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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

I tried to convince a non-developer (and Apple lover) about this a few months ago but got nowhere. Developers are like bellwethers: if they hate you, even if you're successful now, your product/service is doomed.

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Salesforce -- successful business, hated by every programmer who has ever touched it.

I don't mind it. With SF you've got to remember they've been updating and extending the same live platform for over ten years. It's amazing that it's as cohesive as it is.

For all their revenue, they almost never turned a profit. They are popular but I wouldn't call it successful in business sense.

My wife, who is a sales director, loves SalesForce. Maybe programmers aren't their target market?

Nope, but they are required if you want to do anything on it that's custom. And Apex as a platform is a nightmare to work with.

I can attribute this one to developers having to interact with sales force on behalf of their bosses. Hard to refuse usin a technology if your boss tells you you need to support it.

Oracle.

I happen to be an HNer that has been on the Oracle developer list since the late 90's.

I am yet to see a FOSS SQL database to match Oracle's tooling for database programming. The only ones I had similar good experience are with Microsoft and Informix (before it was acquired by IBM) databases.

Same here. Once you get over the hump of treating it as a database and start using it as a platform, nothing can touch Oracle. But most people, even most long-term Oracle customers deeply invested in it, barely scratch the surface

Nobody has the budget for licensing the more advanced bits. One of the tragedies of the computing world is how many great features remain locked to a really small subset of clients, because they're only available in the top-tier, more-money-than-god, if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it edition

Nobody? I think what you'll actually find is no-one pays list price...

oh I wish some one can tell me how to get Sql Server Enterprise license at a price of standard i am paying now...

Can you briefly describe some of that tooling?

The ones I care about:

- The capabilities of PL/SQL and TransactSQL, FOSS databases don't have as feature rich programming language for stored procedures.

- Ability to mix relation, object oriented and unstructured data modeling

- The SQL features and extensions

- Distributed transactions across multiple databases across clusters

- The SQL Developer IDE or integration with Visual Studio, without relying on third parties

My General experence is stored procedures and even transactions scale really poorly. I have seen several ex-oracle projects and it really only seems to work well for hospitals and other organizations that don't grow. Or banks which have relativly few transactions per day.

Ed: Or the old Cognos Big Data (No Users).

Any thoughts?

I have been involved in some telecommunications and health care projects in a couple of Fortune 500, using Informix, Oracle and SQL Server backends, which had more GB on their databases than most big data projects I see being tossed around in big data startups.

Of course it is a personal experience and I cannot generalize, but on those projects we had all the scale we needed.

All the issues we had, the DBAs could sort them out after checking the query optimizers and fine tune the model and respective indexes.

> transactions scale really poorly

Please be more specific about 'scaling' numbers!

> Or banks which have relativly few transactions per day.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...

"Banking apps were used 10.5m times a day across the country in March, eclipsing the 9.6m daily log-ins to internet banking services"

I've always felt that 99% of the people worried about database scaling didn't actually have a DB scaling problem.

I've seen billion dollar double-digit growth rate e-commerce companies run their transactional systems on a single commodity DB server (technically 2 in a failover configuration).

Successful social media companies have legitimate scaling concerns. Most every e-commerce company under $5BB/year does not. At least 10x (and probably 100x) as many architects believe they have a scaling problem as actually do, IMO.

Oracle runs on so many platforms, that essentially once you fire up a command line interface or otherwise give administration commands to it, it is its own OS.

After installation (provided you don't run out of disk space), you can set it up and maintain it without (hardly) ever having to run an OS command.

As a result, just about everything, including statistics to be gathered, users, etc. is just another table you can query via SQL or set using Oracle commands.

You know, Oracle is not so bad for developers if you can get their attention. Basically, if you pay enough, or promise to pay enough (in a pre-sales track), you get treated well.

Then again, there is PL/SQL. If any technology ever demonstrated a casual but deep hatred of the developers that must endure it, it is that one.

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