A dangerous precedent?

Today I've come to load an extract from a HPQC (HPQC being part of HP's ALM toolkit and deals with tracking of test cases etc) schema - anyway the details of that are not really relevant - what was 'slightly' interesting about this was that the schema had some context indexes created in it and these failed to load (as i didn't have the context objects created).

Now I'm sure at one point the 'text' option was costed when it first came out and the world was black and white - now it's all free (well at least it is with EE). As I still pretty much install everything manually i don't load any options unless i really need them - this means less objects to worry about and manage and less 'attack surface' from a security point of view ( i love that phrase by the way).

However when i quickly looked up on metalink my oracle support to confirm the steps required for 12c i had a nasty surprise!

To quote MOS ref 1666831.1

"Manual installation/deinstallation of Oracle Text is not supported in 12c. You now have to use the Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) to add Text."

 What! How dare they!

Forced to use a gui rather than just a 1 line command, not happy...

So without much choice i then tried to load the text option in with the gui. The first annoying thing is our firewalls which mean i need to tunnel the X11 GUI and while I'm working remotely the X display is always painfully slow. ANyway after waiting some time, and then some more time the GUI appeared and i (through gritted teeth) started clicking through the GUI.

First up

Then

then

then

then

then

and then......

Aaargh - i hate guis

What it's problem?

After a quick investigate (and some guesswork about what the problem might be) it seems that you shouldn't use ! in your password (and maybe other characters too) - i guess the gui doesn't pass the password in double quotes to whatever command line it's executing (no doubt the same one we used in v11 that we are not 'allowed' to use)

So anyway i change the password to something 'less' secure....... and then it works OK

So text option installed and import now works fine.

However i'm worried what kind of precedent this is setting now - are we going to be forced more and more down the click/click route rather than giving us some freedom to be able to do things from command line.

How many other things are going to go this way?