[staofbur]

Back in about 1999, I was working for a big corporate and one of our Oracle admins lost her shit and had a meltdown, think it was around 8i era. She just got up and walked out shouting "fuck this fucking shit, I quit". This was on a freshly delivered HP N-Class HPUX box and they just couldn't get it to run after a month of going back and forth between HP and Oracle.

I bumped into her last year at Ansible Fest London and she was still angry about it 17 years later!

And that's what Oracle does to your soul :)

Edit: that N class and Oracle NEVER got deployed in the end. It just sat there unused, licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity and it got chucked in a skip after 5 years. About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

[reitanqild]

licenses weren't renewed, it got sheepishly powered down after a few months to save electricity [...] About £200k of expenditure down the pan.

I guess you could easily lost even more money. Good thing they stopped it at £200k.

[staofbur]

Yeah a big chunk of that was consultancy, support, Oracle licenses. TCO was going to be around £500k for 5 years.

The whole platform got replaced with SQL Server on a clone PC server in the end which cost less than £10k. No fan of Microsoft but there was no competition. And the tooling was far better!

[odammit]

When I get issues were vendors point fingers at each other I three way call them, tell them what's up, hit mute, go get a coffee, and let them figure it out.

[staofbur]

We did that. They were still finger pointing two hours later.

Legal guys said it wasn't worth suing them because we'd have to pay up then or lose the support contract.

[odammit]

Oof. You should bill them for your time. I sent HP or Dell (can't recall) an invoice for $800 in my early 20s for my time wasted on a support call where a "support tech" had asked me to reinstall Windows as a way to fix a disk that failed in a RAID array. OS was AIX.