Don Burleson’s Questions To Ask Your Applications Vendor

February 26th, 2004 by Mark Rittman

Don Burleson offers some useful
guidelines on what to ask of third-party application vendors whose
applications run on the Oracle platform. Don’s advice?

"If you are the victim of a shoddy Oracle vendor implementation,
insist on your right to be provided with complete and accurate Oracle
documentation. Remember, it’s your vendor’s responsibility to provide you with
the configuration and optimization details for their Oracle database. Also
remember, you did not write the vendor’s application, design their database
schema, or write their SQL, so you should not be responsible for tuning
it."

Check out the article for a sample documentation checklist, including
questions to ask about the server configuration, schema layout and guidelines
for monitoring and maintaining the underlying database.

Posted in Oracle Database |

Comments

  1. Tony Quinn Says:

    February 27th, 2004 at 2:04 pm

    Mark,
    Don’s guidelines are very interesting but..
    Yet again I’ve been called in by a retail client to sort out the mess left by “consultants” provided by the vendor of an 3rd party app. As is usual they naively believed the “Oracle bit bucket with no referential integrity” product they bought would solve all their problems. Ofcourse it just increased their problems and throwing masses of hardware at it has made no difference.
    Usual story, client pays through the nose for consultants who are Oracle “experts” especially with large datawarehouses. This usually means they’ve graduated 12 months ago and have been on the pl/sql course.
    Consequence is batch loads take days and days to run and one consultant is replaced by another.
    They are trying to tune very large Oracle systems and they’ve never even heard of Tom Kyte.
    With a bit of proper Oracle nous we have now got most batch loads down to a more manageable couple of hours.
    Impressive weblog, and I’m booked into the UKOUG Tools special event next month, so see you there.
    Kind regards,
    Tony Quinn.

  2. Mark Rittman Says:

    March 1st, 2004 at 10:01 pm

    Hi Tony,
    Thanks for the feedback. Look forward to seeing you at the reporting tools event.
    all the best
    Mark