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)

Don’t get me wrong. Oracle support analysts have a difficult job. Their products are large, complex beasts and you don’t necessarily expect an immediate response. These, however, I did not expect…

• Having spent over a day with hourly contact with support, they ring back returning a voice-mail message left before managing speaking to a ‘real’ person. Twenty-seven hours apparently wasn’t enough for a correct response, either.
• Two weeks of problems lead to a call to our sales manager. Obviously concerned, he went away to research the problem. He came back a day or two later. “This problem you’re having with you SCSI CD-ROM…,” he began. Good effort, wrong customer.
• They asked us to download a patch from their web site, a mere 36Megs. This looked remarkably similar to a patch we’d received the previous week for another problem. Next they insisted that we needed the next version of the SmartClient software. They even sent someone out to install it for us. Naturally, this solution didn’t work. They ummed and arred for a while before declaring it a ‘bug’ and sending it off to the states to be fixed. This is the last I heard of this problem.

Introduction

For many people here, writing software is, if not a job, then a hobby. Our enthusiasm is a double-edged sword. Our technical knowledge is usually much greater than people who just develop software for a living. This sounds like a big advantage, but it’s not as large as you would have thought.

Let’s have a look in ‘Software Project Survival Guide’ (SPSG) to see what Steve McConnell, famed author of ‘Code Complete’ and ‘Rapid Development,’ has to say on the subject.

Introduction

This is neither a new book nor a new purchase for me, so why am I reviewing it? Bottom line: it’s a book that I’ve enjoyed a lot over the years and one that I feel the need to recommend to as many people as possible.

What’s in it?

The obvious format for a book on the personal computer industry would be chronological, but as he points out early on in the book, things just aren’t that simple. Instead he uses what, on paper, might look to be a random arrangment of anecdotes, jumping from Apple to Xerox Parc to Microsoft and IBM in the matter of a few pages. But that’s just the nature of the beast.

Eric Raymond would have us believe that everyone that develops software for fun is a hacker. I know that historically this has always been the case, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing. All good, and bad, things come to an end.

I doubt that it will happen any time soon, but I think that ‘hacker’ is a term that should whither and die.

The first problem, and this is the obvious one, is the public perception of it. Yes we all know that hackers write code while crackers break into computer systems, but how many people ‘outside’ know that? How many professional software developers, i.e., those who do it just for a living rather than for fun, know that?

Introduction

This is a very strange book by almost any criteria. Firstly, much of the content is available on the web in one form or another. This includes an appendix which is literally a Usenet discussion printed. Secondly, most of the writers are techies first and writers second. You don’t get that kind of admission from most writers, even when it’s obviously true.

Content

There are fifteen essays by eighteen writers. I’m not going to go through all of them, but I shall note some of the highlights.

Introduction
Steven Feuerstein’s ‘Oracle PL/SQL Programming‘ book has, over the last couple of years, become my bible on the subject of writing sizable Oracle PL/SQL programs. As I said in my review, it’s useful because it covers just about everything, including the things that don’t work.

So if that book covers just about everything, why would anyone want to buy ‘Oracle Builtin Packages’?

Content

In fact, as the first chapter of the book explains, this entire book was origianlly chapter 15 of ‘PL/SQL Programming’ but Oracle complicated things by adding more to the PL/SQL programming language (all the pseudo-object oriented stuff in version 8 ) and many more new or enhanced packages. The result: either a single two thousand page monster, or two more reasonably sized tomes.

Introduction

There’s a lot of free or open source software on the net, and much been written about both that software and the process that drives it. Eric Raymond, of course, is currently the main anthropologist although Steven Levy beat him to it and there are many others.

There is also a significant amount of free documentation. One only needs to take a look at the GNU web site (their definition of a free operating system includes free documentation) or the Linux Documentation Project to see that. However, there doesn’t seem to have been a “Cathedral and the Bazaar” for free documentation, or even anything similar.

Introduction

Linux is capable of many things. It is an incredibly fast and stable platform, able to sustain months, if not years, of uptime and has many world-class applications such as Oracle8 and Apache. What it doesn’t have much of are decent word processors. I find that, these days, the one of the few reasons that I boot up Windows is for Microsoft Word (the other reason is Worms 2).