Live data from Hacker News

Problems with Oracle SQL

codingtofreedom.com

251–260 of 277 posts

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#251
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Get-Help cmd ? But you can even leave out the arguments and it will query for the mandatory ones.

Also just FYI, it can fuzzy match on arguments, so you can specify only the first letter, or substring of the whole name. I think from this aspect, it is far superior to the UNIX tools.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#252
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I learned a lot of different programming languages. But I’ve never seen something as cryptic as power shell. 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.

Bash is the worst abomination that has ever existed on the world. If a bash script has more lines than 2 (that is including the #! one), it sucks.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#253

Earlier 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…

> Oracle it not that bad anyway, it's just stupidly expensive. Full of bugs, some that destroy speed, some that destroy data, some that just make a feature that you need unusable. More heavyweight than lead (although it gets fast after you throw enough hardware). Lacking any capable or usable management interface (but then, that excludes everyone except for postgres and mysql). Impossible to program. Impossible to pr…

Any source on the bugs?

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#254
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

Not discrediting, but can someone else working there confirm the things written here?

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#255
post #184
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?! How do they disallow people from benchmarking it? Do they just forbid people from benchmarking in legal terms? That sounds so fishy.

Seems it's in the license agreement. What's unusual is that actually matters here. If someone tried to prevent benchmarking Postgresql by licensing terms, someone else would promptly ignore them and do it anyways, since Postgresql is free to download. Oracle licenses are very expensive, so anybody who has access to it also has money and a lot to lose by flouting license terms.

It is “free” to use as a developer, just not in production.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#256

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.

> 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, di…

> defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD)

Would be interested in the logic here, given that it runs counter to what I thought was extremely obvious advice by now.

Defrag generates writes to rearrange blocks in the _virtual_ view of storage visible to the OS, but even after defragmentation, the _physical_ placement is totally outside the control of anything except the firmware. If after defragmentation a file's blocks are arranged (0, 1, 2, 3) in the OS-visible view, in flash are still very likely to to be arranged (412, 77, 1, 12341, 5) etc. All you can do is let it know that some range of sectors is not used, which is what TRIM enables, and that does not require defragmentation upfront.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#257
post #160
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let me make sure I understand the problem you're having trouble getting answers from answers.microsoft.com, is that correct? Please open the site answers.microsoft.com in Microsoft Edge web browser and once the page loads, look for answers there. This should solve the issue. Can you also please run the windows memory diagnostic tool and paste in the output in a reply to this message? Once you have done that, please o…

Please run "sfc /scannow" and dism /online /restore-health" to verify system integrity.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, di…

> defrag.exe simply would not run no matter what (I needed it to TRIM the SSD) Would be interested in the logic here, given that it runs counter to what I thought was extremely obvious advice by now. Defrag generates writes to rearrange blocks in the _virtual_ view of storage visible to the OS, but even after defragmentation, the _physical_ placement is totally outside the control of anything except the firmware. If…

> All you can do is let it know that some range of sectors is not used, which is what TRIM enables, and that does not require defragmentation upfront.

This is exactly what defrag.exe does on an SSD today. Since Windows 10 (or 8?), instead of doing a "real" defrag, defrag.exe also has an option to issue TRIM commands to unused blocks on an SSD. In other words, it works like fstrim(1). The time has changed and you must have missed the update. I suggest keeping your knowledge up-to-date before delivering a lecture on disk defragmentation on a forum where everyone should've known better.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrati...

> /d Perform traditional defrag (this is the default).

> /l Perform retrim on the specified volumes.

> /o Perform the proper optimization for each media type.

Since I migrated the hard disk using a block-level copy via "dd", it's a good idea to manually TRIM the disk afterwards to inform the controller about the unused blocks in the new filesystem for proper wear leveling (to the controller, the block-level copy looks like a single large file).

And before another one gives me another lecture: No, I did not corrupt the filesystem because I made the mistake of copying the disk while Windows was still in Fast Startup mode. It was probably ntfsresize(8), to be fair, the corruption was extremely minor.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#259

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?

In addition to Oracle owned middleware, it's common to end up running Oracle because your vendor supports only it.

Sometimes with somewhat sensible reasons, like Oracle combining clustering and in-memory encryption, but it still means you don't get to choose...

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#260
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…

When I started developing for Apple platform(Objective C) I wondered why there are no examples in the documentation, I used to think may be all other Apple platform developers are just smarter than me and the SO answers almost always referred to a WWDC video.

Thanks to you now I feel vindicated that even (Sr.?) Apple internal developer seems to feels that Apple Documentation should have examples although it's likely you were developing some obscure OS feature.

TBH I don't develop for the platform anymore, So I'm glad I don't have to put up with it anymore. I assume Swift has made development easier.

Post reply on HN