RE: More Support woes!

  • From: Paul Houghton <Paul.Houghton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "howard.latham@xxxxxxxxx" <howard.latham@xxxxxxxxx>, ORACLE-L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 11:50:09 +0000

I have similar problems. Whenever you raise an SR you are asked for the same 
information multiple times. If you persist the answer you normally get is that 
the system is working as designed.

For example, the recycle bin is designed so that when a table needs to extend 
and there is no free space it drops something out of the recyclebin. This works 
fine, until you need to extend the table because you are inserting a row in a 
trigger. Then you can't do  the drop. Support advised that the system is 
working as designed - you can't do DDL in a trigger. Our triggers are the 
problem and need to be rewritten. I pointed out that we were following 
documented practice and we were not doing DDL - it was Oracle that was doing it 
without being asked to. Support grudgingly said if we really want they could 
raise an enhancement. They refused to change the documentation to match the 
behaviour, or the behaviour to match the documentation. They insisted we put in 
hacky workarounds, which is made more difficult because the DBA views treat 
recyclebin objects as free space.

It is very hard to get a call escalated. If you follow the procedure, the 
options in the menu on the phone system don't include an option which seems 
appropriate for escalating an SR. The last time I asked for a call to be 
escalated I was ignored. The last time I did get a call escalated it was 
de-escalated without asking or telling me.

To be fair to the support staff I believe this is because they are powerless. 
They can raise a bug but it will be closed as "not a bug" with some bizarre 
justification which can not be challenged. Then anyone else who raises a bug on 
the same issue will get it closed as a duplicate.

I am filling in the surveys when SRs get closed pointing this out in the hope 
that someone will notice. My concern is they will just be used to beat up the 
poor support staff.

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