[rescue] product quality (was: ham gear)

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 5 Dec 2005, Bryan Gurney wrote:

> Umm, WHOA.  I cracked up at "DBA Barbie", but the fact that this
> application is making use of Oracle, DB2, and Microsoft SQL is very very
> scary.  Most projects I've heard of in some form or another (press
> release, job posting, etc.) make use of one RDBMS and stick to it.

I made that argument at both junctures.  We started with Oracle because
"everyone uses[0] Oracle."  When Microsoft SQL Sewer came into the
picture I argued that we already had a database server and should use
it.  Of course, RoboHelp, being a "all the world is Windows" company
-requires- Microsoft SQL Sewer rather than anything else when using
their products because "everyone runs Microsoft SQL Server".

IBM Content Manager actually will use Oracle (supposedly) to store its
data.  At least, that's what the IBM guys told us.  I argued for using
Oracle because we had Big Database Servers running Oracle, and we had no
DB/2 clue on-staff, and because IBM supports it.  The contractor (who
left two months later) wanted to use DB/2 because it was
"better supported".  Hmm, to whom shall we listen?  Someone who won't be
around to fight with it when we implement or the guy who'll be chained
to this beast until he leaves?  There were suits involved, so of course
they had to do something stupid.

I wonder if they ever got Content Mangler to do anything besides lose
documents and crash.  What an unbelievable pile of garbage that product
is!


[0] Or, in our case, abuses.  Wanna see a Big IBM server grind to a
     crawl?  Do a five-dimensional full-join on tables with hundreds of
     thousands of rows and about thirty columns each.  "Subqueries?
     What're those?"
-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Buy the best there is, because it's sorry enough."
Elgin, TX         (                                      --Henry Zuehlke