The Oracle agony

This incident was urging me to blog upon from the time when I read a blog from similar category. This happened around 10 years back when myself and Mr.~Suz were sitting on an old filthy chair and have been taught the way to the place where I am today.

After a successful clearing of a set of toughest aptitude questions of jeopardy standards, we got into the prestigious institution “CSC”; a software school popular among the upper middle class people for its budget computer education.

To explain further about the technical infra, the place was equiped with higher end cutting edge systems built with the state of art technology. There was a dedicated server for hosting oracle software. It had an enormous memory space which can be measured in terms of “GB”s especially a double digit number prefixing it. We call it a “Server” only for the sole reason that it is connected to a UPS & it can function for around 20 minutes more than the other computers when the power goes off. (Mr.~Suz:- Well explained about its importance. !!)

For the scientists like me, there were pretty old systems for usage; having a memory space which is often in MBs and RAM size little more than a normal scientific calculator. For the convenience of the senior citizens, they have never upgraded the monitor, which’s resolution is not more than 640 X 480 and the characters were often ghosty.

It was on a day of hands on session and as usual myself and my brother were been exploring the database queries sitting before one such computer. I really felt honored when the faculty staffs claimed that, before me that system was used by Charles Babbage for doing his high school home work.

As a usual way, the students get connected to the Oracle server (the one I mentioned above) through their local client using the login & password communicated to them. For a secret reason the login is fondly called as "scott tiger" account.

The way the faculties communicates the password to the students is an interesting way. The login is written on the board during the class hours and password is communicated secretly in the student’s ears during the hands on session (Mr.~Suz:- BS 7799 Policy ?? :-) ). Later we realized that same login & password is shared to all the students and the poor fact is that the password has been never changed since the oracle is installed on to that system (and also now we understood the reason behind the secret nick name :-)).

Myself and he were on our gears for exploring Oracle 8i and he was constantly getting distracted by the surroundings. He was constantly in search of something around the place (May be in search of people from Venus !! ) and accidentally saw the monitor of the neighboring scientist and found that he was trying to create a table. It wasn't really tough to readout the contents because of the character size that was readable even from two rows behind.

He really wanted to show a magic to the guy and he pestered me to drop the table. Me as a responsible scientist tried to convince him that it is not a humane task to do that. But he, who was in a serious mood to show him the magic tried to convince me. At last he succeeded and I too thought of dropping the table. But before doing that I wanted to make sure that it is only a test table. I tried to describe it and found it to be like any other useless students-marks table having Roll no, name and marks as their columns. Hence I proceeded further.

Since I dropped the tables in few mille-seconds after the creator see the success message, his table was not being listed when he tried to list all the tables. We were enjoying the puzzled look of the creator over the monitor (Probably would have scolded the software with some un-defined prefixes).

Since we did this magic couple of times, he called the faculty in-charge to complain about the miss behaving software. As soon as she come, Mr.~Suz took off his eyes from the other monitor and started pretending as if he is working along with me(who was working sincerely for hours). When she tried creating a table, he was more puzzled to see that the table created by her was not getting vanished away. His face gone red when the same magic happened again after the faculty has left the place :-)

He managed to disturb the faculty who was having her Nth dose of tea for the day, she gave some ingenious solution which I dare not hear. (Mr.~Suz:- Probably to restart the computer :-)). Since we were satisfied with the happening we decided to end the magic session and vacated the lab.

This made the day...