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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

Devs get Oracle's best side. They don't know how lucky they are. PL/SQL is a fine language and Oracle throws everything and the kitchen sink into the APIs available inside the database.

As a sysadmin/dba I get to handle the nasty side of Oracle: the bugs, the patches that fail, the redundant tools, the wordy documentation that always feels like a never-ending advert.

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The problem is that putting code into your database has all the problems of data migration with no testability. It's really hard to write tests and debug code compared to a proper language.

I took over support for a small ISP after the previous sysadmin died unexpectedly. He was a big fan of putting code in the PostgreSQL database, which I had never done before. That was fun to figure out and debug issues.

Haven’t worked with Oracle in over a decade, but SQL Server’s tooling is actually quite decent in that regard. You can attach the Visual Studio debugger to a T-SQL stored procedure, set breakpoints, step, inspect variables etc. There are rough edges, but it’s good enough to be useful.

Automated tests of T-SQL stored procedures are also possible. There are couple of ways you could do that, but in our case we just write “unit” tests in C# which call the procedures. This integrates nicely into Visual Studio’s Test Explorer, is debuggable etc. You can even step through a C# test, and then just “step into” T-SQL being called from there!

There are valid reasons for not putting business logic into stored procedures, but “not being a proper language” is probably not one of them, at least in the case of T-SQL. Then again, there are also reasons for using stored procedures. Everything is a tradeoff…

When I was young and beautiful and naive I enjoyed playing with setting things up, even though my main focus was on backend dev. Like, setup postgres, tweak settings to performance, that kind of thing. So I was the first one to get the "figure out on site installation steps" task to share with client admin.

Our small company was building enterprises things for large clients. And one of them wanted Oracle on Windows server. They also wanted a failover setup. How hard could that be?

Now I hate Oracle. I hate Oracle consultants. I despise the ignorance.

My favourite bit was Oracle uninstall procedure. I had like 4 pages printed just for this case.

Oracle bad. Postgres good.

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