Oracle Unleashed my arse!

Hi All

I needed to learn Oracle 7 and D2K so I bought a copy of Oracle Unleashed. The book comes with a trial copy of Personal Oracle 7 and Developer/2000. I would like to state for the record that this is the worst computing related book that I have every attempted to read. There is absolutely no sign that the book has every crossed an editor's desk. Each chapter is written by a different person with scant reference to any other part of the book, and the chapters seem
to have been inserted at random with chapters on database tuning and backup coming before those on database design.. The writing itself is very poor, with the individual
authors giving the impression that they are trying to prove to themselves that they understand the subject matter, rather than trying to convey it to the reader. All in all a truly awful waste of time and money.

I thought that at least if the book itself was bad I could console myself with being able to use the trial software. WRONG! The quality of the installation documentation that comes with Personal Oracle 7 perfectly reflects the crappiness of the book itself. There doesn't seem to be any single document which actually tell you what you need to do to configure the thing. I have spent two days attempting to get oracle forms to speak to the database with absolutely no progress at all.

The first error I came across was ORA-03121. I tried using ":2" as the database name as mentioned in the book but this didn't work. I thought I might have made a mistake in the original installation so I tried to uninstall PO7 and start from scratch. Unfortunately which I ran Oracle installer and removed everything it did f*ck all, so I ended up having to manually delete everything and remove oracle from the registry.

Eventually I went to Oracle's web site and found a link to a page for support on installing PO7 but when I clicked the link I got:

• Error opening SSI file: /u01/webapps/www/htdocs/support/products/po7/win95/html/index.html ****

Great!

I tried their search engine and found a couple of articles mentioning something called SQL*Net so I read these and eventually guessed that I needed to install something called a TCP/IP protocol adapter. I did this and the ORA-03121 error vanished, only to be replaced by a ORA-12203 error. The readme.doc does actually mention this error, and suggests waiting a few seconds and trying again. This doesn't work. I've just downloaded a huge chunk of text from Oracle's site which is going to take me another day to understand, and then I have very little confidence that it's going to work.

I can't be the only person suffering like this. What are Oracle playing at? Out of interest I installed Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 at work. It took me five minutes and half a dozen mouse clicks.

I don't want Bill Gates to take over the whole software industry, but when one of his main competitors supplies software which takes days to install then they're handing him the industry on a plate.

Okay, I've finished moaning now.

Thanks for listening.

Terry Child Received on Wed May 13 1998 - 19:51:23 CDT