RE: RE: Oracle Browser 2

From: David Wagoner <dwagoner_at_arsenaldigital.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 12:05:20 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.003B99E8.20011031120524@fatcity.com>

Wow. Thanks for your effort here Dick. Sounds like quite an ordeal. At least I'll know some problems to look for if my company decides to try Discoverer!

David B. Wagoner
Database Administrator
Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc. 4815 Emperor Blvd., Suite 110
Durham, NC 27703
Tel. (919) 941-4645
Fax (919) 474-0735
Email mailto:dwagoner_at_arsenaldigital.com Web http://www.arsenaldigital.com/

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-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 9:55 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

David,

OK, first off the Oracle sales droid and pre-sales droid came in to do the
install of the product (9iAS Enterprise Edition which BTW, you HAVE to have the
Enterprise edition or else you don't get the WEB based tool). The install manual said it would need 6GB of HP-UX disk to install properly, BULL it was much closer to 9GB (OK, 8.75 to be exact). You end up installing WEB forms, graphics, reports, and the cache DB even though your not going to use them. We
were told the install and initial configuration would only take half a day, it
took that long just to read in the CD's and in actually took the better part of
16 hours with configuration going on into a third 8 hour time period. What a pile of BLOATware, YUCK!!

Next the locator process intermittently died for no apparent reason. There
was no core dump, or other indication that something odd had happen & the log
file was less than helpful it turns out. Actually pointed us in the WRONG direction. According to the log we were having a semaphore problem when in truth it turned into a semaphore set problem. This thing LOVES doing IPC's.

Next we had a problem with browsers. The company 'standard' is MicroSlop IE
5.0. Suppose to work, WRONG!! The only machine that would run Discoverer was a
brand new one with ME and IE 5.51 or something like that, and then it wasn't exactly sure it wanted to go!! This one appears to be a JVM issue (MS does not
like SUN on which Oracle's Java implementations is based), but MetaLink has a
pointer to an article on 'How to use JInitiator with IE 5.x', but for some reason it has not been 'published' yet so you get an 'document is unavailable'
message. The product did work with Netscape 4.61 and beyond but it was SLOW to
startup. After that the interface being a 'navigation tree' was so foreign to
our users that they were totally disenchanted. The 'last straw' was the admin
edition where you had to map all of the tables, etc.. into the end user layer.
Doing certain common tasks, although possible, was not intuitive (like sub queries). The great part was that it did use the referential integrity to self
join tables, warned when you created a Cartesian query but let you run it anyway, and it has a damn good query predictor that gets smarter as time (read
than as number of executions of the query) passes.

What Oracle needs to do here is:

Support the MicroSlop browsers most likely by getting that article published.
Train their sales folks, they were going through the first install right along with us!!
Cut out the bloat. There is no reason for all the other stuff if all you want is Discoverer.
Figure out what the 'real' numbers are for disk and semaphore sets and publish them.
Put back that ability to use the native dictionary as well as the EUL. That was the way it was in Discoverer 2000, why the change?
Get rid of that 'navigation tree' in favor of the graphical table layout diagram.
Let end users edit their SQL. Easiest way to insert sub queries there ever was.
Improve the graphics capabilities, their a little primitive in the current version.

In the end, when we told them we had decided against Discoverer 3000 they were
"not suprised".

Dick Goulet

____________________Reply Separator____________________
Author: David Wagoner <dwagoner_at_arsenaldigital.com>
Date:       10/29/2001 10:52 AM

Dick,

Can you elaborate a little on the instability of Oracle Discoverer 3000 with Oracle 9i database? I was planning to investigate Discoverer as an end-user reporting/query tool sometime soon. We have Oracle 8i and 9i databases. I just heard that Discoverer is an HTML-based data query tool for end-users.

TIA, david

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-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 9:40 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Oracle Browser 2/Oracle Discoverer 2000 is a VERY old piece of software that does not interact well with any Oracle instance beyond 7.3.4. We've got it, it's a pain in the neck, and I would NOT recommend anyone else try to use it,
except if your still running 7.x databases. Your options are not very great,
use Oracle 9iAS enterprise edition for the browser based version of Oracle Discoverer 3000 (not a very stable product from our experience [9iAS version 9.0.1 on HP-UX]) Or go to the third party market We are with a product called
Brio.

Dick Goulet

____________________Reply Separator____________________
Author: "Michael" <oracle-l_at_iceic.com>
Date:       10/28/2001 4:05 AM

Hi all,

Doesn't anybody out there know what Oracle Browser 2 is, and where I might be able to download a copy ?

Thanks for your time.

Michael.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<TITLE>Message</TITLE>

<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2600.0" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hi
all,</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001>    <FONT face=Arial
size=2>Doesn't anybody out there know what Oracle Browser 2 is, and where I might be able to download a copy ?</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001>    <FONT face=Arial
size=2>Thanks for your time.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial
size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial
size=2>Michael.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001></SPAN> </DIV></BODY></HTML>

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Received on Wed Oct 31 2001 - 14:05:20 CST