Re: Gripe-- Bad SQL syntax can crash server. And... PA still stinks.

Neil Truby wrote: > "byrdfarmer" <byrdfarmer@hotmail.com> wrote in message > news:5e52df43.0405130849.711585f7@posting.google.com... > >> I know this isnt much help, but I think its a small group of tech >> support folks that have trouble with the passport thing. I have ran >> into the EXACT same situation four times now and its always 1 of 2 >> people -I starting writing down their names-that I am half way tempted >> to post! > > In my experience it isn't. The technicians just do as they are > instructed. IBM has to strike a balance between providing a service to > genuine customers and witholding it from those customers who make a > decision to let it lapse. As an IBM Business Partner specialising in > Informix services we attract a *lot* of support calls from customers in > the latter category: there are > *many* customers out there with no support. Of course, when they're in > the deep brown stuff they suddenly want it, and IBM has to adopt a tough > attitude. > > So I'd be surprised if individual technicians are unhelpful in this > respect. > > That said, I do sympathise with your situation as a genunine customer > having > your credenials queried. It happens all over: I have a customer who > renewed support in December but, despite five months and perhaps 20 > emails, plus intervention from UK support and from the salesman, we cannot > get PA updated to reflect their entitlement, so they too have initial > problems raising v9 > calls. But that's an IBM admin issue, not the fault of the technician. > >> To be honest though, even when I get through to techsupp, I >> am rarely happy with the service because I hardly ever get any real >> answers, > > Again, my experience with UK support does not bear this out. We find that > the standards are generally as high as those of the pre-IBM days. Of > course to an extent the support is only as good as the technician who > fields your call, and people come and go and new people need to be trained > and get experience etc, but I have never found it hard to get quick and > accuarte support when I really needed it, pre- or post-IBM. > >> especially if its a performance issue. > > Well, to be fair, performance issues must be the devil's own job to fix, > and > tech support people must dread them. To get to the bottom of a support > issue needs a holistic view of what's going on that is very, very > difficult > to provide via a remote support call. And let's generalise a bit here: > Informix has more tuning capability than most databases, but it's > difficult > to REALLY screw it up by accident. Most performance issues when it comes > down to it are caused by poorly thought-out application or database > design, > or transaction logic. I lose count of the amount of times that I argue > with an IT business manager that the 4-second response times are because > the application is crap. They simply don't want to believe that the '2 > million > development is flawed. They want to believe that you have fogotten to > set the GOFAST=1 onconfig parameter ... > > So before you slag off the support people for being unhelpful over > performance issues, please consider how difficult a problem that is to > diagnose remotely. Is GOFAST in onconfig.std or is environment varialbe? -- Enor