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?
metalink at times can be very challenging.
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.
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 😉