Monday, July 7, 2008

Unbreakable?

Oracle has had the "unbreakable" marketing spiel going for some time now. I don't know that I buy their bit, but today, I found the ultimate in unbreakable and it has nothing to do with Oracle. Move over Oracle. Meet Fisher Price.



Today I bought my daughter a Fisher Price Little People: Noah's Ark with Ark Animals set. She has the farm and loves it so I thought she'd also really like this new one since it has so many cool animals. But when I got the thing home and started to try to get it out of the box (note that the photo above shows the item completely unboxed and there is no warning on the packaging of the arduous task you face to get it that way!), it was like trying to break out of a maximum security prison. There were more twisty ties wrapped around plastic anchors bound to cardboard fortified with packing tape than you can imagine. The thing took me the better part of an hour just to get everything detached! I'm talking secure!

Oracle could take a lesson from Fisher Price I think.... If Oracle had half the "unbreakable-ness" that Fisher Price employs in their packaging, Oracle would be unbreakable indeed!

2 comments:

Dan Norris said...

I literally get out the wire cutters, screw gun, pliers, and screwdrivers at birthday parties and Christmas at our house. Not sure why they have to torture the kids by causing us a 20-minute swearing fest just to free the toy from the box...frustrating for sure!

robert said...

My personal experience that crushed Oracle's unbreakable was when we hit the bug which could lead to data returned from the wrong schema under certain circumstances (Bug 5458753, MetaLink Note 392673.1). This is pretty nasty and not too unrealistic to happen if you host multiple similar schemas on the same database.

OTOH, it's probably good to not too much adore this piece of database software (which I nevertheless regard outstanding) because it keeps you alert.

Cheers