A Story of O(racle)
tbray.org
tbray.org
About the only solution I can suggest is to avoid working for such companies, but I'm be preaching to the choir to say that.
Might as well make the best of it.
Not that this is the case everywhere and everytime, but if technical decisions were left solely in the hands of people that lack technical skills, the situation would be even worse that it is now, with all the "enterprise software" floating around and causing trouble directly proportional to their cost.
Every few days on pgsql.general mailing lists, there is someone asking for a good Postgresql book (the "High Performance MySQL" kind)
Less books = one more tick mark for Oracle.
If you won't do it, why should anyone else?
My take is that the overhead of maintaining and using Oracle means that you have to cut resources somewhere else. I'm pretty sure a competent DBA and developers can ensure atomicity and integrity using Postgres (instead of Oracle), and have a lot of time left over to create more features in the application.
Its just that RAC is a special technology with no equivalent on other DBs. It is usually placed where you need load balancing on the DB level. It normally has very high availability that is a good fit for mission critical DBs. I hate seeing good technology wasted, but you are right that if Postgres is already there and works well, there is no point in moving anywhere.
Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and straightforward to use. If you even can run your application on Postgres then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's for[1].
[1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.
Oracle (the database) is meant to be the integration point for Oracle (everything else). If you aren't running any of Oracle's other products, then it boils down to a pure technical decision - do you need feature X? Is it cheaper to buy it or build it? For example do you use OpenFiler or buy VVM or use ASM that comes with Oracle since you need a database anyway? Or maybe you have exotic spatial data needs. Or you want virtual private database/label security (http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/RLS - Oracle has had this for years, the Postgres guys are still talking about it, the MySQL camp don't even know that there is such a thing).
Now, I am a long-time Oracle user, and even I say, unless you know and can say specifically why you need Oracle, then you should use Postgres or SAP/DB (or in place of Oracle XE, maybe even SQLite). But if you do need it, then it's Oracle or DB/2, choose your poison.
I guess you're stuck with it if you need to run Oracle financials or Peoplesoft or something like that but one of my professional goals is to never work for another company big or dumb enough to use either.
Oracle (the database) in the hands of anyone basically competent is easily capable of 5-9s reliability. Not that I'm saying Postgres isn't mind. I'm just saying, use the right tool for the job (and hire the right people).
I find DataPump very easy to use, and very fast, it's I/O bound even on serious storage arrays. YMMV. SQL*Plus is definitely showing its age I agree.
Having said that, I don't think Oracle was totally neglecting that area. They had a few decent free tools available (SQLDeveloper, JDeveloper, trial DB versions) and while their articles didn't come close to the sheer amount IBM offered, there was enough information out there.
They could've marketed that better, though. But in that regard, they're certainly not much worse than a lot of other enterprise companies. You can't measure everything by the way Microsoft and Apple are doing it.
Sadly, this is why Oracle could buy Sun and not the other way around.
And last time I checked, all 3 companies mentioned are bigger in market cap then Oracle.
What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different?
I'm sure the millions of dollars he got helped him make the decision.
Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracle has. The only metric that mattered was how much money Oracle was willing to pay for Sun vs another bidder.
Using any other criteria would just launch a nasty shareholder lawsuit against Sun's soon to be departed management...
So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?
Oracle has claimed they bought Sun for their hardware (e.g. so they could do vertical integration selling like IBM), but that remains to be seen if it is true or not.
Combining that with Oracle's applications turns Oracle into a complete solution provider like IBM & HP.
Solaris is open source, but Oracle has dropped support for the open source version and isn't going to open source all new features.
Sun also owned MySQL, which gives Oracle a great foot-in-the-door at a whole industry segment where they weren't a player before.
What makes you think he had a choice. The CEO isn't the only one, who gets to decide where a company is sold to. Infact his/her vote often counts for very little.
In a public company the CEO typically can only recommend to the Board that an acquisition go through. The board can then put it to a shareholder vote.
The real question is "why did he recommend it?" and the answer is because the company had no other options if it wanted to survive.
Oracle, on the other hands, sells only to other businesses. At this point, their reputation for being "enterprise grade" is so well established, they could probably sit still for a decade and still retain a fair amount of their customers. I don't think Microsoft, Apple, or Google could say the same for their businesses. Well, maybe Microsoft could, but certainly not the other two.
We don't want to take apart our office furniture and make it work more efficiently, or modify it and resell it to other businesses as part of a breakthrough interior decorating package. We want to sit on it and put our laptops on it and use it to get the other "real" work done.
So if you're in the road construction business and you need a HR system or a procurement system or whatever, you call some pricey consultants who call Oracle and you tell your accounting people to explain the problem and ask them how much its going to cost and you tell your IT department and accounting to spec it and do it and you fire them if it's not all done in six months and go back to your real work which is managing your highway building project out in Tallahassee.
Is it the name?
"Do no evil" is some other company's motto. That is actually being sued by Oracle.
So, the analogy may be more apt than the crude master-slave relationship that people have commented here: many companies willingly choose Oracle, knowing full well its tactics and that they will be locked in.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-O-James-Thurber/dp/155611189...
They do this through user conferences such as Collaborate and ODTUG (which is developer specific) - those conferences are much more technical in nature than the marketing oriented OpenWorld.
Oracle also have the OTN and its ACE program for engaging with the technology people, including forums, beta programs, code sharing site, etc.
And of course, Oracle supports the local user groups which are also technology oriented - many of those user groups are highly critical of many Oracle decisions (and you should have heard the noise when Oracle Support site switched to flash) - but Oracle still supports them because they know that an active user community is essential.
Microsoft MSDN for developer support and Oracle has OTN. Both companies have developer oriented conferences in addition to business conferences. Both companies employ evangalists that work with startups to help them adopt their technologies. Where do you see the difference?
A few years back, I wanted to buy stock in a software company, because I was in the software business, knew something about it, and owning stock would result in me learning more, which would benefit me doubly. Out of Sun and Adobe, and choose Sun (still love java); but after I placed the order, I realized that Sun wasn't a software company. It didn't draw significant revenue from software. I tried to change the order to Adobe, but it was too late.
I sold it years later, for half. I don't regret the loss (it's the stockmarket after all), but I do regret mistaking Sun for a software company.
In the enterprise space the customer is other businesses. Apple does essentially the same thing in the consumer space. The user is more important than the developer.
This is a good thing.
Imagine if airlines treated their relationship with the flier as the most important. Imagine if politicians treated their relationship with constituents as most important.
Thank you very much.