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?
October 4th, 2005 at 17:48
metalink at times can be very challenging.
October 7th, 2005 at 20:12
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.
October 7th, 2005 at 20:48
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