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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Too little, too late for Oracle I think. No matter how good the product is, it won't be a first class supported thing at AWS, Azure, or Google's cloud.

Eventually, that will drain off their customer base. If whatever the big 3 cloud providers are selling as a database is "good enough", then "better" won't be enough to keep Oracle's current position in the market.

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Oracle has a lot of "legacy" customers who have a lot invested in their existing Oracle infrastructure. Oracle wants to migrate these customers to their cloud. For "Enterprise" I see Oracle's biggest competitor being Azure.

Yes...I agree. I don't think this is a fast death. But it is similar to the position all the RISC Unix vendors were in once X64 came out. Took a decade, but that was the death knell.

This one might be longer, say 15 or 20 years...but it's coming.

They might need a new database product to survive if they are going to have to compete fairly. Maybe acquire a bunch of distributed systems startups, like CockroachDB, and do something with them for the Oracle cloud.

I think you are reading this wrong. Imaging you are a technical co-founder of a new start up... Someone is now telling you: 'you will not need to hire as many devops or DBAs if you buy this technology and you are also future proof, because we tune things for you and scale up your hardware without any effort from you.'

If the price is good (and considering you would not have to pay for salaries as well) you would be a fool not to take it.

>If the price is good

That's not Oracle's historical strong suit.

Oracle is also building their own public cloud: https://cloud.oracle.com

Sure, but their non database features probably aren't in the same league as the top 3.

They actually have some features that aren't available in other clouds (well, AWS/GCP/AZ) -- if we weren't so locked into AWS, we might've tried them for that reason. We wanted to know if we could run our own hypervisor in their cloud and access VT-x instructions. (And there were other companies at their talk that were definitely hitting up sales for trials; the "baremetal" aspect intrigued a lot of people with compliance reqs or complex cloud appliances. Dedicated bandwidth was another.)

I think later clouds have advantages and not just missing/worse features -- they got to design their architecture after seeing others try, and definitely learned some lessons.

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