You all are probably aware that over the weekend of 23rd August, the Oracle Forums underwent an upgrade. I would not bother clicking on the link though, chances are you will end up seeing something like this:
I would not say the upgrade has gone well.
The above was taken on Wednesday at 09:30am BST, some 5 days after the upgrade began and there seems to be pretty much a continual outage, though maybe it’s working for you?
Sure, I’m gutted that I can’t spend some time prowling the forums looking for a question to answer. I hope Oracle are going to be open about what has gone wrong.
I think it is very interesting that a company the size of Oracle’s with huge resources of talent and money have had such a debacle. Perhaps, the forum is not considered mission critical inside of Oracle, and I can see that something like Metalink is far more critical from a customer service point of view.
That being said if Oracle can frankly make a right hash of an upgrade, what chance is there for the rest of us?
Of course maybe the forums are actually backended with a mysql db 
However if Oracle are after any consultancy regarding Dataguard, my rates are quite reasonable!
I’m pretty certain this is their second go at it, the format appeared briefly a while ago and was pulled and the old version restored.
Maybe tom kyte can help them debug the application…
Comment by Chris — August 27, 2008 @ 12:27 pm |
Hi Chris,
Yep! I think you are right on the 2nd go. It did seem to work for me on Sunday/Monday even if somewhat slowly.
Since Tuesday it has seemed dead like the proverbial parrot – or maybe it’s just sleeping.
jason.
Comment by jarneil — August 27, 2008 @ 12:43 pm |
Its been brought down by all those folks being put back to ‘noob’ status after having spent years answering thousands of questions but not getting some credit for it on the new system ;0)
Comment by Tim — August 27, 2008 @ 4:37 pm |
I’ve seen several tweets from @oracletechnet regarding the OTN upgrade that would support your comment that OTN is not a mission critical site: (in reverse chronological order)
“I feel compelled to reiterate: OTN does not have “support” DNA, it has “evangelism” DNA (and operates accordingly)”
and
“Forums.oracle.com going in read-only mode for 24 hrs starting at 6pm PT (for upgrade re-try) 09:32 AM August 08, 2008 from web “
Comment by Bradd Piontek — August 27, 2008 @ 5:55 pm |
Hi Tim,
Thanks for reading!
Ha ha, DOS attack by gnarled forum veteran irate at being labelled a newbie!
It’s just crazy enough to become a conspiracy theory
cheers,
jason.
Comment by jarneil — August 27, 2008 @ 5:58 pm |
Hi Bradd,
Thanks for sharing that! I’ve still to get with twitter, I’m sure these web 2.0 things take ages to gain traction over this side of the pond.
Does not surprise me about those tweets, but for a company with Oracle’s resources seems like a botch up to me – certainly not good on the PR front.
cheers,
jason.
Comment by jarneil — August 27, 2008 @ 6:03 pm |
For a company that should be all about reliable access to data, the OTN forums have to be a bit of an embarrassment. At the very least, there should have been read-only access to the old version.
Comment by Gary — August 27, 2008 @ 10:59 pm |