Re: Oracle Myths

"Sybrand Bakker" <postbus_at_sybrandb.demon.nl> wrote in message news:uedi3onto96hdf_at_corp.supernews.com...
>
> "koert54" <koert54_at_nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:7LwF8.83809$Ze.13075_at_afrodite.telenet-ops.be...
> > > Nope, and for damn good reasons. I've heard horror stories of people
> who
> > > haven't used it the right way. I sure wouldn't want to support the
> > results in
> > > any other way than enforcing it as strictly as we do! :)
> >
> > hmm from what I have seen it's pretty easy to extract data with DUL -
the
> > result will be same
> > no matter who's in front of the keyboard - the only difficult thing
about
> > DUL is setting the
> > platform specific parameters. And DUL only does reads - so it's not like
> > it'll damage the DB
> > even more ... BBED on the other hand is shipped with Oracle on the NT
> > platform and *will* let
> > you change the blocks directly, being able to corrupt data quite easely
> > without deep knowledge of
> > oracle block structures ... I can't imagine what those horror stories
> would
> > be, I can only imagine
> > the relieve of the IT departement recovering whatever data they can get.
> >
> > btw Pete - you working for Oracle and all - why did Oracle ship BBED
with
> > Oracle on NT and didn't
> > bother to document it - they even password protected it ... is this a
> *bug*
> > and it shouldn't be there in
> > the first place ? :-)
>
>
> I think the strange thing here is Howard Rogers site got shut down by
> Oracle, and what you are doing is clearly an attempt at reverse
engineering.
> This is usually prohibited by your license, and it looks like you are
> clearly violating it.
> For me the surprising thing is Oracle didn't take any legal action against
> you, which I would recommend them doing
> I would also imagine when you make your 'tool' available, you are not
going
> to assume any legal responsibilities for using it.
> This alone would be a sufficient reason to strongly discourage anyone to
use
> your 'tool' at all. After all, if you hire Oracle to rescue your database
> and Oracle screws your database, your legal position is completely
> different.
>
> I am also annoyed you are treating Pete Sharman this way.
> Is Oracle an Open Source product? Clearly it isn't and they have the full
> right not to disclose this information.
> You, however, are hacking and reverse engineering, which is clearly
illegal,
> and not in the interest of the user community.
> I would just love to see Oracle stops your reverse engineering work. This
> would mean a legal move, definitely more justified than shutting Howard J
> Rogers site down.
>
> Regards
>
> --

1. I'm not disrespecting Pete at all - I'm just wandering about BBED (which I would really appreciate getting some more info on)... I think Pete is a great guy on this newsgroup - and him working for Oracle makes it even better !
2. there's not much to reverse engineer if you want to write a dataunloading tool - - everything is basically documented on the internet - it's the puzzling to get pieces together that's difficult ... I'll even post some of the materials I used : http://oraperf.sourceforge.net/refs/all_dumps.html http://www.dbakorea.pe.kr/article/db_block.html several metalink docs on decoding dba, dates and numbers
3. if Oracle says it's not ok - then it's not ok - and that's that ... I'm just writing this tool because it's a challenge - it's much more fun than writing yet another performance monitoring tool ... I've seen tools that generate export dump files, tools that extract data from dump files etc... That's basically the same ... but hey - who knows ... maybe I'll never release it and just write an in-depth paper about it
4. > I would also imagine when you make your 'tool' available, you are not going
   > to assume any legal responsibilities for using it.
   > This alone would be a sufficient reason to strongly discourage anyone to
   use
   > your 'tool' at all.
   You're absolutely correct - actually - people should never need to use a tool like this ... they should have good backup & recovery strategies ... but then again - we're all human ...
5. > and not in the interest of the user community. Let's see how interested someone would be, coming on a site where there is no real DBA, they purchased a license through their application provider that went broke, the db crashed with no valid backup and Oracle refuses to provide support even if you're willing to pay ... however - in the 6 years that I'm working as a DBA consultant this happened to me only once - so maybe you're right that a tool like that is low in demand.

Sybrand, you basically have some real valid points here - and it's good that you remind me of them because at first I wanted to open source the tool, then I thought ...
hmm maybe I'll just release the binaries ... now I'm thinking about not releasing it until I'm certain that I actually can - if not ... though luck ... this is not my day job !

> Sybrand Bakker
> Senior Oracle DBA
>
> to reply remove '-verwijderdit' from my e-mail address
>
>
>
Received on Sat May 18 2002 - 18:00:42 CDT