Comments on: Oracle: It’s not for newbies…

By: Hemant K Chitale

Hemant K Chitale — Tue, 17 May 2011 14:39:48 +0000

You’ve suggested a marketing slogan.

I suggest a DBA slogan that should be part of every Oracle “congratulations for buying Oracle database software” letter :
“Oracle for DBAs : You’ll have to put in some effort to understand it. But you’ll love it if you do (put in effort and understand, both !).”

By: Ben Prusinski

Ben Prusinski — Tue, 17 May 2011 02:38:33 +0000

I agree- Oracle RAC is very complex and requires knowledge of not only Oracle but networking and storage area networks to be considered an expert let alone install Oracle RAC successfully. And no two Oracle RAC deployments are exactly the same.

By: ORACLE-BASE.com

ORACLE-BASE.com — Fri, 13 May 2011 10:29:50 +0000

Cool!

By: Noons

Noons — Fri, 13 May 2011 06:02:33 +0000

Couldn’t agree more. And let’s not go into the actual running issues and the bugs and how to handle them.
One of the things that always makes me laugh is the claim that ASM uses a set of commands that are “easy and familiar to the dba familiar with SQL”. Oh yeah?
When was the last time you needed to write a file pathname such as “+diskgroup/dbname/filetype/filetypetag.file.incarnation” when using a standard file system?
Let’s not go into how to diagnose problems with it and the cacophony of log files and processes to monitor and new utilities to learn…

By: joel garry

joel garry — Thu, 12 May 2011 23:46:15 +0000

Wait a minute, I thought this SQL stuff was supposed to make programming obsolete.

Now explain Oracle locking in one or two sentences.

Newbies; Can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill them.

By: dnunknown

dnunknown — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:38:37 +0000

Agree, worked with non RAC systems for 5 years before getting into RAC, only successful from building and rebuilding the environment about 100 times (bc I would break it so bad it was just easier to rebuild). Also had a good reference; the RAC article that you created.

SQL / Windows and Linux / Oracle are two totally different audiences, and I can now say moving from Windows to Linux I will never go back, but to expect a Windows person to support Linux that is a recipe for failure.

By: Dan Benson

Dan Benson — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:35:54 +0000

If it was easy there would be a lot of consultants out of work…

I remember when the CBO was released and I thought I would need move out of the performance tuning business. In hind sight it was the biggest boon for my business. The rules were way more easier to understand and tune the the CBO. IMHO the CBO has never met its goal of making good SQL development available to the masses. $.02, -d

By: Tony Johnson

Tony Johnson — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:24:11 +0000

Couldn’t agree more … especially with Mark. What you thought you knew in release X can be turned on its head in release Y. The optimizer can/will change with each release. Add in System/Storage admins that don’t want to set it up the way it is defined in the documentation and you add more issues. RTFM is never as important as it is now and has a new brother FTFM – Follow the Fine Manual.

By: Mark Smith

Mark Smith — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:26:40 +0000

Can’t agree more. I’ve been a DBA for ten years and I feel like I know hardly anything, especially compared to others in the community (like yourself).

At a job interview once, they asked me to rate my DBA skills out of 10. I said ’4 or 5′. When asked why I didn’t give myself a 10, I said ‘it’s so broad and deep, anyone who tells you a 10 is either a liar or really a 1 as they don’t understand the subject’.

I got the job.

By: Rui

Rui — Thu, 12 May 2011 13:20:40 +0000

Sigh… wholeheartedly agree with you on that one. I have doing it for 15 years with oracle and 10 with linux and it’s only now that I feel somewhat competent :-p