Oracle Response 4

Oracle's Response (4)

13. This is also petty. Oracle does provide a different means of showing errors, and gives statement level line-of-code messages.

Confession: By default, Oracle does not show you your errors. Petty but confusing: I am creating a stored procedure. After I hit return, Oracle says,

You have an error.
Procedure successfully created.

And now I have to ask Oracle to show the errors. Why do I have to go out of my way to ask for the obvious? And then notice that Oracle creates a stored procedure even though it has errors. Well ,does my procedure have errors or not? Does Oracle readily accept flawed stored procedures? Yes. Yes.

The reason why Oracle turns off errors by default and allows you to create procedures with errors is because Oracle's own scripts are riddled with thousands of errors. Oracle got so fed up with seeing their own problems, that instead of fixing them, they decided to ignore them.

Has anyone ever installed Oracle correctly? Have you ever noticed the hundreds of procedures "created successfully but have errors" during an installation? You have to go out of your way to find the log to notice this. Despite all those errors, Oracle still says, "Installation successful." Is it any wonder why you must go through the installation process 3 or 4 times before you can make an Oracle instance work?

14. This statement is incorrect. This behavior was a bug, fixed ages ago. I can change my line width in SQL*Plus on Solaris to my heart's content today "set linesize 500" works just fine.

Confession. SQL*Plus core dumped all over the place when setting linesize. And as I remember, for years. I am not sure it has gone away. Combinations of setting the linesize, pagesize, wrap beg a core dump. I am still scared to do it. I'll concede this problem for now, but I am giving Oracle the benefit of the doubt . . . which is never wise.

15. Pretty petty. The reserved word list is published. Just don't use reserved words.

Confession. Oracle's SQL compiler does not catch the use of reserved words. You must memorize them all yourself. All 500 or so. Yes, the reserved work list is published. Unfortunately, its publishing in the manual omits 450 of them. Or perhaps Mr. Conway refers to the v$reserved_words view? You sure that has all of them? Should not the Oracle SQL compiler catch the illegal or potentially illegal use of reserved words?

What is so obvious is beyond the hope of Oracle. The SQL languages of Oracle are so convoluted, that it has become too complicated for a compiler writer to write a compiler that knows its own language. Hence what should be checked by the compiler is left to the human. Because Oracle cannot check itself, you can unknowingly use a reserved word when creating such an important thing as a table name. Two months later, when you use your table name in a query, it is possible that Oracle will then brand your name a reserved word. Your query will not compile. Now you have to go back and change thousands of lines of SQL, C++ code, Java, everything, starting with the schema itself. After that, you have to write a migration script to change the table name and every affected object. How many tens of thousands of dollars is that going to cost? This has happened to me. Do you think Engage enjoyed spending $20,000 because Oracle cannot compile its own language?

Remember: None of this happens in Sybase.



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