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04 October 2005

metalink

I just remembered the woman who asked Lawrence Ellison why you need at least three days to get a qualified support representative when you open an iTar.

Since a few days, I have been wondering why a non-dba user was not able to do sqlplus in 10gR2. Well, I saw the bug 4516865 on metalink for 9.2.0.7 and 10.2.0.1, but did not agree that it is a "desirable improvement", imho it is a major lost of service.

Just a few minutes (seconds?) after I finished writing my iTar, severity 2, I received a call from Oracle Support.

Apparently a group of customers asked to prevent any non-dba user from using sqlplus on a database server (just on the client). This kind of answer I do not like. But we had a long talk, he finally showed me a workaround for 10.2.0.1 : doing

chmod -R 755 $ORACLE_HOME

before root.sh.

Well, this should have made me hurl. But ok, I can do this.

He also explained me, that I should escalate this bug if I want development starting working on it. Also there is another bug, 4533592

My satisfaction with this tar is good (4/5). I have been contacted immediatly, informed about the bugs, and informed about the procedure to escalate this case when I will require too.

My overall satisfaction with Metalink is about 3/5. But sometimes, it is really 0/5. The worst I have was :

lsc: how do you remove headers in the middle of your result in sqlplus ? I have a bug with set emb on and set pages 9999.
metalink: This is a bug in sqlplus. Workaround is to use Oracle Reports.

I could just have kill her! The "good" solution is "set pages 0", ref: set pages 50000

One also like this :

lsc: When I try to do an executable in scheduler I got an ora-27371 (AIX)
metalink: switch to a new platfom
lsc: @*#!!
metalink: It will be fixed in 10.1.0.4
lsc: no it is not fixed in 10.1.0.4
metalink: it is an internal bug
...months later...
lsc: still not fix in 10.2.0.1
metalink: development is working on it

well, I have always known that AIX is not a strategic platform and many shell scripts function utterly wrong... still very frustrating one!

Larry just told that woman : just drop me an email. Should I write Larry each time I do receive an idiot answer?

3 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

metalink at times can be very challenging.

4/10/05 17:48  
Blogger Joel Garry said...

I have had both your and the woman's experience - like the woman when asking about AS, like you when asking about rdbms. So I think it just depends on the support group you get routed to.

7/10/05 20:12  
Blogger Laurent Schneider said...

thanks for your comment Joel! nice to read from you, probably the best support you can get is self-support, you know what I mean ;-)

7/10/05 20:48  

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