In all honesty, I’ve not managed to get Oracle working properly yet. When I upgraded my RedHat 7 machine to 8 it still worked, when I installed it from scratch it didn’t. This clearly shows that it’s possible to get Oracle 8i working, but I can’t say how!

For those that are interested, I found that it was easy to get the installer to complete, but I get the infamous “end of communication channel” error when trying to start an instance.

Introduction

It sounded like just the kind of book that I was looking for. I wanted a refresher on C since I’d not used it for a while, and some pointers on ‘advanced techniques.’ The blurb on the back looked about right and the fact that O’Reilly published it clinched the sale.

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

Introduction

The first point to note is that this book is published by O’Reilly. The second point would be that Steven Feuerstein is generally regarded to be one of the worlds leading PL/SQL experts.

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.

You tend to find two things relating to programming languages on the Internet. The first is a long list of all the languages, often with links to a representative web site. The second category are the “representative” web sites, detailed descriptions of a particular language.

I hope to make this part of ZX81.org.uk to be the middle-ground. I won’t cover every language ever designed and nor will I cover them in vast amounts of detail. Instead I’ll look at each languages main features, advantages and flaws.

Credit where it’s due

I am unable to criticise a suite of products the size and complexity of Oracle on my own. There are a number of people that need to me mentioned. Remind me if I missed you out!

People

Thanks to Anna Brabants who nearly created the term ‘Oracle Comedy Errors’ and certainly did an almost continuous stream of abuse (not all of it at Oracle).

And thanks to the rest of the project team, who invariable love Oracle products as much as I do.

I have recently installed Oracle 8i R3 (8.1.7) on my Celeron 466 machine. I found the installation to be very straight-forward compared with both 8.1.5 and the experiences of many people.

My machine is well below the specification that would be required to do real work on, especially if you have a number of developers. It does work, albeit rather slowly. Creating my initial database, for example, took around eight hours.

Introduction

The subject at hand is really much wider than just Redhat 7.x, especially as more recent distributions are following Redhats lead and are now including glibc 2.2 also. I have no reason to believe that this process will not work with newer versions of SuSE, Debian, etc.

The other point to note is that I have not tried the procedure outlined here. I have migrated my box from Debian 2.2 to RedHat 7.2 and can testify that Oracle still works, but I have not actually performed an installation. I have, however, recieved a good number of emails confirming that it works, so don’t worry!

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