office Hours" live webinars and an entire course of learning Oracle Database: https://asktom.oracle.com/databases-for-developers.htm

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#212

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

sk5t wrote: post #208
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is somewhat similar in quality to yahoo answers. “How is babby formed?" [EDIT] Corrected quote

"How is babby formed" - for those not participating in the zeitgeist of 2006.

Thanks for the correction.

I actually missed the original.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#213

Post by gvenzl »

kubanczyk wrote: post #150
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh sorry, are you looking to insert 4001 characters in your varchar2? Buckle up kids, things are gonna get rough.

Or maybe 3999 chars, of which a couple are two-byte. More fun.

Oracle supports up to 32k VARCHARs since 12.1 released back in 2013.

It just needs to be enabled: https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/REFRN/GUID-D424D23B-093...

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#214

Post by zionic »

worik wrote: post #199

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 (th…

The best HN posts really do start around 5PM EST

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#215

Post by NicoJuicy »

tasogare wrote: post #164
Spooky23 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Even before that. A problem in EF, got fixed in 2 minor versions later.

This was during .net 4.5 fyi, ages ago by now.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#216

Post by aeyes »

SCLeo wrote: post #109
winrid wrote: post #79

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.

You can benchmark it, the license agreement only prohibits you from publishing the benchmark.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#217

Post by stdgy »

omnicognate wrote: post #137
pas wrote: post #115

Earlier 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.

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.

Powershell is so weird to me. It never does what I expect it to do but it’s also full of powerful features. When looked at as a programming/scripting language it feels totally insane and disjointed. I just jump into C# or Python instead of dealing with it, because it just doesn’t make any sense to me as an engineer. But whenever I’m looking up how to manipulate some obscure bit of Windows, a cut and paste powershell one liner always makes an appearance.

Does anyone know if there’s any sort of reflective documentation or anything in powershell? Like, is there a way to ask it what arguments exist for a command?

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#218

Post by chasil »

mormegil wrote: post #163

My "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…

Just curious - did you try an AS OF clause for flashback?

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#219

Post by chasil »

revscat wrote: post #117
laumars wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more than that. Oracle is sold off the back of its middleware applications. Which equally suck too…but at least they’re solving difficult problems that most other database vendors don’t both with.

Such as?

All the apps they bought.

Siebel, PeopleSoft, BEA Weblogic.

I was the DBA for a Siebel instance for ten years.

I would say J.D. Edwards, but that's AS400/DB2.

SAP is also a big driver, although they don't want to be (so much so that they bought Sybase).

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#220

Post by chasil »

vbezhenar wrote: post #24
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…

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…

Amazon sponsored a writeup at The Register on the difficulties of moving non-trvial databases off of Oracle.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/how_amazon_broke_free...

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