[ILUG] Drop in replacement for Ingres Database?

[John P. Looney]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2002 at 08:44:42AM +0100, Conor Daly mentioned:
> OTOH, has anyone got anything bad to say about Oracle?  Their website says
> lots of good stuff but I'd like to hear the bad also since _I'm_ probably
> going to have my name associated with the choice of DB at work.  

 Run away. It's crap.

 I had to admin & program for Oracle in three different companies. As a
database, I cared about the amount of learning & work I had to do to make
it work. I couldn't believe how archaic and ... lazy the design is. It has
over 200 tables related to the running of the database, that you have to
know reasonably well to be able to admin the thing.

 Between archives, logs, tables etc. layout is a pain on any reasonably
performance-critical system. The software itself is not cheap. Support is
not cheap either (but my there are shit-loads of documentation).

 Oracle "hot backups" generally don't work. I had to restore a 120GB
database from DLT tapes - thankfully "incremental" backups were taken
every night, but I had to go through 20 separate backups to find one that
would restore!

 You'll love sqlplus. Very 1980s. Don't expect nicities like keyword
completion or readline support that you get in more modern DBs like
mysql/postgres.

 It's C interface is cack beyond belief. The same thing that you can do in
ten lines of C with postgres will take 400 with Oracle (I've a program
that sends a "select * from table" in C, you can look at and weep at, if
you wish).

 Oracle is all things to all people. It's the Celine Dion of the database
world. You'll hate it.

Kate