So we were having a poorly performing query on Oracle 10g (worked fine in 8i or 9i)... HMMM

So an oracle consultant was called...

So... with his infinite wisdom he looked at our queries (this was at a client's set up) and said... I HAVE A SUGESTION...
HERE IS THE SUGESTED SQL: and he gave us some... it was fine, worked, fine, actually it worked REALLY fast, but the problem was it gave the incorrect results.

Reading his e-mail in more detail he himself mentioned that his brilliant query did not give correct results... WTF I thought... infact WTF is what everyone thought...

So we were pissed, but so was our client, they wanted it working and NOW... so my manager googled for about 15 minutes and saw that oracle 10g introduced a nifty new Timestamp field, not to be confused with the old Date field which worked with Timestamp jdbc objects. A simple startup property was enough to fix everything. In other words the client wasted a week's worth of oracle consulting fees only to have my manager figure it out without any help from the consultant (mind you the consultant helped drive us in the wrong direction). What happened was oracle tried using our Timestamp jdbc object and convert it to a Timestamp field, then to a Date, then compare to a column... instead of Timestamp JDBC -> Date -> Compare.

 

hopefully your client can get their money back from oracle consulting.

greedy wankers innit.

Oh yes, and aren't the current rates for Oracle Consulting about $380.00 an hour!?

Many years ago (oracle 6), I got called to a clients site to recover a database.  Oracle had sent their "fireman of the year" consultant, and he said:  "You hot backup procedures did not backup the controlfiles correctly"  There is no way to recover the database (oracle 6 didn't have a "create controlfile" command).  The client stood to lose 2 years of data  He told them they were SOL.  So they called me.

I was brand-new to Oracle at the time, and had never run it a production environment, much less done a recovery.  While the "fireman of the year" was technically correct about not backing Oracle 6 controlfiles correctly in hot backups, he didn't as the client the right questions.  I asked some different ones:'

"Do you have any exports of the database anywhere?"

"No"

"Do you have any backups of the system taken at any time when the database was down?"

"No"

"Are you sure?  Absolutly none at all?"

"Well I did backup the system after the database crashed."

"Good.  Restore the controlfiles from it.  We will procede from there"

The "Fireman of the Year" did assist with the media recovery after the restore.  I could have done it but I hadn't done one before and it would have taken me longer.

 The thing I learned from that system operator is:  Always backup everything you can after a crash.  Those backups may be the ones that save your ass.

el_oscuro:

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Interesting story. Any reason you needed to resurrect this thread just to tell it?

MasterPlanSoftware:

el_oscuro:

...

 

Interesting story. Any reason you needed to resurrect this thread just to tell it?

One time, at Oracle camp...

MasterPlanSoftware:

Interesting story. Any reason you needed to resurrect this thread just to tell it?

The IHOC consists mostly of regulary resurrected threads. Don't be too harsh in that case.

ammoQ:

The IHOC consists mostly of regulary resurrected threads. Don't be too harsh in that case.

The point is that he should have made a new thread. Seems fitting here. 

Make new thread, link to this thread as a reference, profit.

The club thread itself is obviously going to get resurrected.

 Why are people so pissed when someone 'ressurects' a thread? Does the thread feel some kind of pain, is it inhuman to treat it like that? I agree that the guy should've have posted a different thread for his story but in other cases it seems legitimate to post in a dead thread. Maybe you have new information or want to clear up a mistake or something. Is that such a big problem?

hvm:

 Why are people so pissed when someone 'ressurects' a thread?

The problem is that we have to read through the old thread again just to catch up the context of the new post.

hvm:

 Why are people so pissed when someone 'ressurects' a thread? Does the thread feel some kind of pain, is it inhuman to treat it like that? I agree that the guy should've have posted a different thread for his story but in other cases it seems legitimate to post in a dead thread. Maybe you have new information or want to clear up a mistake or something. Is that such a big problem?

Sir, I admire your impeccable timing.

*clap* *clap*

 Thanks, that was part of the idea behind my post :D

 I am the guy who resurrected this thread.  I guess I should have been Arch-vile instead of El Oscuro. I am also pretty new to posting on TDWTF, so I have a few questions:

1. WTF is a dead thread?  On a Camaro board, we have active threads that are over 5 years old.
2. HTF do you tell if a given thread is dead?
3. HTF do you start a new thread?  How does this make it easier to search when the orignial thread only has about 10 posts?
4. The "Brilliant Oracle Consultants" thread should have about 1,000 replies.   If not, I have lots of experience and can spawn all kinds of "I hate Oracle" threads.
5. BTW, I have been an Oracle Consultant.  *Twice*

 Hehe, brilliant post :). Also I'd like to add that you don't have to scroll back to everything when reading a post on a 'dead thread'. If the poster quotes properly or give a short review of what (s)he's talking about then there are no problems. Maybe before when internet connections were expensive and slow you wouldn't quote everytime (resulting in tree-like posts) and couldn't load pages with hundreds of comments at a time but now that is possible. Why not get along with the time, habits and traditions change and on the internet that happens really fast.