Having had the misfortune to once be a Oracle DBA I can definitely confirm this is Oracle true-to-form. It amazes me how many times Oracle departs from Larry Ellison's "Unbreakable" hype. What I remember about Oracle is they would send out eye-wateringly huge patches with massive prerequisites and complications that would happily slaughter Oracle Applications and databases if you got any part of it wrong. I also seem to remember that Oracle would also slip in missing functionality to applications in to patches and bury the details in the small print. They are an absolutely reprehensible company dealing databases and shoddy applications - they make Microsoft look like the high watermark of professionalism and consistency in terms of patching and maintenance. The misery Ellison's "wretched hive of scum and villainy" has caused me would fill several books.

I just had to laugh at your comment, I used to work with Oracle db for years, developing PL/SQL & C applications. I can say that you sound like some of our customers, the worst guyz call themselves Oracle DBA's and lack even basic understanding of what a database is, or need a hand-hold to update a table, create a view ... of course, you are supposed to RTM, especially when you update a prod environment, maybe even test it on a test machine? These pseudo DBA's liked to throw complicated words around like tablespaces, redo-logs or RAC etc and had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. I have seen a lot of customers do silly things over the years, but, honestly, I never had to blame Oracle, most of the time, these guyz would just install the update and fill our system with HEEEEELP!!!!!!! requests a RTM would have solved - nope I do not work with software from Oracle anymore. What "details in the small print" ? .

Then again, MS SQL server will deadlock in some circumstances when two sessions perform a SELECT on a table - nice, professional feature, indeed! When you consider using MS SQL, you should knock on Sybase's door instead, heck, they wrote the code!

I post anonymously for the self-esteem of my former customers, you see, I have a heart for these idiots!