Hey, it's Friday! Time to write my op-ed entry for the week. And this week I've been dealing everyone's favorite way to incite a headache: Oracle.

To be fair, I don't know much about Oracle. I mainly deal with SQL server, but I've also used MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Filemaker in the past. However, I'm doing a project at work that's backed by the new Oracle 10XE, and it's just no fun.

For those that haven't used Oracle 10XE, it's their "personal" edition aimed at the MySQL market. You can only have one database (but many users...which sort of are like what others think of as databases...oh, my simple head starts to spin). It also comes with a super-duper able-to-build-entire-applications-with-zero-code Web-enabled management UI / uber-console that's called, in an amazing move of the Oracle branding department, HTML DB.

It's a piece of crap:

1. It's slow. Molasses-on-a-sunday-morning-in-Vermont-in-February slow.

2. I'm not sure what the Javascript it so heavily relies on doing, but often it'll freeze Firefox entirely while it does something simple, like run a 1-record select statement.

3. Hey, look, a recycle bin. It lets me see dropped objects. Hrm, no "Restore" button on the list. (Click an object). Hey...no restore here either. Not much of a recycle bin, more like a "nyah nyah, you dropped it, you're not getting it back bin."

This is pretty representative of the whole experience.

4. Wow, they spent a lot of time on writing Javascript to dynamically resize the ui's iframes on every page load. It's not like the end user can resize them, so....why not just statically size them with something like width="300"?

5. Object Browser. Tables. Choose a table. Add column named "SomeCharColumn". Next. Finish. Create. Finish already. Create. Confirm. Oh - sorry, the default length we filled out for you a few steps back isn't valid for CHAR. And we won't tell you what is. Enjoy!

6. This one's minor, but representative. When you add a foreign key constaint, and choose the column in one table, you'd think it'd just guess that you want to select a column with the same name in the referenced table. MySQL Administrator does it, and it's quite nice. You'd that that Oracle, with Mr. Ellison flying his MiG, could afford those ten lines of Javascript. But, no, the open source guys actually produced a better UI than the billion-upon-billion dollar company.

7. CSV exports. They must've missed some minor QA, because I love DL'ing files named foo.csv.txt - c'mon, guys, this is a second-week-doing-web-apps thing.

8. Basic "Does this make sense?" QA was never done. I love having two links, on the same page, labelled "Home" and "Homepage" that go to entirely different places.

Overall, Oracle put a lot of time into trying to make things "slick" with Javascript - I've been using it for a few months, and just noticed the start-button style flyout menus on a lot of the "let's draw our own .GIFs instead of using <input type="button"< controls. - but it's like they spent very little time questioning whether or not the thing does what it says it's going to do, or works in the way a dba/developer expects it to.

Man, I love TOAD.