Official Membership Thread -- Just Reply Here!



  • I would like to be in...

    Has anyone tried writing an application for "Workflow" in Oracle Apps? GOD FORBID you need to actually install it to a client (requires you to insert manually points which draw a picture in the workflow into a database, buncha different tables, took weeks, and if you need to modify the workflow... YAY a whole new script... [we almost had to write a generator to compile oracle meta data into a insert script])

     

    Most of the time an error occures the following is gotten:

    "Error: Commit happened during workflow" (we needed to create temporary tables for w/e reason which is auto-commit) so we could never figure out what the error was. The only way is to turn on debugging which we had to print to a "debugging" table in our schema which was a whole nother annoyance to write... Basically when shit went wrong we had to step though client code to attempt to figure what error actually happened... YAY!



  • Yes. Just...yes.

     I wanna be number -1/2! Is that still available? 



  • @dlikhten said:

    "Error: Commit happened during workflow" (we needed to create temporary tables for w/e reason which is auto-commit) so we could never figure out what the error was.

    Well... I can think of no reason why temporary tables have to be created exactly in the middle of a script, instead of "in advance".

     

    The only way is to turn on debugging which we had to print to a "debugging" table in our schema which was a whole nother annoyance to write... Basically when shit went wrong we had to step though client code to attempt to figure what error actually happened... YAY!

     

    Looks like you are not aware of dbms_output, pragma autonomous transaction or the SQL trace facilities in Oracle. MayI propose you better learn your stuff before you work with a sophisticated tool like Oracle?



  • While Oracle based systems "pay the bills" (love/hate relationship??) I'm in, if for no other reason, the nefarious ORA-1405 error.  If you've never encountered the -1405 error, it's a wonderous thing - ever get a null value back from a stored procedure/function/SQL query?  In C, that's an ORA-1405 error.  Yes, an error.  Granted, NULL values can do magical things in C, but c'mon!



  • @DoctorFriday said:

    While Oracle based systems "pay the bills" (love/hate relationship??) I'm in, if for no other reason, the nefarious ORA-1405 error.  If you've never encountered the -1405 error, it's a wonderous thing - ever get a null value back from a stored procedure/function/SQL query?  In C, that's an ORA-1405 error.  Yes, an error.  Granted, NULL values can do magical things in C, but c'mon!

     

    Except when you use indicator variables to catch those null values.

    e.g.

    void stupid() {
      EXEC SQL BEGIN DECLARE SECTION;
      int dummy;
      short i1;
      EXEC  SQL END DECLARE SECTION;

      EXEC SQL select null into :dummy:i1 from dual;

      if (i1==-1)
       printf("yeah, it's really null\n");
    }

     

    That said, I aggree that this behaviour is annoying and unnecessary with varchar2 columns (resp. strings in C). 



  • Yes please count me in, woot and all that stuff. I had to do some work on Oracle some years ago, and yes I did hate it - you couldn't do 'update A set A.this = B.this from A,B where...' you had to do some horrible subquery with 'where exists' eeuugh. And what's all that stuff with dual, has that gone yet? And also I'm a Sybase fan(ex-consultant, so keep your tomatoes to yourselves), so fully willing to boost Sybase over Oracle given the chance, in the interest of keeping my speciality alive.



  • Ack, I thought I was already a member... Count me in.



  •  I want human cloning to be legal just so I can join this club twice.



  • I'm joining the club as well.

    Oh Oracle, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...

    1. The empty string is null. This feature rotted my brain to the point that I assumed it was true for other databases. In working with a SQL Server DB, documentation told me that when inserting rows to a certain table, a certain column should be blank. I made it null. The application failed because it was looking for the empty string, not null. Grrr, why can't everyone pick a standard?

    2. While attempting to come up with a query for a report, I needed to perform a full outer join between two tables. I run my query and get "SQL command not properly ended." I check the query umpteen times and wonder why it's flagging the outer join as the cause for the error. Can you guess? The query was against an Oracle 8i DB, which didn't have support for outer, inner, or any "join" phrasing other than the (+) style join. So how was I to do my full outer join?


      SELECT BLAH FROM A, B WHERE A.FOO = B.FOO (+) UNION SELECT BLAH FROM A, B WHERE A.FOO (+) = B.FOO


      So instead of having a nice, clean, query I have to violate the DRY principle for the sake of an older DB.

    3. Installing Oracle 11g on my new machine and seeing it refuse to support the aforementioned 8i DB. Sigh. 10g is as high as I can go.

    4. When attempting to install 10g, when I didn't pick the right flavor of installer, I got a friendly error message that was great fun to show to my coworkers:


      Abnormal Program Termination. An internal error has occured. Please provide the following files to Oracle Support: "Unknown" "Unknown" "Unknown"



  • I despise oracle.  



  • Well, Alex,

      I do not care about a low membership number.

      I do care about semantics. I propose to rename the club to "I-loathe-Oracle-Club".

    cklam



  • @cklam said:

    Well, Alex,

      I do not care about a low membership number.

      I do care about semantics. I propose to rename the club to "I-loathe-Oracle-Club".

    cklam

    What the fuck are you bitches babbling about?


  • @belgariontheking said:

    @cklam said:

    Well, Alex,

      I do not care about a low membership number.

      I do care about semantics. I propose to rename the club to "I-loathe-Oracle-Club".

    cklam

    What the fuck are you bitches babbling about?

    Hey, he's got 53 whole posts, I think that entitles him to rename some forums, don't you?  Show some respect for goodness' sake!



  •  Meh, I guess I'm in.



  • Hrm, I thought I joined, but I guess not.

     A few years ago, I helped on working to port a rather well known forum system to Oracle. The other programmer on the project had already gotten a working prototype of the software running on Oracle, but wanted some help running Q&A and someone to try and run the installation from the very beginning to make sure everything worked out before he sent the patches upstream. Now, I'm not a fulltime DBA, but I've got a few years experience with PostgreSQL, and MySQL, as well as some experience with a bunch of other database products (mostly interbase/firebird and MS SQL). I figured, it can't be that hard to setup a dev system, and help my friend test the new database driver.

     At the time, I had no experience with the beast, but the trouble began with the freaking installer (I think it was 9, but I don't remember for sure). It would just randomly crap out half-way for no clear reason. A rather frustation experience which was only solved after a lot of googling and trial and error. I think the result required me copying all the files from the CD to the harddrive and installing from there, but I'm not 100% sure.

     Ok, so I got through the install, the rest should be relatively easy to get Oracle bound to the loopback device, get PHP talking to it, and run through the installation. Nope, not at all. Getting Oracle to even properly initalize its own database was somewhat tricky, but closely following the documentation, I was able to get it all the work, and run smoothly; I even got to SQL*Plus to talk nicely to it via a socket interface (I think, its been awhile since I made this setup work).

    I don't remember how long it took, or how many obsecure configuration files I had to go through before I found I needed to run EXEC DBMS_XDB.SETLISTENERLOCALACCESS(FALSE) on the command prompt to make all work. Looking at the oracle documentation now, this is noted in the quick start guide, but it would have saved me a heap of time back then.

     I realize Oracle is a complex and powerful piece of software, but they make it difficult to even get started on it; its almost if you need to be a certified DBA just to play with it a little. I wasn't even doing any real development work; I was simply testing our product against a newly created database backend. It's like they tried hard to make the simple things impossible to figure out without constantly googling, or (trying to) make sense of the Oracle docs.



  •  Started with Oracle 5 running on DOS... Now working with 10g... I've known Oracle for half it's life, and although it is getting older, it's not getting better...



  • Count me in. Here's why.



  • @spajus said:

    Count me in. Here's why.

     

    I don't understand your reasons, sorry. But welcome to the IHOC, anyway.



  • (Added to my Sent mail folder just now) 

    to:  larry.ellison@oracle.com

    subject: i hate you

    Just wanted to give some constructive criticism.  I hate you, I hate your product, I hate Oracle DBAs.  Because you suck.
    Here are some details (about the product, only you know why you suck so much):



  •  Hello all.



  • I joined today just to say that I, too, hate Oracle.

     



  • Membership threads should always be at the top of the forum.  Bump!

    Not sure if I technically qualify, as I've never used Oracle directly.  However, I do administer a program which makes use of Oracle in production and QA, but MySQL in dev.  Getting a change which requires a database change migrated from dev to qa is a pain and a half.  A change that took 15 minutes to research (I'm not a DBA), 5 minutes to enter, and 25 minutes for MySQL to implement takes our Oracle team days or even weeks to do in QA.  I don't usually know what the actual issues are, as I only have access to the database-independent code.  However, I'm given the distinct impression it's not a manpower issue, as we had three Oracle DBAs on priority call for a while when the project was overdue on a particular deliverable the CIO wanted, and simple changes still took days to implement.

    Note that I'm talking about getting things implemented in QA, here, not production.  I fully understand and agree with production changes taking one to three weeks, just for notification purposes.  However, adding a column to a small table (only 100k rows, the MySQL version only took 150M including indexes after the change was made) took nearly a week, and I just don't understand why.  Of course, this issue was known about in advance, which is why we use MySQL in dev.



  • Ok.. I just have to say that although your example of adding a column is pretty simple.. just in general, the concept of using a totally different database system in development versus the one you deploy on is incredibly stupid.

    I mean, this is even worse than the problem we had where our Oracle DBA/developer insisted upon deploying dev database changes oin a manual and ad hoc basis rather than using automated update scripts (with SQL statements that we had tested).

    If the QA team is implementing a change in another database system, then you have actually two dev teams and two products (one mysql, one Oracle). Its incredibly retarded. Even having two different versions of the same database (Oracle 9i vs. 10g for example) is untenable.

    YOUR DEV AND TESTING ENVIRONMENTS MUST MATCH YOUR PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT AS EXACTLY AS POSSIBLE. Using a different database is ridiculous.

    Now, having said all of that I understand why your programmers might prefer mysql. Of course, if they had some kind of licensing or other issue they gave for using mysql in dev, it was invalid as Oracle Express is available for developers. And if there is some reason that supposedly Oracle is necessary for production, that is also invalid as mysql can almost certainly handle the performance requirements (there are few exceptions, give me the performance etc details of your database and I will verify that). If its transaction support or something then they should use the InnoDB engine.

    The fact that you have three Oracle DBAs is compounding the issue. Here's what you do.. save yourself a half a million or more dollars a year and SCRAP ORACLE AND FIRE ALL OF THE DBAS.

    I would say the situation you are in is insane and you should find another job. Your CIO should be fired because he should have recognized that a long time ago.



  • Sign me up! We use Oracle DB, Peoplesoft, Siebel Loyalty, Hyperion, Campaign Managemernt, Oracle Warehouse Builder, etc. etc. They all suck, but not nearly as much as their support and marketing teams.

    Now I'm not just a user, I'm a member too!



  • Sign me up. Oracle is the most obtuse POS I've ever had to deal with.



  • Member 180, reporting in!  (Ok, that was just the post count, didn't count the number of unique posters.)

    NVL, NVL2!?  WTF!?



  • ORA-01799 just put me over the edge.



  •  Sign me up :)



  • Ok, I feel obligated to "join" after having read several (dozens) of the IHOC threads... But I don't per-se belong, because the closest I've been is in college, I took a DB class, and the book included Oracle 10(g?) of some sort on like 4 cd's.  I took one look at that, and asked the prof if all our work had to be done on Oracle, as I'm a LAMP boy myself. Showed him my working stack one day after class in the first week, and asked if I could just LAMP to do my work.

    He was totally okay with that. At the end of the semester, I had several classmates who still hadn't managed to get the software to install. One guy went so far as to reformat his laptop (it was overdue anyways) and after Windows XP, drivers, and minimum updating, he still couldn't get the damned thing to install. Meanwhile, I had a fully working simple web based db app.  So... three months to install Oracle, and it still won't go? I don't know if that's TRWTF, but I'm willing to go out on a little faith here...



  •  Im joining. A database that breaks and the only way to get it back is to perform a strange ritual involving SQLPLUS is fuckin insane. And the database is not the worst of the products labeled ORACLE. The stuff they bought from Stellent is decent tho.



  • I'm in! How about our DBA who says she "doesn't do data" or "doesn't do SQL".. but is "very busy with my own work" all day. Uhh... if your work isn't "data" or "SQL", I'm guessing all that's left is babysitting the database?



  • @johnt519 said:

    I'm in! How about our DBA who says she "doesn't do data" or "doesn't do SQL".. but is "very busy with my own work" all day. Uhh... if your work isn't "data" or "SQL", I'm guessing all that's left is babysitting the database?

    If she's not doing data, she must be doing base.  I'm not entirely certain what that means; probably freebasing.


  • Count me in.

    "...You wanna be where you can see / Our troubles are all the same..."



  • Yeah, great idea!

    Some time  ago I naively thought that ORacle was a database for professionals developed by professionals, and I had great esteem for those people working with Oracle. Now, just a few days after having had to work with it, my high esteem was replaced by commiseration.

    By the way, since Oracle cannot be installed in a "correct" manner for Windows (because C:\Program Files has a blank in the path), I created a directory C:\Legacy and there it went. The same with the Oracle Client.



  • There was a time when I thought it was just another conscienceless big corp. But it does seem more and more likely that it is in fact a cooperation of wholehearted evil, earning money is a secondary priority, making the world a crappier place to live in is the real goal.



  • I don't care much about Oracle, but I hate their JDBC objects with an ever-renewing passion.  Today I learned that if you call a toString() on their unfortunately-named oracle.sql.INTERVALDS object, it will outright lie to you.  The string "0:0:0.100" doesn't mean zero hours, zero minutes, and a tenth of a second.   No, it means zero hours, zero minutes and 100 nanoseconds.  Whaaat the ffuuuuuuuu

    So sign me up.



  • I actually work at Oracle and I want to be a member!

    I hate them because it's slowly destroying a good thing. I hate them because they made me hate my job. It's sad because a good group is being slowly disbanded. A great product being destroyed, bit by bit, with its utter lack of understanding and arcane practices.

    I hate them because I'll have to leave. There's no future here but I'm very fond of the people I work with every day. I see their souls (and mine) being eaten away slowly.

    Only the worst remain at Oracle in the long run.

    I don't want to go, but I have to.



  • yup



  • @juancn said:

    I actually work at Oracle and I want to be a member!

    I hate them because it's slowly destroying a good thing. I hate them because they made me hate my job. It's sad because a good group is being slowly disbanded. A great product being destroyed, bit by bit, with its utter lack of understanding and arcane practices.

    I hate them because I'll have to leave. There's no future here but I'm very fond of the people I work with every day. I see their souls (and mine) being eaten away slowly.

    Only the worst remain at Oracle in the long run.

    I don't want to go, but I have to.

    Let me guess, former Sun developer?

    [edit] Btw, that is also the reason that I would like to join the IHOC. [/edit]



  • Stupid, perverse and generally uninformative error messages!

    								    </p>

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