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the hostility of Oracle
Monday, June 9 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
This morning I had a relatively mundane task I wanted to accomplish with a relational database. That task was to experimentally execute a stored procedure so I could see what sort of data it would produce. Had I been using any of the relational databases with which I have a deep history (Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, or PostgreSQL), this would've been easy. All those database systems can be interactively queried. You send them SQL and they return a recordset showing you the resulting data. It's the most basic functionality one would want of a data storage system. With Oracle, though, things are not so easy, and Oracle is the database technology my current employer uses. "Interactive" queries in Oracle produce a "cursor" which then has to be processed by code that isn't exactly boilerplate and that needs to have foreknowledge of the format of the data being returned. The interactive database tool I was using was DBeaver, and I've had this problem before. Last time I wanted to interactively run a stored procedure as a sanity check on some C# code that called it, I got stuck in a multi-hour ChatGPT loop where the large language model kept coming up with suggestions for how to get data out of DBeaver, frequently making suggestions that DBeaver couldn't actually parse. Part of what needed to happen was that DBeaver needed to have the right driver installed, but then it turned out that this driver couldn't be installed because DBeaver had hidden or changed all the places in its UI where this might be done. There was a work-around, but it involved the creation of lots of highly-specific and extremely brittle SQL statements, something that was best left to ChatGPT. That time, I'd eventually gotten what I wanted. But today I was back in that unpleasant vortex yet again, stuck in that same familiar loop. It was horrible and infuriating, and eventually I decided to try installing some other database tool like SQLPlus or some Oracle-provided tool. But all of these programs had their own problems, needing impossible-to-install drivers or magic unknown and completely undiscoverable parameters. Eventually I had to return to DBeaver, where at some point ChatGPT gave me the winning formula. But there was nothing in any of this that provided a roadmap for how to perform such tests of stored procedures in the future. I asked ChatGPT why it was that anyone uses Oracle given how hostile it is, and it claimed that its advantages were rock-solid reliability, something that apparently grows out of its refusal to provide an easy way to interactively query its data.
By the end of the day, I'd done a query and gotten access to a few things. I was also beginning to come up to speed on Crystal Reports, mostly by asking ChatGPT about it. In passing, to feel out Crystal Reports' capabilities, I happened to tell the large language model about the bespoke reporting system I'd built for my ESP8266 Remote Control system, what with its JSON-specified parameter forms that can themselves query the database to populate dropdowns, etc. ChatGPT seemed impressed (though, to be fair, it always seems impressed) and gushed about how my reporting system had features that were far advanced from the primitive capabilities of Crystal Reports. It even made a handy comparison grid. So it's looking like soon I'll be working with yet another technology I fucking hate.
At the end of the workday, I returned home and took Charlotte and Neville for a walk. Unusually, we started west of the Farm Road and then came down the escarpment not quite near its southern end, thereby keeping me in the broadcast radius of my laboratory-based radio station (I didn't want to miss out on a juicy Dr. John Delony segment about a fundamentalist Christian fiancée who "tested" her future husband by saying she'd thought about it and now she actually did want to have sex before marriage even though she actually did not. (He failed the test.)
Back at the house, I cooked up a huge pan of kale, made rice in the InstantPot, and cooked up a pan of mushrooms, onions, and tempeh with the idea of eating all this with a leftover peanut sauce. It made for another successful meal, one I hadn't actually made before.
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