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Problems with Oracle SQL

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Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#41

Post by mypastself »

kunagi7 wrote: post #20
qsort wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be really fair, have you ever seen SQL error messages that don't suck? I do agree that Oracle's are the worst by far though.

On Oracle most of the error messages are bad, not precise enough or plainly wrong. Basic things like a wrong error line (failure is on line 3, displays 5 or 6), messages that aren't related to the real issue. You're pretty much on your own. Also, I had to switch to DBeaver since Oracle SQL Developer made things worse with random crashes and freezes. Back when I used it, an easy way to freeze the editor was connecting…

To be fair, I had to switch to DBeaver for Postgres as well, as pgAdmin’s usability has been steadily decreasing since the first release of version 4. The lack of quality GUI is essentially my only problem with Postgres, though.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#42

Post by hyperpape »

I share the author's opinion, though I haven't used other DBs in anger much, so I don't know if they're better. When I think about why it works this way, I'm sure product decisions and backwards compatibility are issues, but I also remember an amazing comment on writing code for Oracle:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#43

Post by tmd83 »

beamatronic wrote: post #37
tgv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIMEZONE. Never again.

Let me guess, did you get hit with more than one 3:00am?

Let's not forget that Oracle DB uses the system timezone as the datatype storage (not sure what other database do to be honest) so unless you were running your DB machine as UTC by default their timestamp storage would be ambiguous for DST shift and that's their default. Why wouldn't they store everything in UTC and use the system timezone for parse/formatting I have no clue.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#45

Post by metadata »

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…

Postgres has Oracle layer, available as a commercial variant by EnterpriseDB. I don't think MariaDB implementation can compete, but EDB Postgres is solid. Basically a native implementation of Oracle in Postgres.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#46

Post by kbsspl »

Just someone who wants Oracle to be something else without understanding it's nature.

Vehemently disagree with the 'access denied' error message. Why would you want some one who does not have access to a table to know it exists.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#47

Post by gmfawcett »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #23
jwitthuhn wrote: post #11

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.

Either make the column nullable, or apply local workarounds and folklore. E.g. I've seen "person" records with surname = '.' in certain databases, for people who don't have one.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#48

Post by ndm000 »

The biggest problems I've had with Oracle databases are getting CDC data out of it. There's conflicting technologies with their own tradeoffs - LogMiner vs. Flashback, neither of which cover all use cases well, licensing is ambiguous, and docs are conflated with information you don't need.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#49

Post by thornygreb »

Oracle has quirks, yes. Oracle the company is...yes. We all get it. Oracle RDBMS has been around for longer than most of us have been alive and has amazing backwards compatibility. It has features I wish PostgreSQL had and vice versa. Nothing is perfect.
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