China’s Biggest Startups Ditch Oracle and IBM for Home-Made Tech | Hacker News Reader

China’s Biggest Startups Ditch Oracle and IBM for Home-Made Tech

bloomberg.com

98 pointsceohockey6038 comments

Startups were using Oracle and IBM? Seems an odd choice.

Our startup did, but that was 20 years ago and the Oracle regional office was literally the floor below us.

"Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", arguably the first book with a how-to for what we'd now call 'internet startups', was about using Oracle and Perl to build web applications. But yeah it was published 1997.

And the SPARC/Solaris/Oracle stack is arguably one of the things that brought down ArsDigita a few years later. They couldn't reduce costs to accommodate lower-end customers.

20 years ago (is it so long??) we looked at Oracle for our start-up but the prices they wanted were ridiculous. We went with Informix instead which was acquired by IBM soon after. So can confirm, startups in the first dot com boom were looking at Oracle or IBM.

I wanted us to use PostgreSQL but was overruled by management who thought they knew better.

If startups are ditching Oracle and IBM, they went wrong in adopting Oracle and IBM in the first place. Do Chinese startups really do that? Can you still count as a startup when you're using Oracle and IBM?

But it seems the headline is wrong, and the actual story is that large Chinese enterprises are ditching Oracle and IBM for a Chinese startup.

Is that unique for China though? Large enterprises in the US and europe are also starting to ditch Oracle for other alternatives.

Who SAP? They are not quite as bad as Oracle but in the same league.

Which devil do you want to get locked into?

> Who SAP? They are not quite as bad as Oracle but in the same league.

Of course not SAP. However I know that the 3 biggest French banks use postgresql more and more. I know it's a data point but I think it's telling. Also, Microsoft sql server is still growing.

Amazon made considerable efforts to get off Oracle which proved hard as Oracle seem to provide some features for large users that are hard to match. However they got there and are using AMS services. Presumably other large users may be able to go the same route. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/amazon_fulfilment_o... (Aurora Postgres and DynamoDB are mentioned)

And did they even have a choice in the matter? (whether we're talking IBM being banned from dealing with them, or the Chinese government/officials imposing on them to focus relationships with local businesses)

Advertorial? I'm sure more Chinese companies use MySQL, Postgres etc than TiDB?

Sounds like one. However the DB vendor business is certainly hard to get into and survive. If pingcap has that many paying customers then well done.

Postgres community is very small in China with MySQL dominating.

So much like startups everywhere else, then.

I’m not a database guy and I only know enough SQL to get me through whatever task I need ro be complete. I used MemSQL at my last job and it seemed like an interesting idea.

Can open source solutions provide the same features as MemSQL, MSSQL, and Oracle. can one db provide all of the features as the three above? If so, are there any technical reasons to go with them? Or any proprietary database.

My intiution is that they are probably providing less and less value over time as the tech and knowledge diffuse into the open sphere. Is this true?

I would appreciate some answers to the above questions!

Well my guess is that they are planning for a time where they cannot use US tech. They planning on being self sufficient as a country.

Do Human Computer Interfaces developed by Chinese language programmers differ from HCI developed by English language programmers?

It would seem that Chinese characters might be used instead of icons in some applications. Native Chinese OSS may be more suitable for use in China and have some advantages in HKN countries.

I know that voice control is very popular in China, for text messages for example because writing on phones is much more cumbersome compared to latin alphabets.

Might be interesting to see whether voice control is going to take off much faster in China than in some other regions over the coming decade.

That’s quite interesting; I wonder, given the lack of official status for other dialects, is voice input compatible with them?

Of course they did. That shit's expensive! And have you ever tried to get support out of Oracle? They only fix symptoms, not problems.

This article is... not great journalism.

Some Chinese startups are adopting open-source databases instead of Oracle and IBM. One of them, PingCAP's TiDB [1], happens to be built by a Chinese startup. And that's it? I was expecting to hear that the cold dead hand of the Chinese Communist Party was forcing this, but no, it seems to be simple capitalism at play -- nobody wants to pay the Oracle tax if they can avoid it.

[1] https://github.com/pingcap/tidb

Serious honest question for someone who might know but is anyone in the US adopting Oracle for green field projects based on valid technical merits or biz requirements these days? It's easy to dump on Oracle but I'm curious about legitimate technical or business requirement reasons for adopting Oracle in 2019.

Anyone onboarding to Salesforce is de facto adopting Oracle. Salesforce certainly seems to be popular these days.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people taking salesforce are going for a managed cloud options. It may be running Oracle but the business will likely be several abstraction steps away from managing it day to day.

For some highly-specific performance scenarios, Oracle still cannot be beat. I know far, far more businesses where a supported Postgresql is perfectly suitable. I know only one business where Oracle was a defensible technical choice.

> For some highly-specific performance scenarios, Oracle still cannot be beat.

Can you elaborate on this please? I do not think this statement is correct.

Trading environment, there wasn't another solution with the lookup-and-matching performance they got out of Oracle, from what little was shared with me. I trust the source as he is the best programmer I know first-hand and never shied away from throwing together his own solution if he found benefit from it, like his own object database back in the early 80's.

> Trading environment, there wasn't another solution with the lookup-and-matching performance they got out of Oracle, from what little was shared with me.

I've been maintaining trading backend databases for roughly a decade. What oracle does, db2, sql server, sybase can do. And postgresql, MySQL most probably too.

Most of the times the Oracle choice is dictated by a software editor whose devs are more familiar with Oracle and have an oracle first strategy.

Open Source is the worst thing that can happen to the US tech in US vs China trade war. Chinese scene is largely isolated from OSS in the west and more often than not they are just leeching whatever the rest of the world produces in terms of software.

I dont want to picture chinese people as parasites I want to just point out that the contribution from chinese devs and mainly their tech companies could be better.

Is there a list with the contribution and usage by country?

You also need to consider the language problem, I can imagine that people that are not as good at communicating in english would have less contribution in english language projeccts but would contribute to native language projects (I seen small projects on github, game modding sites) by people that are bad english, use machine translation but that want they share their creation.

Just yesterday I found a small project on github that I used for inspiration on how to solve a problem that had the code in english but all comments was in Japanse(I think) , my point is that you may not see the contribution that happen and you then assume those do not exist.

> Chinese scene is largely isolated from OSS in the west and more often than not they are just leeching whatever the rest of the world produces in terms of software.

> I dont want to picture chinese people as parasites I want to just point out that the contribution from chinese devs and mainly their tech companies could be better.

Can you spot no Chinese company from these?

- FSF patrons https://www.fsf.org/patrons

- Linux Foundation https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/

If you frequent Kernel lists you can find many Chinese contributors (from Redhat)

- Eclipse Foundation https://www.eclipse.org/membership/exploreMembership.php#all...

- Apache Foundation https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks

- Many Apache projects like Apache Dubbo https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar...

- OpenSSL (exceptional support) https://www.openssl.org/support/acks.html

- Ceph Foundation https://ceph.com/foundation/

- OpenContainers Initiative https://www.opencontainers.org/about/members

- CNCF members https://www.cncf.io/about/members/

- OpenStack foundation https://www.openstack.org/foundation/companies/

- Xen members https://xenproject.org/about-us/project-members/

- RISC-V Foundation https://riscv.org/membership/

- OpenPOWER members https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-members/

Are these leeching by your standards?

Really? Alibaba, Baidu, Chinsese university, etc. are publishing many more usable open papers in the AI field than the GAFA. And I don't think that the position of China regarding open source is for instance worst than the one of Amazon. It is again pure capitalism in action.

You need to know where to look, there are some very interesting Chinese open source projects on github, but they're often little known outside Chinese developer circles.

Very small collection of projects I used myself or at least looked into:

https://cocos2d-x.org/about (ok Cocos2DX isn't exactly "little known outside China ;)

http://www.fairygui.com/

https://github.com/cloudwu/pbc (...and every other project by "cloudwu")

https://github.com/openresty/openresty

This is not very different from large chunks of European OSS. The language and cultural barriers are real. No need for paranoia.

> Open Source is the worst thing that can happen to the US tech in US vs China trade war.

While the OP seems to have added some level of rant to the end of the post, I do suspect the first part of the post has some merit and is in fact correct.

The reality is 'Open Source' software does reduced the cost of entry for all organisations where ever in the world they may be.

Open Source allows companies big and small to quickly get up to speed at a minimal cost and I'm sure this fact is not lost on many companies outside of the USA including China.

https://github.com/ecomfe

https://github.com/shadowsocks

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