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Problems with Oracle SQL

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Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#81
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…

So spoiled by Rust now when using one of these "documented" APIs.

* Rust's examples work, because the default behaviour of Rust's automated testing is to test your documented examples (as well as any unit tests you wrote), so, it's actually more effort to write examples that don't work. If you're too lazy for that, you're going to not write any examples, so then I at least know I'm in uncharted territory.

* The relevant Rust source code is linked. Mostly. Rust's source links don't chase macros, so it's conceivable your link tells you that foo(X) is just the result of the macro make_thing!(foo,X) and you need to chase how make_thing!() is defined which is annoying. But 99% of the time you discover immediately what's actually going on.

This week I would say about half of my time was spent fighting with the C# library for talking to the Microsoft Graph API. Both of which are, in theory, "documented" and yet I repeatedly ended up cribbing from Stack Overflow answers or, after beating my head against a wall, pasting URLs (which I already know will go stale in a year or two) and Microsoft's uselessly bland explanations for the obviously broken stuff as the excuse for why we can't do things you would obviously anticipate being possible.

Today I particularly liked: There are five documented ways to make an educationClass. Most of them simply don't work (unanswered Issues on github), and the error responses for these methods are undocumented and lead nowhere. But one of them does work. However the C# library drops the output of the API call for that method on the floor, presumably because coping with this case was hard, and so the best option (as a Stackoverflow post explains) is to reach inside the library, dredge out the HTTP request it's about to do, and perform that request yourself, then do all the heavy lifting they couldn't be bothered to do with the HTTP response to get what you actually wanted (including a polling loop because apparently nothing after the 1980s happened for Microsoft).

However, in the months since that Stackoverflow post was written, the C# library API has changed, enough that the example code wouldn't even build.

The change is undocumented (of course) and involves an enumeration (also undocumented) which was auto-generated for some reason. This feels like somebody was hoping it wouldn't matter if they changed it, and that somebody was wrong. But if they'd been forced to document it then maybe they'd have either decided it wasn't worth it (still works as before) or I'd have saved ten minutes guessing how the API now works.

But now it's the weekend and I'm going to write Rust.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#82
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.

Someone who has performance worth the money would not inhibit the benchmarking of it.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#85
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

Tom Kite is/was great, but his answers are the equivalent of "I'm glad you asked, pull up a chair and let me tell you a story about a white whale..."

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#86

There are 2 types of technologies: the ones that people complain about and the ones that nobody uses.

No. Some technologies are hostile to the people forced to use them.

That's pretty much what OC is saying, any technology good enough to be commonly used is going to suck and/or have sharp edges

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#87
post #36

In theory, Oracle is able to store timestamps down to the microsecond. In practice it rounds off to the nearest second if you try to touch it in any way, or even look at it slightly funny. So much so that the microseconds are practically unusable.

With which data type do you experience this?

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#89
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…

So spoiled by Rust now when using one of these "documented" APIs. * Rust's examples work, because the default behaviour of Rust's automated testing is to test your documented examples (as well as any unit tests you wrote), so, it's actually more effort to write examples that don't work. If you're too lazy for that, you're going to not write any examples, so then I at least know I'm in uncharted territory. * The relev…

A thing that helps with Rust, in my opinion, is that the language is statically typed and people mostly write functions. That makes it easy to glue the pieces together in my head. So even if the documentation isn't great, I can find a way to do what I want.

Re: Problems with Oracle SQL

#90
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.

MSDN and the whole ecosystem around it is a gem. MSFT isn't great at some (or even many) things but I've always felt MSFT really put a lot of effort into developer experience. I don't miss much about moving away from the MSFT orbit except for MSDN and their development tooling. I kind of got some of it back with Visual Studio Code but I still really miss the Visual Studio level of experience.
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