Re: Why does oracle support suck so much?

NetComrade wrote:
> Over the years I have learned to rely less and less on oracle support,
> because quite often you get someone who is either incompetent or
> thick-headed. Thanks to this group, asktom website and many other
> useful oracle sites (or just plain googling) this has been more or
> less possible. However, sometimes when you think you're hitting some
> bug, one has no choice but to log that TAR via metalink.

Oracle unfortunately seems to be viewing support as a revenue generation stream.

It is certainly less expensive to move support jobs outside the US.

There is no question about it the quality of support that one gets has dropped drastically over the last 10 years.

The only apparent motivation that the people working support demonstrate is closing tickets as quickly as possible.

It does not appear to matter if they try to refer you to some bug that has little relevance to your problem. Also, they try to agressively push your problem into some other area so that they can close the current ticket and ask you to open a different one.

>
> I have recently had to open 2 tickets.
>
> One of the tickets was on mysterious job ownership changes (multiple
> schemas, same procedure name, same time), I posted about this earlier
> (Apr 17, same day as I opened a ticket). It took Oracle over a week to
> admit that this was actually happenning, meanwhile giving me
> suggestions such as "Do you need this job? Can you drop this job?"
> (copy and paste from the TAR), while I had to repeatedly state
> something between the lines of "Oracle should not be 'confused' about
> which schema is running and should report which job is failing. Please
> search the bug database and advise on how to figure this out.. We
> can't debug our application is Oracle itself is buggy.". Eventually I
> was told that we must be hitting a Bug 4480940 SIMPLE IMPORT REASSIGNS
> JOB OWNERSHIP, but it doesn't look like this bug has anything to do
> with our problem (there are no 'imports' going on here). For now we
> gave up and 'migrated' to crontab's instead

Yes it the common reply "you must be hitting such and such a bug",

> Another bug we are apparently hitting (4449644), which has to do with
> excessive CPU usage by Oracle Dispatchers, has been fixed in 9.2.0.8,
> which unfortunately is not available for AMD Linux yet, but they've
> been working on a 'backport' patch for over 3 weeks now. I have
> repeatedly tried to escalate this issue today, and all I get in the
> TAR is 'escalated with development', which means _nothing_.. I got a
> message from another 'duty manager' today, it basically stated the
> following:
> "It's impossible for us to give you an estimate on when your backport
> patch will be ready, since we have no control over it. It's in the
> development 'queue', and it updates daily. It's the nature of software
> business to have such uncertainty"
> So maybe next time we have to pay Oracle we can just say "we don't
> know when we'll have the money, but we'll certainly pay at some point
> in the future.."
>
> One of the most ridiculous things I ever heard from Oracle

I had a severity 1 ticket open for over 2 months last year when trying to install one of the cpu security patches. Received on Fri Apr 28 2006 - 18:22:54 CDT