Oracle 9i Internet Application Server II

investmenttool.com technology journal

Yes, they actually expect me to get things done at work, and ias is what they want. The problem is oracle doesn't seem to be very good at supporting the product. This weeks adventure was thoroughly frustrating but there was a moment of hope on Friday.

The product takes around six hours to install on a server after an equal amount of preparation time. Internet Application Server is not a single product. It is a bundle of separate products designed to work together in a flexible and integrated fashion.

After a perfect installation without a single error message or warning, I thought it might be reasonable to expect the basic components, such as a server to display reports designed with oracle's development tools. This assumption was wrong for a few reasons. First, the server configured itself excepting data to be located in directories of the server that it never bothered to create or populate with data.

The worst aspect of the product is oracle support. At a premium price one would expect dedicated, knowledgeable support staff. That would be a very large mistake. Since ias is composed of a dozen sub products, the goal of support staff seems to be to blame some other component and convince you to close the call and open another one.

I flatly refused to do this. Since my last major issue was the operations of the report server, I would not let the support man off. His English was interpretable but understandable. He kept forwarding articles that he thought might help. Then he would but the call into "waiting on customer status". Once my call went back into my box 45 seconds after I hit the submit button telling them the latest article was useless.

Finally, when I discovered the out of the box configuration files, I threw an online fit. I uploaded the offending files and warned if someone familiar with my operating system didn't get to work I would be calling supervisors.

The actual error seemed to indicate an issue with the database connectivity. The problem was that all the database connectivity tests seemed to indicate that the connection was fine. On Friday my support rep and his supervisor called and I missed a train for some simple tests. Tests that should have happened a week ago.

The bottom line is there is a reasonable chance that we will have minimal functionality from the reports server some time on Monday. The cost was a week of my time, which I will never get back.

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Shmuel Protter
investmenttool.com

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