Thursday, March 23, 2006

Someone tell Oracle to please retain form submitted information





Today, I had to register (emphasis on had to) with Oracle's site as I am giving an interview tomorrow and plan to get grilled by some senior Oracle DBAs. I am not really sure whether I would take the job since like other interviews I have been giving this company is looking for an Oracle DBA more than a MySQL DBA. But nonetheless, they want to schedule a second interview knowing I am not an Oracle cheerleader, and I throught why not? At least I will get some questions for my DBA interview post.

The sign up process was truly a nightmare. I had to fill out the form seven times, because every time I would miss something and click the "back button" that Oracle provided, I would loose all the data. Although I was in a hurry, I did take screenshots at two occassions.

One of the errors I received was really hillarious, saying something like that I haven't selected the newsletter to subscribe, so either I must choose a newsletter or I should check the box that says don't send me one.

One would think they will know that if I didn't select anything, I don't want a freaking newsletter.

On top of that, Oracle had disabled the browser's back button (normally Firefox can retain the information entered on badly programmed sites).

May be it's time someone taught this company making billions of dollars about user experience and retaining information and highlighting errors.

-- An annoyed MySQL DBA who had to register at Oracle :(

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dont you think that attacks like these are a bit childish? Its not like mysql.com or postgresql.org never had any issues with their website.

Frank said...

No, seriously, I don't think these are childish attacks.

Oracle is expecting to make US$15 billion next year. Their site should have no room for bad programming.

A company marketing databases should know the importance of retaining form submitted information. If not, they haven't learned the first rule in web based forms.

Every site has issues, including mysql.com and postgresql.org sites, however they don't make billions. If one company was making billions they should spend a few minutes on their site to be a little bit user focused.


Frank