Users give Oracle bad maintenance report

One in three Oracle users has difficulty maintaining their software and one in five is unhappy with Oracle's level of support, according to a survey by the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG).

"I did expect problems on the maintenance side, because people have been telling me this all year," said UKOUG chairman Ronan Miles.

"There are two sets of problems here. First, people don't automatically know when a set of patches or upgrades becomes available, so there is the question of not being aware of the need for maintenance. Second, information is hard to find on how patches for the database, for example, will affect the web server," he added.

The full results of the support and maintenance survey completed by 191 users will be announced at next week's UKOUG 2000 conference in Birmingham.

The three-day conference will also include speeches from senior Oracle personnel, more than 100 presentations and critical focus groups for users.

As part of the conference, Oracle will be unveiling its new 9i database, part of the 9i initiative discussed by Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison at the company's OpenWorld conference in October.

"Ellison said there would be only two Oracle products - the 9i database and the 9i application server," said Miles. "At the moment, maintenance is very difficult because there are so many products and so many interfaces between them that users can't be sure what will interface with what. The 9i initiative tries to address this.

"A lot of people are waiting to see how the initiative will pan out. If Oracle shoehorns 100 products into two it will not necessarily be successful overnight. The aim is good, but people will wait to see how it manifests itself," he added.

The 9i database is expected to be available in the first half of 2001.

First published in Computing