Wow. Thanks for your effort here Dick. Sounds like quite an ordeal. At least I'll know some problems to look for if my company decides to try Discoverer!
David B. Wagoner Database Administrator Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc. 4815 Emperor Blvd., Suite 110 Durham, NC 27703 Tel. (919) 941-4645 Fax (919) 474-0735 Email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web http://www.arsenaldigital.com/ *** NOTICE *** This e-mail message is confidential, intended only for the named recipient(s) above and may contain information that is privileged, work product or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you have received this message in error, or are not the named recipient(s), please immediately notify the sender at (919) 941-4645 and delete this e-mail message from your computer. Thank you. -----Original Message----- Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 9:55 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L David, OK, first off the Oracle sales droid and pre-sales droid came in to do the install of the product (9iAS Enterprise Edition which BTW, you HAVE to have the Enterprise edition or else you don't get the WEB based tool). The install manual said it would need 6GB of HP-UX disk to install properly, BULL it was much closer to 9GB (OK, 8.75 to be exact). You end up installing WEB forms, graphics, reports, and the cache DB even though your not going to use them. We were told the install and initial configuration would only take half a day, it took that long just to read in the CD's and in actually took the better part of 16 hours with configuration going on into a third 8 hour time period. What a pile of BLOATware, YUCK!! Next the locator process intermittently died for no apparent reason. There was no core dump, or other indication that something odd had happen & the log file was less than helpful it turns out. Actually pointed us in the WRONG direction. According to the log we were having a semaphore problem when in truth it turned into a semaphore set problem. This thing LOVES doing IPC's. Next we had a problem with browsers. The company 'standard' is MicroSlop IE 5.0. Suppose to work, WRONG!! The only machine that would run Discoverer was a brand new one with ME and IE 5.51 or something like that, and then it wasn't exactly sure it wanted to go!! This one appears to be a JVM issue (MS does not like SUN on which Oracle's Java implementations is based), but MetaLink has a pointer to an article on 'How to use JInitiator with IE 5.x', but for some reason it has not been 'published' yet so you get an 'document is unavailable' message. The product did work with Netscape 4.61 and beyond but it was SLOW to startup. After that the interface being a 'navigation tree' was so foreign to our users that they were totally disenchanted. The 'last straw' was the admin edition where you had to map all of the tables, etc.. into the end user layer. Doing certain common tasks, although possible, was not intuitive (like sub queries). The great part was that it did use the referential integrity to self join tables, warned when you created a Cartesian query but let you run it anyway, and it has a damn good query predictor that gets smarter as time (read than as number of executions of the query) passes. What Oracle needs to do here is: 1) Support the MicroSlop browsers most likely by getting that article published. 2) Train their sales folks, they were going through the first install right along with us!! 3) Cut out the bloat. There is no reason for all the other stuff if all you want is Discoverer. 4) Figure out what the 'real' numbers are for disk and semaphore sets and publish them. 5) Put back that ability to use the native dictionary as well as the EUL. That was the way it was in Discoverer 2000, why the change? 6) Get rid of that 'navigation tree' in favor of the graphical table layout diagram. 7) Let end users edit their SQL. Easiest way to insert sub queries there ever was. 8) Improve the graphics capabilities, their a little primitive in the current version. In the end, when we told them we had decided against Discoverer 3000 they were "not suprised". Dick Goulet ____________________Reply Separator____________________ Author: David Wagoner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 10/29/2001 10:52 AM Dick, Can you elaborate a little on the instability of Oracle Discoverer 3000 with Oracle 9i database? I was planning to investigate Discoverer as an end-user reporting/query tool sometime soon. We have Oracle 8i and 9i databases. I just heard that Discoverer is an HTML-based data query tool for end-users. TIA, david David B. Wagoner Database Administrator Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc. 4815 Emperor Blvd., Suite 110 Durham, NC 27703 Tel. (919) 941-4645 Fax (919) 474-0735 Email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web http://www.arsenaldigital.com/ *** NOTICE *** This e-mail message is confidential, intended only for the named recipient(s) above and may contain information that is privileged, work product or exempt from disclosure under applicable law. If you have received this message in error, or are not the named recipient(s), please immediately notify the sender at (919) 941-4645 and delete this e-mail message from your computer. Thank you. -----Original Message----- Sent: Monday, October 29, 2001 9:40 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Oracle Browser 2/Oracle Discoverer 2000 is a VERY old piece of software that does not interact well with any Oracle instance beyond 7.3.4. We've got it, it's a pain in the neck, and I would NOT recommend anyone else try to use it, except if your still running 7.x databases. Your options are not very great, use Oracle 9iAS enterprise edition for the browser based version of Oracle Discoverer 3000 (not a very stable product from our experience [9iAS version 9.0.1 on HP-UX]) Or go to the third party market We are with a product called Brio. Dick Goulet ____________________Reply Separator____________________ Author: "Michael" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 10/28/2001 4:05 AM Hi all, Doesn't anybody out there know what Oracle Browser 2 is, and where I might be able to download a copy ? Thanks for your time. Michael. <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii"> <TITLE>Message</TITLE> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2600.0" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY> <DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial size=2>Hi all,</FONT></SPAN></DIV> <DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV> <DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001> <FONT face=Arial size=2>Doesn't anybody out there know what Oracle Browser 2 is, and where I might be able to download a copy ?</FONT></SPAN></DIV> <DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV> <DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001> <FONT face=Arial size=2>Thanks for your time.</FONT></SPAN></DIV> <DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT></SPAN> </DIV> <DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001><FONT face=Arial size=2>Michael.</FONT></SPAN></DIV> <DIV><SPAN class=507420512-28102001></SPAN> </DIV></BODY></HTML> -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists -------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: David Wagoner INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists -------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists -------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: David Wagoner INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists -------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
