So what do the proponents of Oracle's acquisition of Sun think now?

> I have worked with the thing for well over 15 years now.

It's not something I can say. I was administering it for 1.5 year.

> I learned how to use, install, administrate, use the OCI etc etc simply by reading the manuals.

Trying and reading manuals here. I also went to first two DBA courses and the RAC course. They taught me almost nothing new, just googling and trying was a lot faster.

> The interface is the same on all platforms

That is a standard nowadays. On the other hand, the "universal" installer of theirs is a monstrosity. Installer written in Java, that brings JVM along? Hello? No integration with OSes native packaging?

> you do things the same way whether it is on Windows, OS/2 or UNIX(es), even on MVS it is only as different as it has to be due to the system.

I've installed and administered it on Linux, AIX and briefly on Windows too. It is true, that in-database things are same. On the other hand, why should they be different anyway?

> It seems to me that you are getting rather emotional - I wonder why?

Try installing 10.2.0.4 with RAC and ASM on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.2. Because they do not provide patched installer, you need to install 10.2.0.1 first. That one, however, did not know about 5.2 when it was released. Plus it did not open block devices with O_DIRECT, so temporary raw devices for OCR & VOTE and migrate later. vipca fails to configure network, so you have to do that manually after installing a fix right after installer puts the files in, but before you run root.sh.

Then the trouble with Enterprise Manager. Non-expectable behaviour of leaving backup jobs running when you CTRL+C in RMAN.

Plus installer and all graphical tools do not work very well over X11 forwarding, sometimes unexpectedly filling whole 100Mbps link. Oops.

And there also was this "bugfix" which required you to edit shell script of vip service. Tell me, why every script from Oracle have this structure:

#!/bin/sh
CAT=/bin/cat
TAIL=/usr/bin/tail
# ...
$CAT file | $TAIL -n 1

Ever heard of $PATH?

Plus the consistent inconsistency of all commands' options combined with lack of inline command help. No line editing or comfortable history in any interactive tool.

Oh, and the last one is really the coolest. The 11gR2 binaries are statically linked and oracle + RAC daemons + crs_stat (fine, now deprecated, but still) are each 1G large. That's not only disk space, but also a non-shareable RAM. 1G binary? Hello?

OK, I always wanted to say this aloud somewhere where people read it. Sorry.

Make that most RELATIONAL databases.

Change database technology and you can get a lot of Oracle's robustness as a side-effect of not using FNF :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Oracle is nice when it comes to performance and perhaps flexibility, but in terms of security and robustness it's crap. I was able to cause internal error during the first few hours of playing with it, and the security track record is horrible.