I've been working on a project, utilizing Oracle XE in a VMWare machine for database development.  The project has been rocking along properly, without hitches or hiccups on Oracle XE.  I began to move the system over to a full Oracle 10g database server on Friday.

My scripts ran without error on the staging server, and I had my databases built in maybe two hours.  I copied over the aspx pages and cs files and the application was up in another hour after I tweaked some code.

Then my troubles started as soon as I began unit testing.  My Oracle queries were taking forever to execute!  I mean forever.  Queries utilizing the same data on the Oracle XE server were completing in 3 to 4 seconds.  The same query on the 10g staging server was taking almost 30 minutes.  Absolutely amazing.

I ran the Oracle ODT query analyzer that ships with the 11h client and was hit with a "You must have a valid license... yakkity yakiity whatever message."  All I knew was we didn't have the license.  So now, I get to explain to my boss that something that was supposed to happen quickly is not going to happen quickly unless some sort of solution from heaven falls to earth and lands on my server.

I normally like working with Oracle databases and programming in PL/SQL. But, events like what happened Friday definitely dampen my enthusiasm.