Thursday, May 24, 2007

What is going on in Oracle's QA department?

I've been an Oracle DBA since the days of 7.0.16 (on Netware, but that's a story for a different day). I'd like to think I have a decent amount of experience with Oracle and it's nuances. Sure, some things are quirky and don't work the way you think they should, but that's just getting used to the software. I can count on one hand the number of one-off patches I had to install over a base patchset in 7.x to 9.2. (I'm talking RDBMS here, not Oracle Apps.)

I specifically waited to move to 10g until it had been out a while. Our move to 10.2.0.3 has been quite disappointing. Sure, we did a lot of testing. But production is different than testing. After about 30 days of one db being live, we've had to install three one-off patches. And we just got slammed with two more in the last couple days to bring the total up to five. If we were on 10.2.0.0, I'd understand, but 10.2.0.3? Five freaking one-off patches.

C'mon Oracle, get your act together. We're trying to run a business here.

8 comments:

Joel Garry said...

So what patches? Were any not related to the optimizer?

word: mxpupa sounds like something from battlefield earth.

Noons said...

Ayup!

I've been warning the darn thing is as dodgy as can get for quite a while. Of course, Oracle claims it's only me.

Glad to see it confirmed it isn't.

But I'm quite sure liberal doses of 11i marketing and heaps of fusion vaporware will fix all the problems!

Anonymous said...

Only 5?
If you were working with SAP you would be using 10.2.0.2 and +20 one off fixes.
The reason SAP has not released 10.2.0.3 is becuase it would have needed at least the same ammount of patches!
Lets see what happens when 10.2.0.4 arrives

Don said...

I'm on 10.2.0.2, and scared to death of 10.2.0.3 from what I've read. Sure it will fix some bugs that have hit me in 10.2.0.2 but there are some real horror stories out there with .3

Anonymous said...

My guess is that many of the better people/developers are working with the new 11g release. The idea of wanting to work on putting out patchsets is heresy to some of the better oracle technical members.

Oracle's management has really dropped the ball on qa over the last couple of years. The hpux platform used to get good quality patchsets ... not any longer.

Of course the quality of the patchsets is somehow indirectly related/linked to the quality of the cpu quarterly releases which is almost unspeakably bad.

Anonymous said...

What patches did you apply?

Anonymous said...

Not directed at anyone in particular, but if you find bugs in Production that you did not find in Testing, then technically speaking, the testing process is flawed.

Having said that, in the real world, there are very few un-flawed environments around, except those where the pain of discovering such things in Production are financially quantifiable, and has enough zeroes in it.

Maybe RAT will change things...

Anonymous said...

We've had more trouble with 10.2.0.3 than with any other Oracle release-- ever. We're hoping that 10.2.0.4 fixes everything they broke in .3.