John BullJan 26
As an older tech person, it's legit heartwarming watching the TikTok generation discover why we all hate Oracle.
Show threadlemgandi

@garius And their flagship database is an enormous pile of Crap. Many people feed their families by knowing its quirks and difficulties, but I'd rather be productive.

To give you just one example: Oracle SQL HAS NO BOOLEAN DATA TYPE. The official recommendation is to use a 1 char field. What goes into that? Well, who knows? "Y/N" ? "y/n"? "O/N" if you're french? "1/0"?

In many shops, the result is supposedly boolean fields that contain 3, 5, even 7 different values. Yikes.

Jan 26 at 11:16pmWeb
Show threadjz.tuskJan 27

@lemgandi @garius

Fuck Oracle and all, but if they don't know how to put a constraint on a column I gotta wonder if there was ever any hope.....

Show threadlemgandiJan 27

@jztusk @garius

Nope, not for a lot of places. And yeh, that's the band-aid. But still, every DBA is going to have a DIFFERENT CONSTRAINT. Y/N, y/n, 0/1, 1/-1, 1/0, O/N.

I think there's even a mid-eastern language out there where "No" begins with a Y ...

Show threadlemgandiJan 28

@jztusk @garius

And then of course Gary, who quit 5 years ago, favors +/-. But the new guy uses y/n. So now the unlucky developers get to juggle 4 different mutually incompatible values for a Boolean.

Use 'y' instead of '+'? Oops, that's a bug that takes 4 hours to find.