Introduction

This page is just a rant, a way for me to vent my anger. Don’t expect it to be fully rational or for it to make perfect sense. It could, even, be my excuse for buying new hardware; I do like my gadgets.

In fact, this piece is going to be an anti-Linux rant. If you’ve seen the rest of my website this may surprise you. I have, after all, been using Linux since 1994 when I installed Slackware from a knee-high pile of 3.5 inch floppy-discs. I spent a year writing “The Penguin Says“, a collection of Linux application reviews, I have the Oracle 8i Installation HOWTO in the Linux Documentation Project. I’m no fly-by-night, recent Linux convert.

Introduction

The good: there’s a lot of information in here, everything from the creation of FORTRAN and COBOL to Java and the Internet. It’s all discussed in a friendly, easy manner and rarely gets technical enough to scare off people without a computer science degree. The bad: despite the amount of research the author clearly put in, there’s not a lot new in here. It’s nice having it all in one place but it does, kind of, make the whole book unnecessary. The ugly: they really could have done with some more proof-reading. There are many typos and clumsy sentences that could easily have been improved with some light editing.

# Introduction

It took me over a year to decide to buy a SliMP3 player. I am not normally that indecisive but I just couldn’t figure out why it cost so much. I mean, what does it do? It streams MP3 music across an Ethernet network and connects to the phono sockets on your hi-fi system. How hard can that be? There must be something cheaper or better than the Slim Devices machine! It took me all that time to research the subject and come to the conclusion that there wasn’t. I still think it’s a lot of money for what it does, but I also still think that it’s pretty much unique.

Introduction

“Practical C Programming” not only plans to teach you C, but also about style, debugging and the software life-cycle.

Introduction

Those two point, on their own, were enough to clinch the purchase just over eighteen months ago.

Content

The book is, to say the least, comprehensive. When I first started to use PL/SQL I would never have guessed that there was enough there to write a thousand page book, but there is.

Working eight hours a day with a product, you notice not only bugs, but other strange bits and pieces too. This is the page for them.

• One mis-spelling of ‘Oracle’ looks remarkably like ‘Roach.’ Surely not just a coincidence.
• Mis-typing ‘ORACLE_SID’ often looks like ‘ORACLE_SOD’ which is only one word short of what you usually think when you’ve done this.

Fair’s fair, any application the size and complexity of Oracle Applications will have some bugs. But applications seems to do far better than most.

This section refers to the server size of Applications Comedy Errors. There’s another page for the client side.

• To install a new application module, it seems that you have to add the original version you have plus all patches. Not just for your new module, but for all of them. (People that implement Application’s are not expected to make mistakes.)
• The recommended sizes for your database extents are useful. However, if you follow the advice, some parts of the system won’t actually install.
• Oracle helpfully supply a program that goes through the thousands of files that it installs and checks that they’re the right ones. We’ve found at least a dozen files that it claims shouldn’t be there but in fact should be.
• After applying a patch, the shell script that starts the Concurrent Managers just vanished.
• One of the bugs that we found was because Oracle had ‘forgotten’ to port a number of forms from one environment to the one we were using. The word ‘forgotten,’ despite being inverted commas, is the actual word used by Oracle support.

Oracle Data Browser

Oracle Data Browser, part of the Discover 2000 suite, is one of the least amusing applications that Oracle supply. Not because it’s bad, but because it almost works…

• Windows 95 has a ‘full screen drag’ feature (freely download-able from Microsoft‘s web site). If you load Data Browser you don’t. It suddenly stops working.
• Now this is supposed to be a feature, but I’m not convinced. The word ‘Browser’ seems to indicate that it’s a read-only product. In fact a version comes with it that isn’t.

Oracle Data Query

Welcome to the Oracle Comedy Errors Page!

This page is dedicated to all those frustrating hours that you have to spend fiddling about with Oracle just to get it working as it says it does on the box.

These are just things that have happened to me and the projects that I have been involved in. To make a really complete Oracle Comedy Errors Page we need your input.

For those that have already contributed, there is always this page. It also catalogues the projects and Oracle software that I’ve used to build up this list.

Oracle, the company, was founded back in the late seventies as a company that produced an SQL database. Its entire reputation has been built on this product and it is, therefore, no surprise that it is very good.

That’s not to say that there have been no problems…

• To perform dodgy ‘system’ operations on a database, you need access to a user called ‘internal.’ In theory, you need to be in the UNIX ‘dba’ group to be able to connect. That is unless you belong to rather a lot of groups, in which case it doesn’t seem to work. (We’ve not actually called this through, so there may be a simple explanation.) (7.1)
• When creating a new database, you have to run a file called ‘catalog.sql’ to finish the job. At the end of this file is the following message: ‘THIS IS THE END OF THIS FILE – IF I AM NOT HERE THEN RCS HAS TRUNCATED FILE‘ (7.3)
• I’m not entirely sure that this counts, but an installation program that requires more resources than that product that it’s installing demands at least an honorable mention. (8i)