4 ms·

This sounds no different than my experience with some Oracle and SAP products that we had the unfortunate pleasure of supporting.

odammit 9y ago
Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.
- reitanqild 9y ago
  Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard. I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around). For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.
  - staofbur 9y ago
    Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle. I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later! And that's what Oracle does to your soul :) Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan. I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.
      - staofbur 9y ago
        Yeah a big chunk of that was consultancy, support, Oracle licenses. TCO was going to be around £500k for 5 years. The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!
    - odammit 9y ago
      When I get issues were vendors point fingers at each other I three way call them, tell them what's up, hit mute, go get a coffee, and let them figure it out.
      - staofbur 9y ago
        We did that. They were still finger pointing two hours later. Legal guys said it wasn't worth suing them because we'd have to pay up then or lose the support contract.
        odammit 9y ago
        Oof. You should bill them for your time. I sent HP or Dell (can't recall) an invoice for $800 in my early 20s for my time wasted on a support call where a "support tech" had asked me to reinstall Windows as a way to fix a disk that failed in a RAID array. OS was AIX.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Hilariously Oracle database can't run on Oracle Linux OOTB...
    - dsr_ 9y ago
      While I'm not a fan of Oracle, I have to correct you: Oracle DB runs just fine on Oracle Linux. It installs exactly the same way that it does on RHEL, same checklist.
      - reitanqild 9y ago
        Just as long as you follow the defaults without changing anything I guess :-)
      - gaius 9y ago
        That's kinda my point - why do they ship a Linux distribution without the prerequisites for their flagship product preinstalled?
        hildaman 9y ago
        Probably because they don't want to deal with the overhead of maintaining patches to RHEL source.
        gaius 9y ago
        Then they fully deserve the ridicule. It's like Ford selling you a car but you have to bring your own tyres if you want to drive it away
  - nthcolumn 9y ago
    See it wasn't that hard. Stupid company procedures made it hard-er and even then iff you know what you are doing it is still trivially easy. It is so easy even sysadmins can do it. Next next finish have a cookie back in your gimp cave now easy.

odammit 9y ago

Oracle's Responsys is definetly dog shit wrapped in cat shit. I hope you'll never had to deal with that dumpster fire.

reitanqild 9y ago
Even just trying to install Oracle 11g correctly was hard. I think it expected to be installed in /usr/local and company procedures demanded that it was installed in /opt (or the other way around). For this it would consequently misplace some permissions on some of the files causing a later stage in the installer to fail and bork the installation.
- staofbur 9y ago
  Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle. I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later! And that's what Oracle does to your soul :) Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan. I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.
    - staofbur 9y ago
      Yeah a big chunk of that was consultancy, support, Oracle licenses. TCO was going to be around £500k for 5 years. The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!
  - odammit 9y ago
    When I get issues were vendors point fingers at each other I three way call them, tell them what's up, hit mute, go get a coffee, and let them figure it out.
    - staofbur 9y ago
      We did that. They were still finger pointing two hours later. Legal guys said it wasn't worth suing them because we'd have to pay up then or lose the support contract.
      - odammit 9y ago
        Oof. You should bill them for your time. I sent HP or Dell (can't recall) an invoice for $800 in my early 20s for my time wasted on a support call where a "support tech" had asked me to reinstall Windows as a way to fix a disk that failed in a RAID array. OS was AIX.
- gaius 9y ago
  Hilariously Oracle database can't run on Oracle Linux OOTB...
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    While I'm not a fan of Oracle, I have to correct you: Oracle DB runs just fine on Oracle Linux. It installs exactly the same way that it does on RHEL, same checklist.
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      Just as long as you follow the defaults without changing anything I guess :-)
    - gaius 9y ago
      That's kinda my point - why do they ship a Linux distribution without the prerequisites for their flagship product preinstalled?
      - hildaman 9y ago
        Probably because they don't want to deal with the overhead of maintaining patches to RHEL source.
        gaius 9y ago
        Then they fully deserve the ridicule. It's like Ford selling you a car but you have to bring your own tyres if you want to drive it away
- nthcolumn 9y ago
  See it wasn't that hard. Stupid company procedures made it hard-er and even then iff you know what you are doing it is still trivially easy. It is so easy even sysadmins can do it. Next next finish have a cookie back in your gimp cave now easy.