[Gllug] Oracle on Linux

[Richard Jones]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2004 at 12:11:37PM +0100, Tethys wrote:
> 
> Nix writes:
> 
> >> If it's any consolation, Informix on both NT and Linux is much much
> >> worse even than Oracle.
> >
> >That's... hard to imagine, but I can feel some fun war stories waiting
> >to be told...
> 
> Actually, I remember Informix being quite trivial to install, and
> certainly pleasant when compared to Oracle. That said, this was
> some (10+) years ago now, so I guess things could have changed.

Back in '99 we were basically the testbed for Informix on Linux in
Europe.  The problem was that Informix had just about managed to
compile the thing on Linux, but it seemed hadn't actually bothered to
run any regression tests on it before they shipped it to us.  The
result was a database which appeared to run, under low loads, but as
soon as it was deployed would corrupt itself royally.

It turned out that some clever Informix drone had added the equivalent
of -Dvolatile= to the compilation flags in order to "get it to
compile".  This caused the compiler to optimize out any references to
shared variables.  The inter-thread locking was just broken.  We went
the expensive route and switched to Solaris after that.

Anyway, Informix informix informix ...

Limited size strings.  In fact all sorts of arbitrary limits all over
the place.  Like tablespaces - if you forgot to allocate exactly the
right block size and lay out your tablespaces correctly, then your
tables could unexpectedly hit some limits, even when you had plenty of
disk space left.  Oh, and you had to remember to do this when you
created the table, because there was bugger all way to adjust it
afterwards.

A database access tool called 'dbaccess' that sucked even in
comparison to sqlplus.  For one thing, it had an 80 column limit.  You
simply couldn't type past the right hand end of the screen.

Slow.  Very very slow when compared to PostgreSQL.  Often you'd have a
perfectly good SQL statement, and make a minor tweak to it, and the
statement would run 1000s of times slower.

Weird debugging tool called 'onstat'.  It had about a million options,
and allowed you to enumerate almost any aspect of the database, which
was good, but the syntax it used was just terrible.  Instead of
printing out table names, for instance, it printed out hex numbers
which you had to break apart manually into binary and cross-reference
each bitstring through several other displays to work out what table
it was talking about.  Computers are supposed to do this shit, not me!

The installation was ... interesting.  You had the choice of
installing from a tarball or from an RPM.  Taking the RPM route, and
installing it, you'd find that all the RPM did was install the same
tarball, and refer you to the tarball instructions.  Duh!

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
http://www.YouUnlimited.co.uk/ - management courses
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