Comments on: RTFM - stuff you never wanted to know about reading the manual!

By: Ken Naim

Ken Naim — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:34:44 +0000

I find the documentation to serve its purpose quite adequetly however i find the search engines lacking, especially when delaing with some oracle features that use very generic terms as names, unforutently none come to mind at the moment.

By: Stephen Booth

Stephen Booth — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 10:02:11 +0000

My personal view is that Oracle documentation (for the database at least) took a sharp decline after version 7 and is only now starting to recover. The version 7 documentation was clear, explanatory and quickly let you find what you needed to know. Versions 8, 8i and 9i documentation seemed bloated, unclear and to have massive gaping holes. I heard a rumour that version 7 and earlier the documentation was mostly written by techies who either worked on/with the product or had worked on/with the product in the past where as in 8 Oracle brought in a load of technical writers to overhaul the documentation and give it a more professional polish. How true that is I don’t know but I certainly saw a big change between v7 and v8.

Stephen

By: Charles Schultz

Charles Schultz — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:03:34 +0000

I agree, the documentation is both vast and comprehensive, in good and bad ways. The authors have gone to amazing lengths to describe, report and analyze how Oracle works. It is a grand day when you can find that little piece of gold buried in the mounds of verbiage.

I am happy to refer to the documentation, especially if someone can point out a particular section that may be of interest. Trying to find what you are looking for if you have “no clue” may be a wild goose chase, however. For all the good documentation, I have found that errors are not documented well. I look forward to when errors can be cross-referenced with the documentation in a meaningful way (I hate those ora-600 errors that say, “You should never see this, call Oracle Support”).

The irony to such a thick library is that there are many things that are not documented, so it is easy to come in with the expectation that “everything” is documented and then get a reality check when you cannot find it.

All in all, the documentation is excellent! The next step in evolution is when they finally put up a wiki. Please, the sooner the better!

By: Alex Gorbachev

Alex Gorbachev — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 00:52:36 +0000

Well said. Thanks Simon!

All obvious stuff - so with such easy access to the documentation, why is it you still see lame questions (on Oracle-L, OTN discussion forums, etc) asking how to do such and such? Surely it’s quicker just to look it up… and you don’t have to wait for some kind soul to reply.

I can’t resist adding “It’s lame guess-answers that inspire lame questions”.

By: Alex Fatkulin

Alex Fatkulin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:18:37 +0000

“I KNOW THE ACCESS DATABASE VERY WELL, AND IS FAR BETTER THAN ORACLE. ORCALE IS TOO MANY DOCS”

remember that funny thread on OTN