Conference ulysse::rdb_vms_competition

50.0. "Oracle Mess" by AUNTB::BOOTH (A career of MISunderstanding) Mon Nov 30 1987 20:56

    Is this any way to run a software company? Could you create FUD with this 
MUD?

From MISWeek, 11/23/87:

                      Oracle DBMS Stirs User's Anger
                            By Irwin Greenstein

 Berkeley, Calif. - Oracle Corp. is negotiating a refund to a startup 
financial firm here that claims that its business risked near-havoc due to 
an early version of an Oracle database management system (DBMS), MISWeek 
has learned.
  After three frustrating months of attempting to develop a real-time 
foreign-exchange application on Oracle's relational DBMS under Unix 
Berkeley 4.2, Capital Market Technology Inc. (CMT), based here, unplugged 
the software from its Sun workstations, taking a loss of about $30,000, CMT 
officials disclosed. CMT then installed a DBMS from Sybase Inc., also based 
here, which specializes in Unix DBMS.
  An Oracle official argued that the chief cause of CMT's problems with its 
DBMS was that the company turned its back on Oracle's consultant and 
educational services. However, Oracle, based in Belmont, Calif., has to 
shoulder part of the burden due to inadequate account management, the 
official said.
  Because Oracle's DBMS caused setbacks in bringing to market an 
application to manage foreign-exchange portfolios for corporate clients, 
"I would say we were within the width of a hair of having serious problems" 
with venture investor customers, said Rod Zimmerman, CMT's database 
administrator.

Great Expectations

  "A small company has a window of opportunity," Zimmerman said. "They 
raise money, there's definite expectations on the part of the investors as 
to when they can expect a return. If you don't do it then, you may never in 
your lifetime get another chance."
  CMT president Sean Llewelyn said, "We were just spending so long playing 
around with Oracle rather than getting the product going, between the time 
that we accepted shipment of their DBMS in June and when we scrapped it in 
August...we might never have gotten there."
  "We are now in a turnaround. We are trying hard to get the first customer 
in November," said Mark Garman, CMT chairman. "We have been talking to 
several parties."
  Using Sybase, the CMT team has now developed an application capable of 
processing some 20,000 transactions per day to help corporate treasurers 
maintain a predetermined margin of return on foreign-exchange holdings. In 
a real-time mode, CMT's software updates a matrix of information from 
15,000 to 20,000 price items coming down the pike "from on-line information 
services," Garman explained.
  Referring to the abandonment of the Oracle DBMS, Bruce Cleveland, 
Oracle's Unix product line manager, charged that CMT ignored Oracle's 
educational programs. He called CMT "very naive" and said that "they are 
not naive in the sense of being computer specialists, but in being naive 
Oracle users. You cannot use Oracle without training and without prior 
experience."

DBMS Still in Beta

  In seemingly contradictory remarks, Cleveland vouched for the quality of 
the DBMS sold to CMT, while subsequently admitting that pieces of the 
product were still in beta, or pre-production, version when shipped.
  "I'm not trying to abrogate our responsibility," Cleveland said. "I'll 
apologize for the management of CMT account, not for the quality of the 
product."
  Cleveland later added, "When the salesman sold them that product, pieces 
of it were in beta, not in production. If CMT had contacted me, I would've 
told them, 'We don't have a product for you today.' For example SQL Net, 
the ability to connect Sun workstations together -- that feature was not 
available at that time. That's one of the reasons we terminated that 
individual."
  SQL Net is slated to be available this summer, according to Cleveland.
  Waine Beard, the former Oracle salesman who serviced the CMT account and 
is now working for Sybase, vehemently denied Cleveland's allegations.
  Although Oracle's DBMS for Unix 4.2 is still not generally available, "it 
was on the price list" at the time he sold it to CMT, Beard said. "The 
product is available if there is a price for a product, and Oracle is 
willing to ship it in its current state."
  After a prospective customer signs the software license agreement, "it's 
approved by Oracle for signature, and then returned to the customer," Beard 
noted. "At that time, the software is shipped to the customer, once it's 
approved by Oracle's management."
  "Beard also countered that he was not terminated by Oracle. "I resigned 
from Oracle on July 2, 1987," he said, "because Sybase made me a better 
offer. Sybase, as company and as a product, offered me a better career path 
and allowed me to make a greater contribution to the user community."
  Bob Vandenaker, Beard's direct supervisor who also recently left Oracle, 
confirmed Beard's statement "Waine clearly resigned from Oracle. He had 
another position he would rather pursue."
  Beard also challenged CMT's allegations of not disclosing they were 
buying beta software.
  "They gave us a beta version, but didn't tell us," insisted Llewelyn. In 
a meeting on Nov. 13, with Cleveland and two other Oracle officials, they 
"acknowledged that they couldn't support it until summer."
  Cleveland disclosed that Oracle would be "releasing in the near future 
ports based on Unix 4.2."
  Cleveland blamed the CMT incident "on two things: an overeager 
salesperson, for that I apologize; but on the other hand it's a combination 
of CMT not educating themselves."
  Llewelyn replied, "The classes would not have helped us at all. We 
weren't told it was an unauthorized beta version. The tech support was 
inadequate. We had to cope with what we thought was a market version."

It Seemed Reasonable

  In the Nov. 13 meeting, "We requested a refund" of the license fee, 
Llewelyn said. "Their attitude was that they would refer the refund to 
other people in the organization." The Oracle representatives, Llewelyn 
said, believed "it wasn't unreasonable to ask for one."
  Both companies, CMT and Oracle, confirmed that negotiations were in 
progress on a refund in the amount of approximately $17,000, representing 
the license fee, while CMT would absorb the remainder of the overall loss 
in manpower cost.
  Cleveland acknowledged that, "A reimbursement for the fee is under 
negotiation."
  Cleveland, meanwhile, criticized the Unix community for its so-called 
hacker approach to obviating vendor educational services.
  "I run into this a lot," Cleveland said. "Unix people feel they are very 
competent. They are used to being hackers."
  The dilemma is further aggravated when a user of one Unix is forced to 
deal with a different Unix operating system. "Unix is full of bigots -- 
Berkeley bigots and AT&T bigots," he said. The AT&T proponents are "more 
commercial" while their Berkeley antagonists are "more academic."
  In that vein, Cleveland chastened Garman. "Mark's comment to me is that 
he has a Ph. D., and is a computer scientist. But my response is how can 
you open a new product and be productive on it? That's the hacker. You 
could've taken three days and gone to the forms classes, and avoided the 
problem."
  Cleveland subsequently admitted, however, "CMT also had a beta copy of 
SQL Forms" for Berkeley 4.2 Unix on Sun workstations."

SQL Forms Spurred Switch

  SQL Forms was a thorny problem for CMT's Garman. Ultimately, the 
unwieldiness of SQL Forms, used for creating screens, was pivotal in CMT's 
decision to scrap Oracle in favor of Sybase.
  "After I fiddled with screen tools for a month or so, and still didn't 
have anything to show for it, I said, 'That's it, it's going to take us 
forever to develop screens on this system,'" the chairman said.
  Characterizing his programming skills, Garman said, "I'm a reasonable 
programmer. I'm not a professional programmer, but I did graduate with an 
equivalent of a Ph. D. in programming."

I would be interested in hearing how Sybase handled the training
issue better than Oracle, and how customers percieve the ease of
our installation and support of application development.  In my
experience, Sybase is no easier to work with than Oracle, and
requires a comparable learning curve.  Sybase on Sun Unix was about
as hard to use as Oracle, and Sybase on VMS (this was around August
of '87) was a complete nightmare.

RE -.1
    Dave,
    
    Could you please tell us what the nightmare was with Sybase on the
    Vax?  I am very interested.
    
    

re: .-1

The problem was an impossibly buggy system for VMS.  I sent a guy who
had considerable DBMS experience (including about 5 years experience
as a Cullinet developer, as I recall) to Sybase school.  That was a 
week of training, plus travel, before he could begin to use the system
effectively, and he knew the relational data model quite well before he
went to school.

Despite the training, it turned out that the Sybase/VMS we had did not
perform acceptably, and we had to delay our development four months 
until our Sun systems were installed.  The major bugs I recall were:
1) the report writer flat did not work and 2) it completely hosed the
access of other processes to the RA8Xs we had installed (response time
of DIR on a disk which had a Sybase file on it was on the order of
minutes), and 3) the 785 we had it on was not sufficient to support
other users (mostly editing and printing text files) when the query
processor was running.

The UNIX version on the Suns is running well, although it has a rather
annoying feature:  if you attempt to bring up the Data Workbench on
your local machine either by rpc or rlogin, the Data Workbench, while
advertised to support up to three users (presumably two in the Sun
architecture are remote), it turns out that the user interface only
knows how to talk to the console.  The result is that a remote user
starts the Data Workbench, and the user of the machine on which DW
is installed is startled to see a DW workbench window suddenly pop
up over whatever he or she was doing, while the remote user gets
hung.  Clever programming, wot?

Dave