4 ms·

My first time using Oracle, I was trying to migrate magazine articles to a different DB system. Oracle "helpfully" and silently truncated the magazine content a

by larrik 4y ago

My first time using Oracle, I was trying to migrate magazine articles to a different DB system. Oracle "helpfully" and silently truncated the magazine content at a certain size, leaving most of the articles unfinished. The Oracle experts were incapable of producing a dump or report of the raw articles. So, I tried myself. I tried multiple tools, and every single one would truncate the field regardless of my settings, except for one. The Java ODB driver gave me the whole thing. So, I had to write a Java program to extract it for me. In the end I learned that Oracle can't even output it's own data properly, even with the help of experts. I also got to learn what installing Oracle software was a really like (it was brutal). So, no, I would not recommend Oracle to anyone, ever.

cafard 4y ago
With the Perl DBI interface, you had to set some magic item on the statement or database handle--LongReadLen, maybe--in order to get all of a LONG or LOB. But you could get the whole thing. I mention Perl here, because I used it to copy articles from the Oracle back end of a ColdFusion website to the front end of something built on PHP plus MySql. And before I could even test this, I had to get the data into a different Oracle database, using the standard exp/imp. I don't doubt what you say, but I do wonder about the experts you encountered.
gcanyon 4y ago
Disclaimer: this happened over twenty years ago. 1. I worked with developers trying to implement a UI using Oracle's app-builder of the time (Oracle Forms? I don't remember). The devs spent an entire summer, with Oracle support, just trying to get the system set up and configured to build "Hello World." They gave up and we abandoned the project. 2. I needed to install an Oracle product on my computer. I had an Oracle provided CD. The install was non-obvious: multiple install files with multiple options and ways to get it wrong. On the CD was a set of help files, with an app to view them. The app did not default to showing the help files: you had to select which base file to start with. The choice was not obvious. There were broken links in the help system -- meaning links that tried to point to other files on the CD that weren't there. In short: Oracle -- not even once.

by larrik 4y ago

cafard 4y ago

With the Perl DBI interface, you had to set some magic item on the statement or database handle--LongReadLen, maybe--in order to get all of a LONG or LOB. But you could get the whole thing. I mention Perl here, because I used it to copy articles from the Oracle back end of a ColdFusion website to the front end of something built on PHP plus MySql. And before I could even test this, I had to get the data into a different Oracle database, using the standard exp/imp. I don't doubt what you say, but I do wonder about the experts you encountered.

gcanyon 4y ago

Disclaimer: this happened over twenty years ago. 1. I worked with developers trying to implement a UI using Oracle's app-builder of the time (Oracle Forms? I don't remember). The devs spent an entire summer, with Oracle support, just trying to get the system set up and configured to build "Hello World." They gave up and we abandoned the project. 2. I needed to install an Oracle product on my computer. I had an Oracle provided CD. The install was non-obvious: multiple install files with multiple options and ways to get it wrong. On the CD was a set of help files, with an app to view them. The app did not default to showing the help files: you had to select which base file to start with. The choice was not obvious. There were broken links in the help system -- meaning links that tried to point to other files on the CD that weren't there. In short: Oracle -- not even once.