IMO not a WTF, but well-documented behaviour. Using quotes, you cannot only use lowercase letters, but other characters as well.

create table "i don't like Oracle" ( "just kidding ;-)" varchar2(30));

create synonym "i hate Oracle" for "i don't like Oracle";

insert into "i hate Oracle" values ('La Poete');

select * from "i hate Oracle";

If you use quotes during creation, you have to use them for your DML statements, too. (Unless the name consists of only uppercase letters)

Sure, it's documented and intended that way.  But that doesn't make a non-WTF.  The behavoir would be fine if they didn't force non-quoted identifiers to uppercase.  I teach Oracle development and I can't think of another issue that causes as many funny looks as this one (except maybe dual).

Yes, this is refreshing to see.

 

At one time (years ago) I had respect for some of Oracle's core products.

 

Now 18 months into an 11i Apps "implmentation", all I see is a large, steaming pile of camel dung.

 

When I found the IHOC I had to join - this database has made my life a living hell for over a year now and I need to know I'm not alone!

Oracle is the Devil.

Count me in. I don't like working with databases that much anyway, but give me good old (my)SQL anyday.

Ooh!  Ooh!  Pick me!  Oracle is a frickin' steaming turd.  Larry Ellison, the installer, tnsnames.ora, SQL+, Booleans, underhanded sales practices, absurd pricing, empty strings, crappy UI, ridiculous resource requirements.  Need I go on?  Oracle apologists claim that it performs better than the competition (after being tuned by an army of consultants, I guess).  Even if this is the case, how many Oracle clients have the load to justify the attendant pain?  Last I recall, hardware is cheaper than wetware.  God, I hate clueless managers who get suckered into this crap because it sounds 'hard core'.  I swear, to make such a user unfriendly product seems like it would require a concerted effort.  Does Larry hate his users or just like keeping consultants in business?  Even the most adament Microsoft basher has got to be happy that Mr. Ellison ain't #1.

I think that the appeal of Oracle shares much with that of Linux, C, Perl, Emacs, etc.  What better way for an ass to establish his alpha male status?  Find some complex piece of software and lord your skillz over the losers who lack the ability, time or inclination to become experts.  With some tools (like the aforementioned), the steep learning curve is merely a necessary side effect of an effort to build something powerful.  With Oracle, it's more like a sick joke.  And they've had decades to put some lipstick on this pig but have made zero effort to make the product more usable.  WTF?

PS One good thing about Oracle -- the cafeteria.  I encourage anyone who works in the area to sneak in (it's easy).  Since meals are subsidized, you'd be doing your small part to sink that crappy company.

So where do I go to have my membership number tattooed on my forehead??

I'm In

request for membership.


Cheers

I'm in.And I use the AS keyword in any damn place I want.

Brilliant:

"I don't like working with databases that much anyway"

*knock*knock* let me in !!
Sitting in front of  this crapy s***, wasting days & night.
Oracle stored Procedures, prepared Statemets & callable Calls with Java
I hate it.  

ndb:

*knock*knock* let me in !!
Sitting in front of  this crapy s***, wasting days & night.
Oracle stored Procedures, prepared Statemets & callable Calls with Java

How's that? Never had a reason to complain about Java+Oracle, except for the BLOB thingy.

Thank you for the group.  I feel better now.  I got somethings off my chest.

Farquat

Member of OA (Oracle Anonymous)
The first step is admitting you have a problem

I work on Oracle 360Commerce point-of-sale development.  The product was bought by Oracle, not originally an Oracle product, but I've dealt with my fair share of WTF's in the code.

I'd like to join as well. I really admire Oracle for its data expansion capabilities (expanding a 50MB dump into a 2GB database), as well as for its built-in delay loops at database creation.

ErikEngerd:

I'd like to join as well. I really admire Oracle for its data expansion capabilities (expanding a 50MB dump into a 2GB database), as well as for its built-in delay loops at database creation.

You can easily expand a 500K dump into a 20GB database. Just export an empty table with the right storage parameters.

Count me in as well. Oracle just friggin sucks.

   A coworker sent me a link to this group today saying, "This sounds like you."  He couldn't have been more right. 

   I've been converting a product upgrade for MS SQL 2000 to Oracle 9i for months.  What drudgery!  Do you wonder how bad it could be?  Reading some of the signups for membership to this group made me laugh so hard tears came to my eyes.  When a 40 year old man can laugh so hard that he fears busting a gut over his peers shared misery, something is truly wrong.  Is it me or is it Oracle?

  About 40% of our customers use Oracle for their RDBMS.  Our application can persist data in either MS SQL or Oracle.  When I first interviewed for this job I said "I don't have any experience in Oracle, why would you even consider hiring me?"  They said my knowledge of MS SQL was good enough that they thought I would easily be able to get a grasp of Oracle and manage the syntactical differences.  I thought, "... cool, I'll get paid to learn Oracle. Having that Oracle experience will look good on the resume..."  I had no idea what I was getting into.

   The other day I had to sit in on a call with a customer who are Oracle bigots and listen to one of our implementation specialist tell the customer that all other databases are inferior to Oracle.  My fingers were turing white holding onto the edge of my chair as I imagined strangling him for the heresy of saying Oracle is the best.

   I could go on for days but rather than bore you with pointless anecdotes, just join me up.

I'm in. When my last job upgraded from 8i to 9i (just a couple years ago, gov't agencies are always the last to go) we had a problem with VPD's, something was causing any query that hit a vpd (which was almost all of them) to lock up the processor, and never complete. (When I say never, i mean, I never actually tried to wait it out for more than an hour or 2). We got dicked around Oracle Un-Supportive for weeks, and were told they couldn't recreate the problem, even when I sent them a sample of my data, and all the scripts we used to build the VPDs. We kept asking if the were running the same environment RHEL 3.0, and were told yes. Unfortunately, they lie. Finally they did set up a duplicate of our environment, and lo and behold, they could recreate the problem, and we got the patch shortly thereafter. The problem was it took 3 months to convince them there was a bug. And this was on a production system. The work around was to disable VPD's, and hope no one noticed. Luckily, none of the data was super secret classified, but I don't think that Auditors would have appreciated it if it had happened while they were on site.

Make me a member! Sit me on the front row of the jury! Let me pull the switch! If I could run this product over I'd reverse back over it and pee on the squashed turdy ofal that would remain...

Technology is there as a tool to get a job done. It's meant to make things easier. WTF! These self absorbed barstards seem to take pleasure in writting crap you can't use unless you're in the secret Oracle society. I've fought with some inaccessible rubbish in my time, but never has it been worse than Oracle. I've searched the net, I've read the manuals, I've spoken to the company experts, but no fucker can make the vaugest sense out of this monstrosity.

There's probably a barstard handshake amongst these insecure fucks who feel it neccessary to write something you can't bloody install in less than a fortnight. They meet up in mountain hideouts and rub linseed oil into each others bum cracks whilst inventing new names for configuration settings.  "I know lets have a role called a DBAENDQUSERFLOATSTAKER, we'll make them the only user who can use the letter "Q" in a four line sentance" - BARSTARDS!

Oracle how about something you can install and use, with advanced configuration settings that come ... and here's the big pitch ... after you've been using the basic functionality.

I see it like this. There was this guy: incoherant, anal, pedantic and lonely, with a tiny shlong - to the point of just being undetectable to a person skilled in brail. So he decides to create a database program. He decides to make it complex and unneccessarily pissy. He decides to do it in such a way that no one will be able to use it. That way he'll feel very important. He'll be the only person who can use it and he'll forget about his crappy life. That would be good, it'd distract him from evil naked women on the internet for just a few hours. So he does it. He builds his beast. Soon he is joined by another lonely guy who thinks technology is about his own fragile ego - as opposed to doing stuff - He blows the first guy and as a reward gets his own DBA login and a decoder ring the size of a twin tub.

Keck knows how man years later here we are, and there it is, the poo blocking the toilet bend of data management "Oracle". The car with the steering wheel locked in the trunk and an engine that will only start using a key that you were never given!

Breath! Breath!

Man - and what's with the case sensitivity and namine shit! And why the distinctly crap GUI interfaces - that never work, so I always end up doing it from the command line in SQL*Plus! And why with the packaging the wrong documentation with your downloads!

 Do they want us to use it? Even the form to download the fucking product doesn't work! Why build something nobody can use - Why waste your life doing that Oracle... Unless you have no life to waste you insecure technoperverts...
 

Ohmigoodness, just finding this site has made me feel better already. 

Totally agree. Oracle is the most over-complicated pile of junk I have to work with.

PL/SQL is so badly thought out. It seems to that each new feature is the result of an engineer having a good idea on the way to work, implementing it and then afterwards checking to see whether it had been done before. Coming from a Java background I find the collections implementation is Oracle just plain weird.

Count me in.

Flynn:

PL/SQL is so badly thought out. It seems to that each new feature is the result of an engineer having a good idea on the way to work, implementing it and then afterwards checking to see whether it had been done before.

There are some examples where they did it somehow in one version only to do it right in a later version. 

 

Coming from a Java background I find the collections implementation is Oracle just plain weird.

True, but a PL/SQL program mostly uses the database to store information; excessive use of collections might be an indication for bad style...