Re: Oracle rant

On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, mlw wrote:

> I just wanted to post this note.
>
> I have been in Oracle hell for four days now, and in between the 5
> minutes of work and the hours of watings, dealing with table spaces,

I've been in Informix hell for the month or so.
At first, we were getting the message "No more extents" - so I look up the
documentation and it says the only way to fix it is to either delete data
or unload and reload the data.  Ok. fine. I talked with a bunch of people
and they agreed that is how to fix the problem.  Unfortunatly, we cannot
have much downtime and a reload would take days and days.  So I went about
writing a little appliation to do it (Since I could not use a lovely sql
statement to do it because of a lack of logical log space - turning the
logs off is also not something I want to do.. especially on a multi-day
operation).

So the thing runs.  A week later the data is loaded, indexes built. We're
about to switch the tables and I'm replaying my "audit trail" to make sure
the new table is up to date when I get "No more exents".  Luckly I had a
bottle of rum handy.  After some searching around on newsgroups and
message boards it turns out that the problem is not that there are not
enough extents, but there are 16.7M pages of data in the table. The only
fixes for THAT are to fragment the table (Kind of like an internal union
view type thing - which I couldn't do because informix doesn't let you do
union with a text blob).  So after lots of testing and finding out the
version of informix we run has a bug where max() doesn't work if your
index is fragmented, we've finally started the copy again.

A long time ago I managed to win a battle to get a PG system (7.0.1) for a
thing I developed.  That machine has NEVER <knock knock> had a problem.
And since that time we've moved lots of stuff onto it... currently is only
about 4GB in size. Someday I'll upgrade to a newer version, but if it
ain't broke, don't fix it.

So with all that, you gotta appreciate both sides - hte fact pg "just
works" and the tunability of bigger db's (Oh yeah - and we've actually had
informix on the horn about the problem - their solution was "upgrade to
9.4 - it'll be out in march").

Hopefully this last thing will complete and I'll be done with it.

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