Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL - a comment

Paul Förster <paul(dot)foerster(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:

> and then, some day, a developer approaches a DBA with a query which is generated and, if printed out in a 11pt. sized font, can fill a billboard on a street, to optimize it or search for what's wrong with it, or why it performs so slow... That's usually when I play BOFH because I'm not willing to debug 10 pages which its creator hasn't even cared to take a look at first. :-P :-)
>
> Same goes for the app guys sending me 10 MB of Java stack trace by email containing one single line of ORA-xxxxx. They should send only that line along with a (approximate) time when it occurred. If I get the full stack trace, I send it back to them telling them they should come back when they find the line containing the ORA message. They usually don't come back because they don't know how to grep. :-) Some do, though, and those are the ones I try to help.
>
>> If I'm in an environment where someone else is responsible for all the DBA stuff, Oracle is nice to work with.
>
> yes, leave the cardiac arrest to us DBAs. :-P
>

Yes, even after longer time doing Oracle, I still never felt as
comfortable or across things as much as I do with PG. Started with
Oracle 7 and stayed until 11g and each year, it got worse rather than better.

After working as a DBA, I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes, DBA has
to equal "Don't Bother Asking".

As a developer, I have to admit being somewhat embarrassed by the
frequently poor understanding amongst many developers regarding the
technology they are using. I've never understood this. I come across
developers all the time who are completely clueless once outside their
IDE or editor. Too often, they have little understanding of the hosting
environment, the base protocols they are using, the RDBMS or even basic
SQL. I don't understand how you can develop anything of quality if you
don't have a thorough understanding of all the technology involved.

I'm probably just a dinosaur - I also prefer VI and Emacs as my primary
development environments and will use psql and sqlplus before Taod,
pgAdmin, sqlDeveloper etc.

Tim

P.S. for moving Oracle databases, we use to just use sed and change the
paths in the control file. Worked remarkably well. Often used this
technique to 'refresh' our dev or testing systems to current prod data.

--
Tim Cross