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Comment by valarauca1 | Hacker News Reader

Oracle UltraSPARC purchasing agreement forbids 3rd party direct comparison benchmarks.

The only ones you'll find by 3rd party are non-direct comparisons like transactions per second in Oracle-SQL. Or Core Count.

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Why am I not surprised by this. I sometimes find myself thinking I should check my bias against Oracle, just to make sure I'm not being too hard on them for past transgressions (for example, Microsoft is far from perfect but they've come a long ways from many of their more negative past practices). Then I learn something like this, which while it doesn't directly mean they are still continuing in predatory marketing and sales practices, doesn't exactly assuage any fears I might have have had.

I currently work for a company that heavily uses Oracle technology. It's horrible. Our culmative contracts are worth several hundred thousand dollars per years.

But they'll still cheat us on small things. We request information on a training seminar (we had a free attendance voucher), and they lose our account information until 1 week after the seminar ended.

It's to the point where I just laugh. Everyone knows their cheating us, but upper management won't change.

Oracle's database is pretty good (if you can afford it). All their other software, from what I've seen, is shockingly bad considering their resources.

Yes if you shell out for all the money to run it on every core, and use a lot memory it is solid. But the bang for your buck, Microsoft SQL has a better support plan, and saner licensing model. My experience is working with smaller datasets <200GB so YMMV.

I mean I'd rather use Postgres. But large corps like having a vendor to call.

Check out EnterpriseDB. I don't know how good they are in practice. But their speciality is solving the exact problem you mentioned with Oracle vs Postgres.

http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/produ...

Forbidding benchmarks is the kind of thing that should draw the wrath of any state worth the name.

Alas.

Or if someone steals one ?

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