Searching for answers to Oracle product failure questions on Google seems a useless effort. All Oracle products are licensed and therefore entitled to Oracle support. The questions get answered and there’s no discussion on the public internet. Google is still your friend, but it has limitations. Sure, you will find answers to most known database errors (ORA-nnnnn), and common listener errors (TNS-nnnnn). Today there are dozens of prefixes, and new numbered messages. You will find most of them, and multiple sites worth reading and following. There is no shortage of documentation on the internet, and sites like Stack Overflow.
There are plenty of places to look for answers, to write details in threads of discussion that may or may not address the searcher’s specific problem. I know there are places to find answers in general. I’m talking about finding answers to the specific issues found in the installation of a particular database product where there are no answers specifically due to Oracle’s dominance through licensing.
Perhaps I have just described a right to repair issue and I am late to be new to the movement.
The answers to the questions I ask are in Oracle’s repositories. 40 years of product support has produced something other than cash. It’s done that, so what do I hope to gain here?
Oracle has been great in providing developers with software through the Oracle Technical Network (OTN). This only gets a developer so far. The lack of patches and updates, and the inability to even view tech notes can be a show-stopper to a learning curve. Some of the basic answers you are enlightened with are so simple, configuration or parameter settings that need tweaking, but from the method that Oracle arrives at the answer, you’ve never know it. Oracle support is super… well, mostly.
Some of the techs are superior. They can recreate issues, document failures, provide solutions, or escalate, accordingly. I have never heard of them searching their internal databases for the exact same phrase you searched Google for… They start with a planed set of procedures, do this, now this…. You often end up uninstalling and re-installing components, sometimes with new distributions, distributions much cleaner than those unpatched on OTN.
When an Oracle product is licensed, it is registered. Oracle has a right to information contained in your Oracle database. If you’ve violated the terms of your license, you can be charged. Fined. The benefits from Oracle increasing their services to the learning public would be that even unlicensed copies of their product are registered. In order for an Oracle database to be autonomous and self-healing, it needs to be connected to its master. It doesn’t need to be connected all the time, but, it needs to check in occasionally. Oracle has had trace files for years, but they’ve only started cultivating them for five years, +/-. This facility, TFA, and others, like ADR, all need to work, whether you’re connecting, or not. Only connected can Oracle make their claims.
I want to create a site that is the invisible link to Oracle solutions. By invisible link, I mean a site that isn’t either the question or the answer, it’s a message and the fix. Remember, I am talking about within Oracle, not the world. A failure and a fix. Not a site that you would ever browse, but a site that links Oracle to an invisible resource… a resource with the answer.
I don’t know if I want to create an interface or a networked solution. I have been working with Oracle on VMs here in the house for the last three months of social distancing. I am not employed and I’m looking for something that involves my love, Oracle. I think the next step to document the RAC configuration we have here currently on disk. I also hope to document my system of configuring, useful aliases, and a simple menu system, that remains more functional than the one built into Oracle tfactl (trace file utility).
The next build phase on VMs will be another RAC installation using RAID and more, specifically sized, volumes.
During this build cycle, I hope to demonstrate some of the conditions in the interface I want to build.
This whole concept is developing. I’ve been kicking it around without doing anything about it. 6/6/2020.