Project 365: Day 84

I recently took some advanced PL/SQL training from Oracle University which turned out to be the biggest hassle I have ever experienced. Originally, the course was scheduled for October 2009, then it was canceled and moved to November 24, 2009. Hmm, does that date look familiar? Why yes, yes it is during the Thanksgiving holidays. I opted to not take the training then and called Oracle to change my time. Oracle said okay, but only if I paid half of the $1200 course fee first, then the other half upon completion. I agreed to this and they rescheduled it to January 2010.

Well, they canceled that one again and scheduled me for one in February. February comes along and I finally get a phone call from our Oracle rep saying the one in February was canceled, but that there was online training I can take. By this point, I was pretty pissed since I was not going to pay $1200 for some stupid online material which I can probably get for free through Google. After telling my rep I wanted my money back, she finally "found" a course in March that she guaranteed would run. I agreed to this, but then she tried to charge me the whole $1200 for the course even though the previous agent had already charged me $600. At this point, I just flat out asked for my money back, but then the agent "checked" some records and determined that I should only be charged the remaining $600.

Course finally runs and the first day of class, the instructor hands out these free notebooks that were probably printed in 1995 or something. One of them even had writing from a previous course.


To be fair, the instructor was very knowledgeable and taught the class very well. I learned a lot of tips on how to write better code and ways to improve efficiency during coding. Even though the class was ultimately useful, I would highly not recommend training from Oracle because of the horrible enrollment process.