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Comment by datashovel | Hacker News Reader

I have a policy when assessing opportunities. Use of Oracle products is a deal breaker.

Why? Is it the money?

The DBMS technology is excellent. I worked at Sybase from 1990 on and much as I loved the company Oracle beat us fair and square with features like Row Level Locking and Multi-version Concurrency Control. Oracle also had a healthier attitude about data corruption. Oracle fixed the bugs or didn't let them get in in the first place. Sybase on the other hand developed DBCC, which repaired the problems on live databases. I lost numerous tables on Sybase while developing products. This never happened after switching to Oracle in the late 90s.

One of the things I still like about Oracle is that no matter what data management problem you are solving there is generally some feature that helps you do it.

VPD (virtual private database) is a great example. I was working at a SaaS in the late 90s and we ran into a problem where we absolutely needed data from multiple tenants in a single database but still fully isolated between each tenant. Oracle had a feature called VPD that did exactly that. It saved our bacon on that project.

I have dealt with the Oracle license police and yes they can be jerks. But you can't fault their technology. The company deserves respect for what they have accomplished.

Edit: fixed typo.

Just one reason, among many.

From the article:

  He often said, “It’s not enough to win—all others must fail.”

I think capitalism taken to its extreme is counter-productive to society.

One of the big lies of capitalism is that competition is desirable.

Competition is desirable for the consumer, not for the producer.

In addition to this, I would add that competition can take many different forms. I think it's very useful when it inspires everyone to do better and everyone can shake hands afterwards because they enjoyed the journey. It's less than useless when people use it as an excuse to cut each other down without improving anyone's performance, which is disappointingly often.

I think it's very useful when it inspires everyone to do better and everyone can shake hands afterwards because they enjoyed the journey.

Do you have any examples of this happening in real life?

If you meant crony capitalism, sure. Then you'll use enough old boy tactics to ban your competition or give you a state-enforced monopoly or deal (effectively skewing the market in your favor and against your competition).

Really? I sure as hell can fault them - getting them to even acknowledge bugs is a gigantic PITA. Unless you are huge, getting their support people to respond or even understand issues is impossible. The CBO is a gigantic black box and can be incredibly hard to troubleshoot.

They have a CSO who has publicly stated they don't want bug reports or anyone to give them security exploits, and who once gave a talk "How Joshua DoSed Jericho: Cybersecrets of the Bible". [1]

There's plenty more to make you stay away from them at all costs, not the least of which are completely unethical business practices.

1. https://www.rsaconference.com/videos/how-joshua-dosed-jerich...

Fair point on support and security. Mary Ann Davidson's rant about security on the Oracle blog was indefensible. [1]

While I'm impressed by some of the Oracle engineering there's no question they also know how to squeeze customers just up to the breaking point.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/08/oracle-deletes-csos-screed-hac...

Not just the money although that's part of it. But I've dealt with Oracle as a database before and I found it to be a miserable experience. Figuring out why something was slow or wasn't working the way you thought it should involved paying Oracle a whole bunch of money to help you figure out which undocumented switch you needed to flip.

It may be solid but it's complex enough under the hood that you are practically required to pay ungodly amounts of money to them to be able to effectively use it. I'll never willingly use them again.

I try to not be ideological about technology; oracle is a pretty decent database and for some cases is still superior to my favorite RDBMS (Postgres). But while the technology is fine, the licensing leads me to believe that the decision to use oracle was made on a golf course by a guy that doesn't even know how to set up his own email client, and doesn't care how anything works as long as he's next in line for CEO. And so yeah, I agree with you...Oracle is a deal breaker.

A golf course or an entirely different establishment?

I have a similar policy, if I'm working on something and looking for solutions, the solution that doesn't involve Oracle wins by default.

Now come on. Oracle and PostgreSQL and MySQL and the others all overlap a lot, but there's one thing that Oracle does much better than any of the others.

It makes money for the Oracle Corporation!

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