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Comment by megaremote | Hacker News Reader

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

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?

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)

> 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.

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)

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

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.

"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.

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