OK, lots of points to make about Oracle 8i:
- Oracle 8i has been out in the US for a few months now. How come it's
not available in the UK ? Looking at Oracle 8.0.5, there seems to be
no customisation for the UK market (we even have to choose
"American English" - there's no "British English" option !), so why the
delay in getting 8i in the UK ?
- If I go to www.oracle.co.uk, the home page has an Oracle 8i logo on it
(plus a link to an 8i article just below it). And yet, the link goes to
the *US* site.
- When I phoned up Oracle UK about 8i, the woman incredibly said "oh, I don't
know when it's released in the UK, I'll have to ask a colleague". When she
did ask, she came back with an answer "it'll be released in January", which
I thought was far too long a delay.
- I went back to the www.oracle.co.uk home page and, if you scroll and scroll
down, there's a link to "The UK Oracle User Group", so I followed that
out of curiosity. It took me to www.oracleuser.co.uk and, guess what, there's
a big logo there about the "UK Launch of Oracle 8". I clicked on that to
get to: http://www.oracleuser.co.uk/conf98/8i/index.html and voila,
we have the official release data of Oracle 8i in the UK:
5.40pm, Tuesday 8th December 1998
So how come www.oracle.co.uk has no mention of this launch date and how
come the Oracle customer line gave me the wrong date too ? Is it just me,
or is Oracle UK basically hopeless ?
BTW, anyone going to phone up Oracle UK at 5.45pm on Tuesday 8th Dec and
order it ? Any bets Oracle UK will claim it hasn't been launched yet ? :-)
Richard K. Lloyd, E-mail: rkl_at_connect.org.uk
Connect, WWW: http://www.connect.org.uk/
Liverpool University,
Merseyside, England,
Great Britain.
Received on Fri Oct 30 1998 - 05:45:47 CST
