Ancient Chinese DBMS (Oracle 8i = teh suck)
Ran into an issue earlier today writing a simple database SQL query. I was trying to run a query like the one below (table/column names changed):
SELECT t.col1, r.col1
FROM schema1.table1 t
LEFT JOIN schema2.table2 r
ON t.col2 = r.col2
And I received an error:
ORA-00933: SQL command not properly ended
I assumed I had some sort of syntax error (I had an additional WHERE clause and some other stuff), so I stripped it down to its barest form shown above and tried again, same result.
I was starting to get pissed off until I realized this client was probably running a really old version of Oracle. So I ran the following code to check it out:
SELECT * FROM v$version
The response came back - 8.1.6.3.0. Some quick googling revealed that Oracle version 8i did not support the ANSI-style joins I was trying to perform (explicitly writing LEFT JOIN). I of course knew Oracle supported its own join syntax, but I usually avoid it to try and keep SQL portable to other database systems. However, I rewrote the query:
SELECT t.col1, r.col1
FROM schema1.table1 t, schema2.table2 r
WHERE t.col2 = r.col2 (+)
And sure enough it worked! No thanks to you Oracle 8i. On a side note, I really hope we upgrade soon... I mean 10g has been out for a while now.
The obvious lesson here is if something seems to be failing even though you KNOW it should be working, don't forget to consider version.
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