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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Really?

This single blog post is strong evidence for why you should never, ever buy an Oracle product, and if you are running anything written by them, why you should plan to migrate away.

Now, the culture of consultants in the Oracle sphere of influence is pretty toxic and money-grubbing. I can imagine companies being badgered into paying security weasels big bucks to analyze software with tools that cough up a zillion false positives, whereupon the weasel looks like a hero and is paid a bunch of cash, the customer panics and demands that Oracle fix a pile of non-existent vulns, and some department buried inside Oracle doesn't know how to deal. Whereupon the weasel skates off to another company to run the same scam: rinse, repeat, and this blog post.

In which case Oracle should simply call it out: "Please don't send us crappy automated scanning tool reports from the shitty security weasel consultant you hired because those reports are useless, and the same weasels have been sending identical ones in, monthly, for years, and you are being ripped off." But Oracle never passes up the opportunity to express contempt for its customers, nor can it admit to being wrong.

Better to avoid that whole ecosystem.

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This is hardly a first. Oracle stuffs a bad, misspelled little poem in their DB protocols, not for any technical reason, but purely to attempt to extend copyright protection by forcing people to violate their copyrights to be compatible with Oracle.

You can find a copy of it here: http://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html

Note the copyright statement on the mispelled, 3-line poem with no literary merit whatsoever (which happens to be longer than the poem itself):

The purpose of this is to abuse the copyright on the above "poem" in order to prevent people from implementing the Oracle DB protocols. I guess they hope that everyone is ignorant of Sega v. Accolade? Even that trick of theirs is copied from elsewhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

EDIT: Reading that deliberate misspelling makes me wonder if I could start "Oracl1e Corporation" and give people permission to violate this? Sure, it'd be a ridiculous cheat, but so is the sham copyright on their worthless poem.

I was going to post Sega v. Accolade after seeing the first three paragraphs of your post. Yeah. Copyright isn't functional, duplicating the poem to achieve functionality wouldn't violate copyright.

Isn't the blogpost violating copyright by posting the whole poem?

That depends on how the fair use argument goes. The downside of such arguments is that you generally have to argue that in court. I tend to believe that Oracle would prefer to leave this untested, as they'd probably benefit more from leaving it uncertain than to spend a ton of money litigating it with a chance of blowing up the whole scheme.

I mean, given that this is a trivial work with no discernible literary merit, a full quotation is arguably a reasonable step in order to fully demonstrate the triviality of the work.

The sole purpose of this poem, given that it's hidden away deep in the plumbing of the system where almost nobody ever sees it, is to dissuade people from making something that is interoperable with Oracle's DBs, after all.

One normally displays art that they're proud of where people can appreciate it, rather than making it a technical requirement for a machine to recite bad poetry to a database before the database will deign to respond.

It could be worse, though. Just imagine if this was Vogon poetry...

Someone should just publish that as public domain, and see what happens if Oracle challenges it. How can they prove that a bunch of bytes sent over the network are meant as prior art and so on.

Prior art only applies to patents, not copyrights. The preexisting publication of copies of this poem would also undercut any such attempt.

That said, the fact that one can ONLY find copies of the work by looking to 3rd parties (rather than Oracle) should undercut any arguments they try to make against discussing it for the purpose of criticism to be fair use.

You can make a very strong argument for fair use in this case. Oracle knows this; if anything, their lawyers are not idiots.

Oracle reacted:

Oracle yanks blog post critical of security vendors, customers

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2969378/security/oracle...

Why didn't Sega just require games to be digitally signed with their key?

At the time, I'd guess that not many people knew anything about cryptography.

Stanford was taken to the cleaners to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD in the deployment of Oracle Financials and related products via endless "consultant implementation" charges that didn't really deliver much value, were rarely on schedule or on budget. Oracle's enterprise calendaring program was totally inadequate and had UX that made most point-of-sale systems look effortless by contrast. Also, the assets managing app, Sunflower, was another dud. The only thing Oracle Database had going for it was no crippling license activation (license scofflaws are/were sued or fined into oblivion worse than M$FT), which one could say was equivalent to MS SQL. Unlike MS MSQL, Oracle DBMS has/had bazillions of support patches to apply to run a real production box, analogous to the previously separate Sun's Solaris patchsets.

Btw: For smaller enterprisey shops, either MS SQL or Postgres are the way to go. Often multiple similar components are needed because different apps have firm requirements that only support one or another; but generally try to avoid this because supporting too many heterogenous components is expensive (laborious)... hence the prevalence of local "standards." Deploying everything with cfengine3 or puppet can help reduce the manualness and nudge vendors into repeatable, idempotent deployments rather than clicking on inane GUI installers like an animal.

ProTip: Don't let consultants "provide" oversight / free-reign for their own projects, budgets, etc., that's like the wolf guarding the henhouse. The client must hire their own project managers, have clear accountability/authority paths to their management and know exactly what they need (avoid endless upselling). Or lots of money will be transferred from idiots to crooks (enterprise caveat emptor).

Edit: fixed grammar

The place where I work, regret a decision to use Oracle, our application build with Oracle Form Builder, which is awfully hard to use, broken easily. But I must admit, their pre-sales really good at describing their product, my boss really hooked up by them. "Oh, for that problem we have this, it will cost this much, but for now, you can just use it for free" then some wild invoice came to our office.

The dept I used to work at was mostly ex-B4 people and I later did enterprise consulting later: What happens is that sales people talk to people high enough up on the food chain that they get the run of the place, and so it's nearly impossible to kick them out or refuse their requests without a substantial political cost/justification. It's called "building a beachhead" and involves the engagement team worming their way up to a client's CTO or even CEO, if possible. I've been deployed as a client-facing "technical"# consultant, and I got really good at it (if I do say so myself): creating additional staff roles, developing opportunities and frenimizing other consulting shops... without inventing things that didn't need doing or creating bullsh!t jobs.

# My mind was more on how to grow the business while simultaneously helping the client fix their deployments. Seriously, the sales guy was dead weight and dumb as a bag of broken rocks but looked good in suit and could talk in nonstop sports metaphors and bizease clichés.

The measure of how a software company values its customers is in the post-sales support... just asking some users how it's going is better than hiding out or DKing them. (About '03/'04, Dell took us out to see the server factory in Round Rock, but went radio silent after a significant purchase.)

I was in a situation where they were selling something to a business leader that my side of the org wasn't in favor of buying (5x cost difference). I drew the short straw and got to meet with them and the business leadership people.

In the meeting, I literally had this dude and his presales guys in $5000 suits sitting across the table from me, berating our position and demanding (quote was "You have no fucking business saying no until you provide us with <our numbers> so we can do your ROI") all sort of crap from us. Ended up prodding the salesbot and let him run his mouth for awhile until he said something really stupid that ostracized the business folks on our side.

Wow that's wildly aggressive. I know people say 'push for the sale' but that seems counterproductive. It seems like they would have got further if they listened more.

Dell Hell.

iSCSI purchase that was promised to be supported on CentOS (it wasn't: RHEL only, despite no deltas), and which Dell itself didn't understand. Ended up getting RHEL just to get a comparison baseline install.

At one point, got cussed out by Dell's support manager in the process (the front-line support team was good). The quote was "I'm not here to support you." Ultimately cost me my job (though we did get the product running).

I'm usually pretty free with sharing my documentation, but in this case made an exception: Dell's support was so fucking crap I refused to provide any assistance for them at all.

Dell's academic-facing sales force (sales and support are their core business value) seemed to start sucking around 2007+. For enterprise IT critical boxes, I would today probably shop around IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell but for web I would go the ODM/OEM route if it were a big enough order. For test lab stuff, Unixsurplus FTW.

(Dell tried to hire me thrice because I could actually use Visio to communicate visually and detail drilling quotes (BOMs) to ferret out upselling and ensure we had supportable configurations (SANs and such). I even had the pleasure to due-diligence several of their solution presentations across the table from 6 of their SE's in Round Rock with the worst hangover of my life, and we still managed to extract maximum intel from that meeting. Dell's client reception secretaries helpfully stocked boxes-upon-boxes of Advil and Tylenol samples and a righteous Keurig binge didn't hurt either. Interestingly, Dell+Redhat had a massive champagne orgy in an adjoining room and we wondered what sort of treatment the several megabucks USD customer level receives, hopefully not just a backpack or stay at the Dell cobranded hotel.)

> The client must hire their own project managers, have clear accountability/authority paths to their management and know exactly what they need (avoid endless upselling).

This so much. Especially the "know exactly what they need" side of things. I speak from the consultant side of the fence, and we've had a number of projects where project management was lacking on the client side; it ends poorly.

We always have our own project manager on projects, and we strongly encourage the client to have their own as well. It really helps to maintain a clear escalation path, and makes everything run much more smoothly.

Large enterprise account engagement is trickier, than say a solo consultant contract with a startup, because there are way more expectations to manage and moving parts to coordinate. As a client-facing consultant, you're often having to balance multiple masters of client and internal politics without having bleed-through and maintain a unified position regardless of other people's screw-ups, accidents or outright lies.

I worked for a large company which will remain unnamed, who a few years after purchasing a 12-year unlimited support contract, switched to using Postgres. Read: they were already locked in to paying for Oracle's most expensive contract for 12 years, regardless of what services they used. In short, they concluded that due to the cost of developing for Oracle, it was cheaper to migrate to Postgres than to continue using Oracle even when Oracle was free.

It is somewhat rare that companies will recognize the fallacy of sunk costs ("We've already spent so much, we need to do this"). I think the world would be a much different place if we could somehow overcome this cognitive error.

makes for good examples that everyone can learn from

easier said than done.

I see this repeated all the time and tend to label it "the investment-bias fallacy" but it's also called commitment bias. [0] Go into any casino where people are trying to win back their lost money is one classic cliché.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

"Sunk cost fallacy" is what my college "Engineering methods" course called it, but we are talking about the same concept.

In case anyone were wondering: Postgres deliberately resembles Oracle. EnterpriseDB is one of the official Postgres commercial flavors which is an even closer "clone" of Oracle DBMS with support options to make migration from ora easier.

> Postgres deliberately resembles Oracle.

I don't think that's really the case. We don't try to do anything different for the sake of it, but that's pretty much that.

> EnterpriseDB is one of the official Postgres commercial flavors

There are no 'official Postgres commercial flavors'. EDB is well known and contributes a fair amount to PG development, but that doesn't make them official.

[citation needed]

I guess one could say they deliberately resemble Oracle in that both DBs roughly implement the SQL standard, but this is by no means a clone, nor was it a smooth transition.

> to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD

Was it really necessary to type it like that?

For general sanity: $150,000,000

To be pedantic, 1.5e8 carries additional information about accuracy: $150,000,000 ± $5,000,000. By contrast, 1.50e8 would be ten times as accurate, and so on.

Of course, accuracy is hardly relevant here.

s/accuracy/precision

Sorry, I don't usually try to be pedantic, but when the conversation is already about nitpicking, I think it's necessary.

Significant figures are precision, not accuracy. Accuracy is "being in the ballpark". Precision is "tight groups".

I'm sorry for the confusion. English is not my first language, and I resorted to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision to pick between "accuracy" and "precision".

To put it another way: "pi is exactly 3" is extremely precise, but not very accurate.

On the other hand, if you had said "Pi is 3", you would have been accurate, but not very precise. If you said "Pi is "Pi is 3.14", you would have been so precise that you could have gotten to the moon and back.

Damn, and here I thought I needed to build a gigantic rocket.

My statement was accurate, just lacking in precision on the details :P

The very next task of mine

is a new value of pi to define.

I think I'll use 3

it's much simpler you see;

than 3.14159

You've simpified pi, that's fo' shore.

But rivalry says "level-up score".

With competitive drive,

It's yet higher I strive.

The value I'll use shall be four.

Well played

Or, the usual and shorter $150M.

At the very least keep it to multiples of three, as in 150e6 or 150 * 10^6! Though a very simple 150 million is easy to think of in terms of erasing past donations that sounded impressive.

I don't think that they mean , one hundred and fifty times ten to the sixth factorial

     _|_    __  ___   ___      ___    ___    ___      ___    ___    ___      ___    ___  
    / |_)  /  )| __) / _ \    / _ \  / _ \  / _ \    / _ \  / _ \  / _ \    / _ \  / _ \ 
    \_| \   )( |__ \( (_) )()( (_) )( (_) )( (_) )()( (_) )( (_) )( (_) )  ( (_) )( (_) )
    (_|_/  (__)(___/ \___/ /  \___/  \___/  \___/ /  \___/  \___/  \___/ () \___/  \___/ 
      |

I went to a prominent tech school that adopted an Oracle platform for student course management in my last few years. I won't mince words: it was a piece of shit, and my school's administrators ate shit by agreeing to a contract that forbid them from making any changes to Oracle's broken system. Now I work in college administration and we have to deal with the very same pile of junk.

Someone once told me that Larry Ellison is the biggest asshole in Silicon Valley, and also the richest, so he must be doing something right. The same could be said for John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Is the world we have the world we want?

ok you are a hair away from my favorite oracle acronym. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

UMass Amherst was this side of non-functional for the first three days of the school year in 2005 because of a botched Peoplesoft (at that time recently purchased by Oracle) rollout.

http://www.cio.com/article/2439102/enterprise-resource-plann...

Hah! The guys at SFSU somehow forgot that. They just implemented a Peoplesoft last year, now a part of Oracle since forever, so no excuses for how badly it works.

You might want to fact check yourself on Rockefeller:

Founded 1870, antitrust 1911:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil

Crude prices in that time frame (and beyond):

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Prices_Since_186...

Production in that time frame (having trouble finding a nice long time-series chart):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_indus...

If we want to make a strong claim of harmful monopoly[0], we should not expect to see a massive surge in production combined with an impressive decrease in price.

[0]Here I use the term "harmful monopoly" to refer to a firm that has both market power (can influence prices by controlling supply) and uses it to increase its own profits. What we see instead is a time period where we do indeed have a dominant firm, but one behaving as if it were in a competitive market.

The important characteristics of a competitive market here are low barriers to entry/exit, and a commodity product. There were incredibly low barriers to entry/exit, and oil has, for nearly its entire existence as a product in the modern age, been a commodity.

According to the very Wikipedia article you link, Standard Oil was found guilty of anticompetitive actions.

Note that monopolistic behavior does not necessarily imply rising prices. See: Wal-Mart. Also see this quote from that Wikipedia article again:

"The evidence is, in fact, absolutely conclusive that the Standard Oil Co. charges altogether excessive prices where it meets no competition, and particularly where there is little likelihood of competitors entering the field, and that, on the other hand, where competition is active, it frequently cuts prices to a point which leaves even the Standard little or no profit, and which more often leaves no profit to the competitor, whose costs are ordinarily somewhat higher."

I believe we are going to be at an impasse here, but the quote you extracted illustrates the point I made, that Standard Oil acted as a competitive firm. We expect to see profit driven to zero in a competitive market, and that is what we saw in Standard Oil's pricing.

In cases where there was little competition, that clearly indicates an area where the costs of the trade were such that the market price would be higher.

The former is strictly competitive and the latter is strictly not anti-competitive.

I think we're going on the wrong track. What I meant was that Rockefeller and Ellison both show that wealth doesn't always come from producing value, but can also be made by abusing market dominance.

Arguing the nuances of Standard Oil's behavior is a moot point when the Supreme Court settled that issue in 1911.

I'll go out on a limb here and assume that you agree just as vehemently with the ruling in Citizens United?

Apples and oranges - I'm not getting into this.

profit driven to zero in a competitive market

No, if profit is close to zero then there would be no point in being in a market. Markets drive profits to the 'standard' risk adjusted ROI for the economy they operate in. In other words if you could run a gas station, a book store, a flower shop, or whatever, then you do whichever one gives the most profits.

If we're going to get into definitions, we can do that.

Since we are discussing economics, I do not feel the need to preface every use of jargon with disclaimers, though I can.

The relevant portion of Wikipedia's entry on (economics jargon) profit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_%28economics%29#In_comp...

You can confirm this concept in any economics text. (economics jargon) Profit is driven to zero in a (economics jargon) competitive (economics jargon) market.

Economic profit is not the same thing as profit. In a pure economic debate you can drop it, but when talking about specific firms in a general context such as HN you really should clarify.

For everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_(economics) "Economic profit is similar to accounting profit but smaller because it subtracts off the total opportunity costs (not just the explicit costs, but also the implicit costs) of a venture to an investor.[1] Normal profit refers to zero economic profit.[2] A concept related to economic profit, and sometimes considered synonymous, is that of economic rent."

You can think of Economic profit as the 'standard' ROI you get in a given economy. Hypothetically Economic profit is also being driven to zero in a static economy, but that's a separate and long term thing.

PS: I am just being this clear because general HN readers are likely to miss the distinction.

"We expect to see profit driven to zero in a competitive market, and that is what we saw in Standard Oil's pricing."

We don't see that in any of the information you provided. You gave a graph of oil prices, not of Standard Oil's profits.

I was responding specifically to the latter portion of the quote excerpted by the grandparent post, which indicated minimal and zero profits for Standard Oil in areas with competition, in alignment with economic theory which indicates economic profit tends toward zero with increased competition.

You're choosing to laser focus in on a specific aspect of the story and cut the bigger picture out of the frame in a very telling way.

Surely you've considered why Standard Oil's decision to do this was found to be anticompetitive, have you not?

I responded to multiple points in the post. You questioned a specific excerpt. I responded regarding that specific excerpt. You are now accusing me of laser focus.

This thread has all the markings of one that becomes net negative for all involved and those reading. I'll leave it with this:

I am focusing on the outcome to the consumer of the behavior in question, not on the outcome to competitors of the behavior.

To get a little more insight into the impact to consumers, and the reason why this behavior is illegal, read the two sections of that Wikipedia quote the other way around.

Where there was no competition, Standard Oil provided oil. Where there was competition, Standard Oil provided oil at zero or near-zero profit.

The former is a situation of supply where there was otherwise none, and some is better than none. The latter is a situation of competitive pricing, and competitive pricing is better than non-competitive pricing.

How is this worse off for consumers than the situation without Standard Oil?

Without any comment on the business practices of Standard Oil, I do think it's interesting that the price of crude actually increased substantially after the antitrust ruling.

World War I, increased demand, and a period in the 1920s during which there was genuine concern that all the oil that could be found had been.

That fear disappeared with the East Texas oilfield discovery in 1930. Which so increased the supply of oil relative to demand that prices fell to 13 cents per barrel.

This created a number of problems, including the prospect of damaging oilfields to the point that future extraction would be compromised. It ended up with the governors of both Texas and Oklahoma calling out the state militia, and, in Texas's case, the Texas Rangers, and seizing control of wellheads by force of arms in an effort to constrain extraction and drive oil prices up -- to $1/bbl.

This resulted in the Texas Railroad Commission effectively controlling US oil output (with oversight from the US Department of Interior) from 1931 to 1972, at which point, peak US oil meant that there was no longer any surplus extraction capacity to limit. Shortly afterward the Arabs tried another of their periodic embargos against the US and Europe, and, to everyone's shock, it actually worked.

If you look at the price of oil, from 1931 to 1972 it was remarkably stable. Even WWII and the post-war consumption boom barely moved the needle. Post 1974, everything goes all to hell. We're still there now.

Daniel Yergin's masterpiece work, The Prize, covers this history in great depth.

I should have been more specific - I was more remarking on the period between 1911 and 1914, which saw crude prices rise; that seemed rather interesting, since I'd expect an antitrust ruling to have the opposite effect if Standard had been keeping prices high through elimination of potential competition. The effect of WWI is quite obvious, naturally.

The rest of the history, though, is quite interesting. I've added that book to my reading list. Thank you!

It rocked my world. We don't live in the Atomic Age, or Computer Age, or the Age of Democracy.

We live in the oil age.

And the rapidity with which it arrived following Colonel Drake's well is staggering.

You’re ignoring opportunity costs. Standard Oil maintained high margins though monopoly pricing.

And you might want to consult a contemporary account of Rockefeller, Ida Tarbell's The History of the Standard Oil Company.

https://archive.org/stream/historyofstandar00tarbuoft#page/n...

Particularly chapters 3 "The Oil War of 1872", 4 "An Unholy Alliance", and 5 "Laying the Foundations of a Trust".

The oil industry has almost always been controlled by a small cartel, though that cartel has varied though the years: Standard Oil, the As-Is agreement, the Texas Railroad Commission, the Seven Sisters, the National Producers, and OPEC.

It's not been a competitive market.

Though I'd argue that oil has been tremendously underpriced since 1869.

My great-great-grandmother was very interested in news of Rockefeller's philanthropy. My great-great-grandfather had died middle-aged, so she had to raise their children on a tight budget. She noticed that the price of kerosene would always rise shortly after Rockefeller made a major donation.

> Larry Ellison is the biggest asshole in Silicon Valley, and also the richest, so he must be doing something right.

This weekend I learned that Larry Ellison purchased ~90% of an island in Hawaii.

Bordering on Bond villain status at this point.

I've recently read "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" and while it was published over 10 years ago, this sounds exactly like a lot of things that happened in the book. The Oracle corporate culture seems to basically be reflection of Larry Ellison's megalomania. Their will to rack sales is just insatiable.

You might enjoy this talk by Bryan Cantrill, where he describes the Oracle acquisition of Sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m7s

> "what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle"

> "this company is about one man and his alter ego and what he wants to inflict upon humanity"

Edit:

And how could I forget this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m

> "and then, the Nazis invaded"

> "for a while I tried to not go to Nazi allegory when talking about Oracle but I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table"

You forgot the bit about "The Larry Ellison Institute for the Prolonging of Life: <stage pause> namely his"

Hadn't seen the second talk, which is (no surprise) technically interesting as well as highly entertaining. Thanks!

YouTube should suggest some of his other talks too. There's more oracle stuff in the illumous day and Surge talks, and he also has very humorous segments in the Surge 2013 and 2014 Lighting talks.

My favorite quote from that talk has always been:

> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.

Hah, awesome. The sentiment he puts into portraying Oracle truely tells something about the company.

But I don't understand - why wouldn't Larry Ellison think he's Larry Ellison?

--Dad

but it's not a zero-sum game. Oracle's services could really be "you suck at business, we can write ten lines of code that improve your process 100x, we just call it database management because no way you would pay us to show you how incompetent you are at thinking about and running your own business, that we don't know anything about."

Most companies that use oracle's services could likely literally, no shit, do it on a single mac mini using sqlite.

Most companies just don't have that much data, and even if they do single servers are giant, massive affairs today where for the price of one month of consulting services (I mean $10K-$70K) you can configure a server with 1TB RAM that will handle your data for the next five years.

There's just not that much data. Laptops can handle it. The reason you pay for an oracle DBA instead of running sqlite on your macbook, is not because oracle is that much better. It's because that way you don't have to admit how much you suck.

Look up the story of the State of Oregon's failed healthcare exchange. Set up by Oracle.

Last new I'm aware was Oregon sued Oracle for $200 million.

"Oregon sues Oracle over failed Obamacare website" http://fortune.com/2014/08/22/oregon-oracle-spat-200-million...

Oregon’s suit, filed Friday in state court, alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, made falsely convinced officials to buy “hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised.” It is seeking $200 million in damages.

My company is still dealing with a (thankfully) failed move to oracle. Some hotshot (who is long gone now) sold them on the idea and our DB tables/columns names are still all over the place b/c of oracles limits on name lengths. All new (and really old) tables are full length but around when we thought we were going to move all the table/column names are nearly unreadable... We also have a couple hundred thousand dollar boat anchors (read: oracle servers) because apparently they aren't worth shit if you don't run oracle on then and stripping them for parts is almost a zero-sum game. Also Oracle told us they will try to sell them for us (because they won't just buy them bacl) but they have ZERO incentive to do so when they can swindle some other corporation out of more money by selling new servers. We are now in the middle of switching over to MariaDB and I can't wait to leave Oracle behind.

Turns out to be Oracle's chief security officer.

Read the other blog posts. Holy cow crackers.

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