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Problems with Oracle SQL

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Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#71

Post by throwaway675309 »

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…

Honestly I wouldn't mind the MSDN documentation so much or the Microsoft forums if it didn't feel like it was constantly doing this super tedious redirection hot potato because of their SSO Microsoft live account bull crap.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#72

Post by cygned »

tartoran wrote: post #67

Beside the regular complaints or praises I find oracle extremely ugly, unaesthetic and inconsistent. I understand it is old and has backwards compatibility but why would anyone choose oracle over a newer modern RBDMS such as PostgreSQL or MSSQL for a new project? Besides, Oracle is very expensive and very hard to get rid of. It is also a bit of an issue that they don't have a default IDE, I worked with Rapid SQL whic…

> MSSQL

T-SQL is just so a weirdly ugly language and the feature set of SQL Server is super weird.

If we can, we go with Postgres or MySQL.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#73

Post by puppet-master »

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.

The actual MSDN docs sections are uniformly reasonable in my experience, but some galaxy brains decided to nest at least 2 (if not 3?) user support forums (think "my printer is broken") under the microsoft.com domain. Searching their docs usually requires a bunch of excludes

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#74

Post by zaat »

cyberbanjo wrote: post #66
zaat wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience both Oracle and Microsoft documentation is usually good to excellent,I actually want google to search specifically on ms docs site most of the time. I do find AWS docs to be lengthy and incomprehensible. StackOverflow is mostly useful to quickly (and often dirtly) solve issues that are burning now, without getting deeper understanding of the subject. This isn't universally true, some answers are exce…

Somewhat unrelated, the case where I want to "Google search some specific site" is well suited to duckduckgo bangs, if there is a bang for that site. !msdn will search MS's developer network

Just like site:msdn.microsoft.com, just more convenient and with worse results

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#75

Post by msluyter »

thornygreb wrote: post #56
kunagi7 wrote: post #4

Well, I used to work with Oracle Databases and that "old man" (Donald Burleson) website has saved me quite a few times. I even remember the "Learn Oracle at the Sea" advertisement. But that's the state of affairs and I try to avoid them as much as I can. Amazon seems to think similar [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4

My goto was Tom Kyte ( https://asktom.oracle.com ) for learning the 'why'. Burleson is an interesting character, but not always correct either.

Tom Kyte books were great and beyond Oracle, I learned a lot about databases generally from them.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#76

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

> 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 predict how your program will run.... And my favorite, absolutely fragile, any wrong code you run there can take everything out of the air.

And yeah, stupidly expensive and comes with the Oracle legal team.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#77

Post by garenp »

metadata wrote: post #45
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.

Does it replicate the same kind of "evil" bugs as in the article, or does it provide an improvement?

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#78

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

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 products to the edge of their limits, and the product group will edit the product specs in near real-time.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#79

Post by winrid »

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.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#80

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

> Empty strings are equivalent to null.

No, they are not. Empty strings are completely different from null, and if you go returning them or testing for equality, everything will break by random some single-digit percent of the time. The same for concatenating, taking the length or iterating.

I imagine there's some deterministic procedure to decide what leads to an empty string and what leads to null. The one thing I know is that if you insert it on a table, you will always get null.

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