Re: Why does oracle support suck so much?

We develop on Ora 10.2.0.x SE on Win and Linux. Over the last year we experienced some really bad OraBugs. Highlights are

• wrong timestamp arithmetics, failing timestamp arithmetics, wrong time zone behaviour
• a MERGE statement, which gives different results depending if it is executed in a LOOP or a FORALL

Often it was really annoying to reiterate with the support analyst what went wrong. I always provide test scripts, stripped down to the least possible, to reproduce the issue. If the support analyst doesn't read my explanations, doesn't execute the script, does not have any clue about time zones, I start to get upset.

In case of the timestamp with time zone isues (over a course of two months I found >6 completely new bugs which partially were very easy to find and I would have expected them to be found inside some really basic test loops) I had an awful time to get the issues escalated, bundled and given to some competend engineer. Finally I stumbled across an ARE (advanced resolution engineer) who took care of all open SRs, provided very good solutions and workaround, opened new BUGS, and all within few days. But it happened by pure accident, that one of the SRs was given to him. I several times asked ORACLE support to establish a contact to someone experienced, but nothing happened.

In case of the FORALL MERGE issue I insisted on a timeline for a fix. Nothing happened. After several iterations my tone getting ruder and harsher, finally the poor analyst got to handle the bug to development. Now I can see constantly working on the issue, but even after two months I got no timeline for a fix.

New SRs are handled very fast. But if it is some extraordinary problem, especially with very complex SQL-statements, forget it.

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Marc Blum
mailto:blumXXXSPAMXXX_at_marcblum.de
http://www.marcblum.de