Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change
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We've fought every kind of licensing issue you can imagine, shitty support, broken tools. A simple migration of a few hundred rows in a very simple table turned into a month long exercise that required 200 billable hours to Oracle consultants because all of the import/export tools that Oracle provides are broken in subtle, different and incompatible ways. At one point we saved time by copying and pasting data from one table into another through the management GUI rather than fight all the bullshit Oracle puts in your way.
The customer, now irate that we've been in standstill for a year, doesn't understand and hasn't made any progress in getting Postgres signed off on by their security idiots and now they're out an extra million dollars or so.
From initial install to development to deployment it's been a nightmare and the only conclusion anybody can reasonable come up with is that it's because Oracle purposely breaks their software in subtle ways so that the only paths of execution require deep Oracle lore that only somebody who dedicates their job to being an Oracle DBA could possibly know.
Oracle can't die fast enough as a company. They're an enormous drag on the entire technology industry and I'm convinced a force for evil.
As someone who has worked with Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases for many years, you sound like someone who has never worked with their database. Oracle databases might be expensive but you can move data between instances and schemas using SQLLDR or DataPump with ease.
Every single export option available in Oracle SQL Developer truncated the CLOB field whenever it felt like, and half of the exported formats were exported without escaping content in the CLOB so that they were unparseable on import.
When we finally called in the Oracle consultants, they said "we never use the import/export tools in SQL Developer" and moved on to SQLLDR, but failed for exiting reasons last seen in 1980's computing like "Error in Index ORA-42321" and then other issues with the parser.
Data Pump didn't work for some reason only the consultants know, but "minor version mismatch" was something they liked to say.
I don't remember the final solution, but I believe it was a hackneyed combination of writing some python code to connect to one of the databases, dumping the table data to a bunch of INSERT statements then just copy-pasting the whole output back into SQL Developer and running it in chunks until everything could be inserted into the new table. We couldn't just write more python code to pump the data back in because of some permissions problem that nobody could ever quite resolve satisfactorily. We also couldn't just load the file through the SQL Developer because it would only load files that were sitting in a specific, inaccessible directory on that specific server, not through the GUI.
I think this was when the lightbulb went off in all of our heads and we collectively realized "it's this terrible on purpose"
Total shit show with hundreds of thousands of dollars flushed down the toilet for no additional capability, huge program delays and a good reminder why nobody uses Oracle for new starts on software these days, it's absolute garbage and a curse on any organization that sustains it.
This brings me to one of my pet peeves, programmers tend to trash databases because most of them don't understand how they internally work. If you ask most corporate developers to generate an explain plan and tell you what is going on in the output, most couldn't generate the plan.
It sounded like you were trying to defend the Oracle product here, but it actually comes across as a sort of indictment.
SQLLDR threw up a bunch of index and constraint errors that magically went away when we just copy pasted in the INSERT statements into the GUI tool. Why? Who knows, but we didn't want to spend another $400/hr figuring it out.
CLOBs shouldn't be some magical type that's impossible to serialize and deserialize. There's nothing particularly tricky about serialized text in almost any other technology context, except in magical Oracle-land where all the tools are broken and you can measure how many dollars each row of data is costing you.
We weren't doing anything particularly exotic, or sexy, just very very vanilla relational dB 101 stuff, and Oracle has managed to turn that into expert-level wizard secrets. It doesn't matter how Oracle internally works, if we have to know, especially for these kinds of simple use-cases. If you have to know, you may as well just write what you need yourself instead of relying on a tool.
I agree with stickfigure, defenses of this garbage end up becoming an indictment of it.
Based on what you were trying to do, maybe writing a simple program to read a record from schema A and insert it into schema B would have been easier and cost less.
Yup, that's basically the lesson learned. Oracle's tooling is terrible, it's just easier to write your own most of the time.
My experience is that the tools and the "experts" leave a lot to be desired.
I wanted to move schema and data from the customer's server to my server so I could troubleshoot and issue the users were having.
The customer had 3 full time Oracle DBAs and I contracted a few high priced consultants to help with this job.
It took 6 days to move it.
Oracle isn't hated because people don't understand how databases work, it is hated because it is difficult to work with. Things may be different now (we were using 10g) but it feels like the most basic tasks take days of work.
CIO at a company we consult for was recently fired. Or rather made to resign.
In the last few years the cio changed almost the entire businesses enterprise systems to oracle covering.
HR, performance management, reporting, data warehousing, sales, ecommerce, repairs, document management
This has effectively allowed the consulting company and oracle to fleece the business and hold them at Randsom putting the company under tremendous risk.
We have been called in to untangle the mess.
To give you an idea millions have been spent to build an ecommerce portal with sales in the 1000's. The ROI will probably take years To be realized.
Some of the challenges dealing with the mess of a complete oracle stack:
- typical people who specialize in oracle solutions are just that. Specialist in the solution not developers.
- Unless you are using one of the more popular products. Finding information is practically impossible compare the google search for magneto vs oracle atg
- you cannot easily transition a competent developer to oracle tools due to the complexity
- some of the tools are complex for reasons I fail to understand simple things take a long time to achieve. Maybe hard things are easier but I have yet to see this
- they encourage bad practices, everything goes in the db including HTML templates the works.
Some friends are working on a project with these tools... they are a couple of years in and don't have password reset fully implemented yet, and cannot come up with a date for implementation.
With a commercial product like Microsoft ILM/FIM, a team of 3-4 people could meet 90% of project objectives in 90 days with 90% less spend. The other 10% would require some product evals or tool building.
Maybe when they finally do go under Google will be able to buy Java and MySQL...
I've had two jobs in the past that have been in Oracle shops and from my experience those companies were so fully invested in a lot of the Oracle suite (think WebLogic, ESB, the database etc) it would be like turning a huge oil tanker around to pivot away from it.
And don't forget the reams of PL/SQL that often sits at the core of a lot of business logic
Another important factor is today's engineers are tomorrows architects.
Also in the enterprise space code changes are measured in dollars/euro/yan/... per hour, not engineer happiness.
You spend some money, get new and hopefully better code, and with some luck you will get a return on the investment, ie more money than you spent on doing it.
Unless you are doing it for fun. Or don't know what to do with all the money you have.
That better code had a cost of 1 000 euros, due to the amount of hours spent on it.
How much profit did those euros spent on developer salary brought to the business revenue?
The biggest obstacle to Oracle's future success isn't price or other databases. It's the analytics space i.e. Hadoop/Spark which is relegating big iron SQL databases to being dumb CRUD boxes. It's why both Oracle and Teradata moved into the space but have struggled to get any traction against Hortonworks or Cloudera.
Not sure how much traction is having vs Horton or Cloudera, but I'm sure a lot of companies that already buy Oracle would look into it if needed.
That is a bold statement. Google has ~1/3 of the world who have access to the internet as regular users. Apple is a hardware maker with a very desirable array of products. I won't say I am a fan of Oracle, and I agree with you on how the lifecycle of enterprise adoption works, but that is a very far fetched conclusion.
First, large companies need to adapt quicker; while this has always been the case, the pace is accelerating. As pointed out above, Oracle has done some shit to alienate a lot of people, and have been for a while.
New companies grow up to be "enterprise". While they ard gouging and alienating their current customers and potential employees, people are NOT building on Oracle. They aren't being locked in.
As old companies (or their management) retire Oracle will have adoption rates like cobol. I am not saying tomorrow, nor this year, but Oracle is going to make big changes or see their MRR fade out with the salesy slicks who brought them on board 2 decades ago.
Whilst Oracle has done absolutely nothing the last few years other than crappy, me-too products they do have a LOT of luck on their side. Why ? Because nobody is touching the EDW (enterprise data warehouse) space. There are no new startups. No disruptors. Nothing. All of the excitement and growth is happening in the analytics space where companies are just sucking all the data from the EDW into Hadoop. And then doing feature extraction, modelling, machine learning etc there rather than doing it in the database.
So nobody is really going after Oracle/Teradata/SAP etc core business any more. It's just kind of forgotten arguably like Windows or Office.
My company is still stuck using CVS because when a new project starts up, they want to use the people who are already locked into the old tech and so they end up going with what people already know. Even teams that started with git have downgraded to CVS once the managers starting looking for ways reuse resources.
I'm not saying all companies will end up doing that, but some certainly will (and already do). They may not be vocal about it, though, because they don't want to piss Oracle.
More realistically, it's department politics that are going to prevent any sort of migration.
Enterprise IT is broken enough that those multiple system replacement projects were going to happen anyway because of accumulated technical debt and broken development and maintenance processes, and replacing a backend DB as part of that replacement is a rounding error in expense. Sure, it takes a lot of time for the transition to be complete, but lots of those transitions off Oracle are already underway.
Past performance is no guarantee for the future. We zillions of PC manufacturers before we got the likes of HP and Dell, and twenty years later, we still have them. On the desktop OS/application front, the same happened with Microsoft becoming the main player.
The common theme, I think, is that things are chaotic while there is room for everyone to grow, but get more predictable once the entire pie has been divided (aside: that's an argument in favor of Uber's "land grab at any cost" strategy)
Oracle, Google, or Facebook may eventually disappear, but it won't happen at he time scale at which Altavista or MySpace did.
https://gigaom.com/report/sector-roadmap-cloud-analytic-data...
That said, IBM DB2 is very much in the same boat.
* DB2 rolls new features in at their top pricing tier, then trickles them down. So things you could only get in the top tier in 9.5 (for example) are now available in Workgroup edition in 11. Oracle keeps very old features (e.g. partitioning and encryption) as expensive add-ons.
* DB2 is still pushing out new features. PureScale has (for example) moved from parity with RAC (clustering in one datacentre) to well beyond it (metro clusting across a region).
* DB2 respects pretty much any VM technology for sub-capacity licensing. Oracle pretty much require you buy OVM.
Top-tier DB2 and a fully loaded Oracle DB are pretty similar pricing (depending on the specific deals you can obtain from your account manager), but DB2 keeps moving, and many of the features you might care about can be had in much cheaper editions.
The problems DB2 face are mindshare (easier to find DBAs for Oracle, many people still think of DB2 as a "mainframe thing"), and there's still quite a few "enterprise" apps that only support Oracle DBs.
Relentlessly squeezing existing customers that have no way out will only get you so far.
Direct licensing costs are not all that matters. The restrictions on architectural choices and the uncertainty created by these complex licensing structures could hurt them a lot more.
They also found a new way to apply that same model with 0365 and their continual effort to add new features that only cost a "few dollars more per user per month"
Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way... all of them do it.
No doubt about that, but for basic infrastructure like DBMSs the customer of the future will be another tech company. Try extracting the same margins for a database system from, say, Airbnb or Uber as from a mid-sized bank founded in 1888.
Use to Stability, and Profitability not growth was important.
Stability, and Profitability were the goal, growth followed but was not in itself a goal
Now even if you are profitable, if you are not seeing growth then you failed. It is ridiculous.
The role of technology is to drive productivity growth, which is ultimately the only thing that improves living standards (or at least has the potential to do so).
A pizza sold in 1987 is just as useful as a pizza sold in 2017 measured by its nutritional value. But the same is not true of technologies from 1987.
These mega vendors drive co-dependency, not innovation.
Even at their most dominant, Microsoft kept adding things customers wanted. AD was a big leap forward for customers, when Microsoft could have rested on the domain model. SQL Server kept adding capabilities, Exchange, etc.
CAL's for example would never be possible with out Vendor Lockin, What kind of extortion scheme do you have to have to sell a server licence then charge for every thing that wants to connect to the server.....
Etc. etc. etc.
This particular price change is all about customers moving away from old RISC systems and IBM and towards x86. Amazon dramatically overprices Intel cores, so Oracle wants to capture that value. Cheap licensing for x86 is subsidy for AWS and Azure. They are spiking the pricing to push you into Oracle/Sun hardware or the Oracle cloud offerings. "Hardware and Software Engineered together" isn't limited to technology engineering!
The sunk cost fallacy! A better reason not to change is that a different system would cost significant sums of money retraining people and procedures
That assumes that people act rationally though, so I am not saying you are wrong that people think like this
But I don't think you realize the extent of Google's ubiquitousness. Innovation is a survival strategy, and between the companies you mentioned, Oracle comes last in that front.
If enough businesses pursue that option, then the cash cow of annual support dries up and Oracle is in a world of hurt.
They could just raise licensing costs. They've already won on API copyrights. Businesses would have to move everything off Oracle entirely with new API's to avoid legal risk. Such moves, esp if Oracle docs suck as much as claimed here, can cost a fortune with huge chance of breaking stuff. Oracle just has to keep cost of licensing lower than that of a move.
I'm not sure that's true; it's may be true that Oracle has more Enterprise penetration now, but enterprises with significant Oracle dependencies I've encountered are mostly migrating out (largely to Microsoft) -- including enterprises that also have substantial decades-old COBOL mainframe legacy that they aren't as actively working to retire.
I laugh at how the only thing discussed here is open source software and the cloud. People forget that there's a whole entire world of enterprise software and systems.
As someone else mentioned earlier, mid to large size companies don't replace systems like people do here with Javascript frameworks. It is really expensive and costly to replace systems that have been around for decades. The business logic tied up in some of these systems is so vast and complex that it is cheaper to keep them around than to replace them with something new.
So rewriting and keeping the same logic is very difficult and the business risk is very high due to all the unknowns: features, time, compliance, correctness, performance.
| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 |
-------------------------------------------------------
Gross Income | 26.83B| 27.68B| 28.74B| 28.55B| 27.93B|Forever and a day. Oracle sells to managers and executives and are very, very good at it.
Your opinion of the company as a developer or engineer has literally no relevance.
I agree, but the point is that they are getting worse. Their cloud shift is not panning out as well as they wanted, I think, and they are actually opening opportunities for competitors: if you have to make significant efforts to migrate your existing solutions, you might as well move somewhere nicer. And by basically threatening their own partner ecosystems (which won't be needed in the new oracle-cloud era), they're losing steam in sales and presales.
(Of course, it doesn't help that Safe Harbor first and Privacy Shield now have been shot down, so European businesses are not keen on moving to US-based clouds. The sort of businesses Oracle pines for, does care about these things.)
Oracle DBA here who hates their licensing, practices, etc. as much as the next guy, but I have to hand it to their query optimization. I've seen their optimizer get better with every major release, and yes, regression testing will always turn up a few problems but Oracle gives you the best tools to analyze and override the decisions that the optimizer is making when necessary (and I'm not just talking about basic hints here)
So, you changed code and didn't test it. Yup, definitely Oracle's fault.
That's not even really a CBO issue. But I hear your pain :-)
Sometimes you just aren't going to pick up this sort of thing in testing as you'll only know about it under full production load. Their CBO is pretty powerful, but by and large it's often difficult to know why it makes certain decisions. And that's even when you use their full suite of profiling tools!
no, it really is not.
But those engineers retire, new ones without memory of Oracle's past take their place, and all will be forgotten.
Remember how Microsoft was the company many engineers hated when the Halloween Documents [1] came out? Yet, they have managed to patch up that relationship since 1998.
A long time. They are making tons of money.
Devs may not like them, but most devs don't care.
Devs are usually not the one's footing the bill.
Oracle makes a decent product, they will force big-corp ABC to pay for it.
I don't like them, but I don't think this is going to hurt their business.
Am doing exactly what you suggest. All of my personal projects now run Postgres.
At that point, having to choose between paying hundreds of thousands to move db, or a few extra thousands per year to keep things as they are, the business decision is not as simple as one would think.
* Offshore to save money. Databases are a car, just follow the script / maintenance manual and everything will be okay right?
* Discover the awful quality, security, never-ending cycle of bodies, lack of retention of information, zero innovation, frustrated staff having to try to deal with them, and and most of all costs which creep up (a lot like Oracle licensing).
* Insource to qualified internal staff and retain knowledge, save money, and fix all the problems the outsourced company wouldn't.
* Now that everything is fixed, create work manuals, and offshore again. This will get out of date over time, servers will get replaced, new software comes along, and things go to pot again. Repeat.
To be fair, companies also often institute long and complex policies which stifle any kind of remediation an offshore staffer would do - because they can't. Internal employees learn the system, how to get things done, and they do it.
I work for a team that has taken over from multiple offshore companies in this way. We find all of these things and worse, really just the most awfully maintained systems around - no backups, no maintenance, no organisation, nothing. They don't even patch but they say they do! And they've paid millions (and tens of millions) for the privilege!
There's really no comparison so don't mistake the two for a second. As for automation - well - tools have made it so that one DBA can "manage" hundreds of servers at once if they're standardised in certain ways. But you'd be surprised at how many things can go wrong and how few can be automated, especially when the rest of the companies don't have proper automation infrastructure in place. Large enterprises are still fiefdoms of managers who want local employees and to retain their own jobs.
Performance tuning and improvements though are extremely time consuming. You can, for some projects, focus entirely on single digit servers for years at a time if they're important enough.
Oracle's in an awkward place. They want to get to the new world of cloud and appliance without burning down the old world, while preserving their profitability, and that's quite hard.
https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-...
Raising prices for hosting with the competitor makes perfect sense when viewed from that angle.
Now I wonder BTRFS is not getting enough attention, because its started by Oracle and their history with open-source?
http://fossforce.com/2016/03/microsoft-oracle-oracle-tried-r...
How many Oracle ERP users have made the move to the cloud? Very few.
Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL, while admirable, remains in a lower class.
I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the open source cars of tomorrow; you can't compare them to the pedigree of a Porsche.
I was always a Sybase and DB/2 guy myself, but Oracle could do things. Things Sybase couldn't be tuned for. You don't put Wordpress on Oracle. You do crazy insane shit on it that will break MySQL.
Could you put into words a little bit more of what the Oracle DB does that Maria/MySQL/Postgres could not?
So far the features that oracle had that people have mentioned:
- An amazing query optimizer
- Replication (enabling High Availability) features available 15 years ago
- Oracle was the only database able to take multi GB or TB of data in a single table/DB. (Old MySQL/Postgre had various limitations like X GB per table for a long time, they still do).
If you worked in the DB in the 200X years, Oracle was the standard and for good reasons. MySQL/Postgre were considered like toys, for good reasons.
I understand what you're saying to mean simply replication, NOT a proper distributed database system allowing/facilitating writes using what we now know to be state-of-the-art theorems/methods. To rephrase, I assume you mean oracle dbs let people write to one database, and send updates to some mirrors somewhere else.
Just google it for yourself. This is a forum, not every post needs to be a peer-reviewed scientific paper. If you don't believe the OP then go ahead, but getting him/her to jump through hoops to try to prove a point is dumb.
However, as the creator of [citation needed], I'd just like to say: if you want to say something in a forum, and it seems wrong, then I for one welcome data that backs up the assertion. Why should we take any one on face value?
You're absolutely right in that the OP has no obligation to 'jump through hoops' to prove their point (and again they are free to not reply), but people on HN generally don't make claims without at least some citation/proof, and that's why (to me, and I'm sure others) HN is valuable. Everyone has opinions. The expectation on HN is usually of reasoned discourse, and fact-driven analysis (where applicable)... While this is a minor inconvenience for posters/community members, it does a whole lot to solidify HN as a worthwhile place for people who care about that kind of thing to hang out.
Everyone who needs Oracle deserves Oracle.
As a matter of fact, I did so multiple times in order to provide simple JSON APIs which consume data from massively huge enterprise software and expose them to nice shiny web apps. Can't name any more details though, but it works - at least if you use PHP, but I believe there's also an Oracle DB driver for nodejs, and most certainly for Java/JDBC.
I built up a single OpenLDAP box, just using the standard mdb backend and a ton of RAM. Easily crushed the load test. Sadly could't be implemented for political reasons.
Screw Oracle, especially if you care about performance.
The only scalable LDAP server is the one from Sun Microsystem (openDS). It was killed when Oracle acquired Sun because they already had identity products. Then the sun guys quit to continue the products line under their own company, ForgeRock. https://forgerock.org/opendj/
I've done load testing and this ldap is taking millions of accounts, no problem.
The best products are rarely free once you get out of the average web dev context. Funny thing, this one is both paid and open source.
Technically it works... sometimes. Custom shims have a tendency to lead to complications because the API isn't very well-exposed or documented... it was another acquisition product.
Infrastructurally it's an unmitigated garbage fire. Oracle seems to think, e.g., your organization is too stupid (which is true, since you're an Oracle client) to know how to connect to AD from a nix machine or Java application, so the hardware footprint is huge.
It's questionable biz-wise for two reasons. First, because it's sold as a "complete", off-the-shelf solution when in reality it's probably about a dozen analysts working on it full-time for months just to get its biz logic set up, and then a handful for maintenance. Second, because OIM aims to be a institution-wide, one-stop-shop product (which it is* good at), but institutions that acquire it are so large that they're bereft with inter-department politics and policies that make using it firm-wide difficult.
I'm sorry but there isn't a commercial product that can compete with OpenLDAP and there may never be because it is just that good if you know how to use it. (yes, the learning curve is high, that is the only criticism I really have of OpenLDAP).
The open-source edition is only a facade with highly stripped features.
If you want any decent replication, HA, performances or bugfix. You have to pay for their OpenLDAP gold edition, which last I checked was $100k for a site license.
If you don't pay Symas money then no, you won't get support, or bugfixes developed for you.
However I doubt there is a large performance difference, it's already very efficient so it would be in the single percentage points.
As for replication you can do almost anything with the open-source version by combining syncrepl/delta-syncrepl into the topology you want, hell you can do N-way multi-master if you wanted.
I'm not sure what you have against using open-source OpenLDAP, maybe you should try it first?
Lots of Fortune 500 do it, even to their mainframe backends.
I'd highly doubt that there's something one can do with Oracle that couldn't be done with a FOSS database - although it's certainly true that it requires more servers but servers are a commodity these days anyway.
What's going to keep Oracle in the market is the amount of enterprise software that has been written without database abstraction and would require complete rewrites to support anything else than Oracle as its engine.
The only exception to that I know of is SAP which supports MySQL backends, but then again SAP is only used by companies big enough to just mindlessly shell out big bucks for Oracle too if that's what they already use.
Look, free databases are great, they just can't compete for real serious use. Not WordPress. More like NYSE.
Random case in point NASA is using pgsql for handling data streams from several of their probes, is that not real serious use ?
If you're willing to throw mapreduce at everything as a solution, you won't need Oracle nor will you know how to take advantage.
So it doesn't matter how "good" the DB is. If the App & presentation layers are so bad, that they introduce logical or other anomalies every so often, does it matter if the DB does not produce any error in a billion years?
The Porsche analogy is cute. But if the business case could be solved by 10 scooters, isn't it be better & cheaper? When your "Porsche" is down, all customers are affected. With 5 scooters down, only 50% can be (if you design it that way).
In many of these so called "enterprise" applications, what they _needed_ was 10-20 scooters, but they bought 2-3 Porsches. And it's usually because "no one gets fired for buying IBM". In many internal apps, companies literally are putting Wordpress like shitty CRUD CMS on Oracle because of this mentality.
And maybe this would still make sense. Java is still relevant. JavaEE provides the packaging for the applications. Maybe the basis for a nice serverless offering (you have for example the message driven beans).
I also think with Rust taken up by programing enthusiasts which otherwise would have prefered Scala on JVM is also going to put pressure on Java/JVM.
I don't think so. I our circles, we think 'Go' is a thing, but in most of the world, it's not.
Rust, Go, these are all popular with new companies.
Enterprises are so often .Net/Java + Oracle etc..
It's a big world of hospitals, large companies, government agencies etc..
It will start with sucking oxygen for new projects which would be by default in Java.
But Oracle support basically doesn't answer the phone unless you're regularly cutting them six-figure checks, so you kinda need that level of management to be making the decision whether or not to use the platform.
But in the enterprise world nobody really cares what engineers think. You have Enterprise Architects, Technical Architects, Solution Architects etc. who get paid exorbitant amounts of money, are political animals and can masterfully straddle the line between business and technology. Most of them are ex-engineers so they aren't entirely useless and since they have their own language they will make you look stupid. Can't articulate the transition from a tactical to strategic solution and explain what business capabilities it aligns to ? Well good luck getting that past the central Enterprise Architects who will need to sign off on your choice before it heads to Procurement/Legal.
Architects along with IT managers and CIOs are the people whom the famous Oracle Sales machine targets with golf games, overseas trips and fancy dinners. It's never engineers. I spent a few years at Oracle. They are a multi billion dollar company for a reason.
For a start, that's why I don't work (at least directly) for the enterprise world.
But I've seen companies adopt open source solutions and modernize. I've also seen companies use those "legacy" technologies. They're the ones that usually go bankrupt, unless technology is a minor part of their business.
And yes, as much as "corporate architecture" is 90% BS and politics, if you can at least explain why solution A is better than solution B in a way it's understood, then you did your part.
And the question remains, who will pick up the phone when an open source DB fails to perform as it should. Does Red Hat provide support in that area?
They all offer certifications, training and conferences around the world for you to spend company money on.
Yes it's called 'kickbacks' and it can be illegal or considered corruption.
If you were a CEO would you want your team buying a product because they were given $5000 tickets to the superbowl?
As an example, I can't stop the CIO and board at my company from talking about the cloud because of all the consultants and sales guys talking to the C suite. You want to see something really oversold right now look no further than the cloud.
Of course they do on some level.
But it's a fine line.
It's crazy how many CEO's will let purchasing decision makers be taken on these things and junkets, I would just not allow it.
But also don't doubt the ability of people to just drink koolaid. There are tons of non-thinkers out there who just 'buy' the story presented to them.
Also - I don't think 'the cloud' is oversold. It's definitely the future, and it's going to be the 'new normal' and it's here to stay.
The notion that anyone would 'host their own' stuff just doesn't make sense anymore - unless there are specific reasons for it. 'The cloud' is now the 'default choice' for most things, unless you have a need not to use it.
In the case of the cloud, I agree that there's a future for it. But I think in the future people are going to look around and notice that it cost a lot of money to run everything in the cloud and on-premise is going to start looking good again.
Well, that is rather the point of buying a large complex business application - it has to align with business processes!!
These projects often cost $10m+, once you factor in the technical implementation and integration, business process changes, training for business staff, training for IT staff, transition costs, etc.
So if you want to argue that the business should get the solution that fits their requirements the second best, because the 'best' one has an Oracle backend, you had better come up with a shit-hot reason that can't be solved with 'hire a couple of Oracle engineers'.
Exactly - cost of support/hosting/licensing the relevant database is a factor but, in my experience, it is a pretty small part of a large ERP or CRM implementation.
Build and implement an Intranet system based on Oracle
That was the start, and finish of the spec we got. Question about what sort of information the intranet stores? Here's your answer:
As long as it uses Oracle
Standing your ground where Oracle is involved usually just means quitting. Not every engineer has that luxury.
Yes, I'd quit. Period. End of discussion. I couldn't work at a company that operated that way.
There is no vendor so you're relying on third parties many of whom are mom and pop shops. And if you're a global, multi-national well good luck finding someone who you can cut a deal with for global support. Not to mention that the support is hardly likely to be top tier.
You're generally either dealing with EnterpriseDB, or you're dealing with a company that is run by people who are significant contributors to the project — literally, on the core committee — or have people who have created meaningful parts of the PostgreSQL ecosystem.
You need to drop this FUD.
I will never again use or support an Oracle product after they literally, specifically cost a former employer $.75mm, on Cyber Monday by giving us factually false information.
Did your employer attempt to recover the money from Oracle? If not, did they even consider doing so?
EnterpriseDB has according to LinkedIn between 200-500 people mostly located in AMR and EMEA based on experience with their APAC division. They simply are NOT a top tier support company on par with Oracle, Teradata, SAP etc. I am based in APAC and so my opinion is going to be far different than other parts of the globe.
And the difference with DataStax, MongoDB etc is that those companies are basically the open source projects. They control the steering committees, copyrights, branding etc. And so there there's a lot more confidence in being able to reach someone who actually wrote that part of the code. PostgreSQL has always been far more decentralised.
AWS.
While multi-master replication is still not there (it's still just a synchronous standby and read slaves) all of the heavy lifting is done for you.
Oracle has other products as well. I am generally aware of couple used widely.
Their ESB is one of the heavy players, and some sausage stands always need the most advanced ones. The funny thing is that with Oracle's ESB you end up developing the missing glue features using Java, and the ESB product's framework. The environment is extremely non-productive.
Oracle's JavaEE application server is kind of nice, if you wanted WebSphere with training wheels. While feature wise it does have similar set, the maintainability and management features are just plain inferior, and most options are bolted down, and not available unless you go to lower levels...
Oh, they offer ERP suite(s) as well. Those are for people that are prone to joining religious cults. They are not technology, and software products really. They are something sold to general and logistic managers with a story that you can actually force your company to use their "best practices" sets for everything, and abandon all software architecture in favor of warm and nice spaghetti. :)
It does not have multi-master replication natively, though there are companion projects that enable it.
http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/bdr-is-coming-to-postgresql-9-6/
Also, we're only on 9.5, so I haven't gotten to play with BDR yet, though I do have a meeting next week to start talking about how we might use logical decoding.
The other thing is that "PG 9.6 brought ..." might suggest this is built into PostgreSQL 9.6. That's not quite the case - we're working on moving it into core, but that takes time. For now it's an extension (plug-in). PG 10 will however include pglogical, which is another step in that direction.
Adding extra implementation to application, to do the database's work against the usual division of labor, no thanks. And bringing some shady 3rd party support package on top of the database is a second really big no.
For businesses only what you get out of the box counts. Otherwise you can always state that "the platform has C++ compiler, stfu and code". That doesn't really work. The companies are into buying complete products for a reason: they don't want to implement unnecessarily things they really should just get out of the box.
TBH I love postgres, but before they offer proper multi-master transactions out of the box most companies just still go for Oracle. That's similar as to why people buy Photoshop. GIMP fell some 10 years after in usability and features when they did not prioritize implementing the dynamic layer effect system. Instead of that they chose to masturbate with GEGL or something like that for 10 years, without providing the actual end user requested features. The situation still stands there, before they implement what Photoshop 4 or so did they got no chance of being valid alternative...
Postgres is my preference over MySQL/MariaDB, but I wouldn't have pushed for it back when I worked in traditional corporate IT: Stability, and having a third-party to blame, really wins there!
You mean Weblogic, right? Because OAS has been dead for a while now. Afaik, Weblogic and Websphere are practically the same, hard to say one is "just plain inferior" to the other.
Pg and mysql dominate developer-centric operations, but business-first environments are a very different game. There, it's all about long sales cycles and long feature-lists that only big vendors can afford.
It probably out performs MySQL and Postgres in most areas - and if you don't do horizontal scaling, then Oracle is probably your best bet if you want to get the most out of a server.
I don't think there are any advantages of going to vertical scaling over horizontal scaling these days.
The trick to scaling a sql db is to either shard it and treat it like nosql with worse tooling, or go vertical as far as you can before you go horizontal. Luckily, there aren't many workloads that require horizontal scaling. Stackoverflow can run on a single beefy db server.
- ASM
- DataGuard
- FlashBack Query
- RAC
- PL/SQL (the worst language ever but very useful for building packages inside database)
- Window Functions
- Transparent Data Encryption
- online reorg
- RMAN and online backup
Oracle as a company is terrible. But Oracle RDBMS is a mean machine. Do not underestimate it.
Actually it is way better than the open source alternatives, but maybe my likeness for Ada makes my opinion biased
I've heard that "in the database" sentence many times but never got it. PL/SQL is just another programming language VM that happens to have SQL types as native types, and syntax for SQL cursors.
Other than for triggers and possibly indexed deterministic functions (both of which are inessential/questionable), you don't want your code "in the database" due to it lacking basic capabilities such as unit testing.
https://thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.co.at/2016/09/noplsq...
proves that with flame graphs for a simple workload done from the app server vs. implemented in PL/SQL.
To encapsulate business logic using PL/SQL, however, is crazy IMHO. Rather than coding your business logic in a mainstream language (with incomparably better staffing and tooling), you now have it in a proprietary niche language with awkward or even non-existent debugging.
Also, the relational model is (or should be) the unified access at this level IMHO, rather than some ad-hoc data access layer.
It wont be SAP though, they seem to be all about HANNA these days
Mine is video encoding using FFMPEG (where I run more program threads than FFMPEG decides is optimal in order to make sure no cpu thread is idle).
I get at most 15% over hyperthreading off, and often about 5-10% less than hyperthreading off (For the whole process, beginning to end).
On real cores, it is close to being linear in the number of cores (not quite, but it is close).
For decades now we've had to suffer these weird internet arguments about whether hyperthreading is "real", as if there was a naturally-occuring correct number of frontends on a CPU. If someone wants to put more instruction decoders on their CPU there is no rational argument that is "wrong".
I presume a database must be memory intensive.
They might be able to stick around for a while because their legacy system is everywhere. But....
It will yet again hurt their image though; they've been hated by geeks for ages, but they are increasingly unpopular even among executives. How long can you do business with people who openly despise you?
Oracle is the only db that supports packages. Packages make migrating away very difficult. However...I don't think companies will want to migrate without package support anyhow...
The alternative to packages are schemas. One schema for every group of objects. Personally, no thanks. I cannot live without packages.