As the one probably most to blame for Tim’s current work position, I think I should apologise for his rant

But why are support services so bad these days…? You can probably blame the commodity hardware phenomenon.
There’s an interesting discussion over on the HP forums.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1060955

I quite like this quote from Duncan Edmonstone:

“10 years ago, when we bought a ‘critical’ system we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds/shekels/’insert your currency here’ on the tin, and we didn’t think much of spending up to 20% of the value of the tin on support contracts. 20% of a $1M tin purchase paid the salary of at least one head to support that system!

Now we are in the land of ‘commodity IT’ – this is where IT analysts, industry experts and yes, the vendors too have been pushing us – now that critical system might only cost us $0.1M, and guess what – 20% of *that* figure don’t pay much of anyones salary, whether they’re in Palo Alto, Houston, New York, London, or even Bangalore…”

Makes you think doesn’t it !

Cheers,

Rob

Paul: Good to hear from you. You don’t know the half of it.

Cheers

Tim…

There’s just been a flurry of posts about recovery with XE. Oracle thoughtfully provides a ‘restore database’ option in the Windows menus, but if you need to do disaster recovery, for example, it doesn’t have any pre-built scripts that prompt you to specify a DBID, for example. At which point, it’s back to the command line and having to type it out for yourself -but you want to bet how many XE users, familiar with its cutesy interface, are going to have a clue what to type or why?

Anyone who learnt RMAN the hard way, however, will not have a problem working it out.

So what was the point of a cutsey interface in the first place?!

Making people believe that recovering a database -*any* database- is a piece of cake and a mere two-click effort is a serious disservice, and Oracle shouldn’t be thanked for it.

Do you feel that if you could get your message across to the ‘pointy-haired’ bosses that they are being sucked into mass marketing hype, they would change?

I for one do not.

Regards,

Paul

I think it’s a combination of employers not understanding that better quality people (at more cost) is better value and employees over inflating there skills to stand out from the crowd (and not being “found out” before being hired).

Not sure what the answer is, but I still cringe when I recall an “experienced” contractor asking me some years ago – “So what are indexes for?”