Database Underground | Sean McCown » Oracle's community: part 2

March 20, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Oracle's community: part 2

TAGS: General Database

Well, it seems as though I may have struck a nerve yesterday. And I'm always surprised to see the people who are reading me.
I got a lot of comments, but even more emails, and the results are mixed. I haven't added it up but the count is pretty close to have that agree with me. And that's fine. One thing I'm finding out is how passionate the Oracle people are about their DB.

One thing I thought was really funny was the wide range of comments I got. Like I said, some agreed with me, some called my mother everything out there, and one even went so far as to defend Unix, but say I was right about Oracle. I love that one personally.

And you've got to understand this though. I never said there were NO forums or documentation. I said that it's really difficult to find anything when you need it. And it's hard to find good online training that's detailed enough to make it worth your while. Also understand that I'm out there like the rest of you trying to find answers to some issues that I run up against. And quite often it's not that easy. When I have problems with SQL Server it's always somehow much easier to get what I need.

So what does this mean then? Well, going from my comment stats I'd say that there are plenty of people out there who say I'm wrong and who are very certain that Oracle's community is really on the ball. And there are those who don't. So what I can gather from this is that maybe Oracle hasn't done enough to get the word out on all of their resources. Because while I don't know the research skills of everyone who wrote me, I do know my own. I research things for a living basically. And if I've had problems finding some of these resources, then I know others have too.

So the question stands: How does the Oracle community go about advertising its resources?

And just to tip the scale a little bit, one area I think Oracle has it over Microsoft is in its downloads. When I go to Oracle to download anything, all the downloads are clearly marked on a single page. Microsoft just isn't like that. Sometimes even finding a service pack for SQL is like finding help for Oracle. I really wish Microsoft would put all of their downloads for SQL on a single page so we could find what we're looking for without having to be creative or learn regular expressions.

However, I will so to those of you who said Oracle is easier to admin that SQL, you're just crazy. You've clearly never had to manage tablespaces in Oracle before. However, pretty much the only thing that comes to mind that is easier in Oracle is setup. Microsoft still can't seem to pull together a nice, clean, fast setup. There are still too many screens to go through and too many button clicks. And while Katmai can be scripted, you can't record it as of yet so all the scripting has to be done by hand.

Posted by Sean McCown on March 20, 2008 09:50 AM

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