Oracle VP: Data would be safer if most OSS distributed databases didn't exist | Hacker News Reader

Oracle VP: Data would be safer if most OSS distributed databases didn't exist

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When I read content like this, I can't help but be reminded of Bryan Cantrill's talk at USENIX entitled "Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos" from 2011 [1].

Some personal favorites:

> You actually don't need to be open-minded about Oracle. You are wasting the openness of your mind.

> What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle.

> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think "oh, the lawnmower hates me". The lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, the lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. [...] The lawnmower can't have empathy.

[1] https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2040

I think this is true for all corporations. In my opinion, all corporations are driven by the bottom line, not by emotions.

It's not. Tesla is ran by a pretty awesome guy. So are many other companies. Some visions happen to be compatible with ethics. When one's brand is backed by ethics, investors know what they are getting into. A lot of mountaineering companies and outback companies are actually like that.

Umm Tesla has plenty of "soulless corporation" going on - again, quit anthropomorphizing minmax optimization engines.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/13/tesla-wor...

https://www.revealnews.org/blog/a-users-guide-to-teslas-work...

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-factory-workers-detail...

And guess who is on Tesla’s board: Larry Ellison.

Not really, and they're not exclusive. Before profits comes the company's constitution or charter. Companies are ultimately a vehicle for its shareholder's wishes, so you have companies that are very idiosyncratic and companies established for a certain mission, etc.

That's true of companies in general, but not of corporations, and we've loaded up the corporate structure with so many advantages that it's a deal hard to resist. There are a very few companies that stay private so that they can pursue goals other than maximum short-term profit at all costs, but as a practical reality corporations are the dominant form of business today. I wish we'd go back to having enforceable time-limited charters, as the only fair trade for all the benefits we extend to corporations, but that's not the world we live in right now.

Some companies value their reputation and want to protect it.

Being nasty might give you short-term profits but cost you in the long run as people will avoid dealing with your company just because of that.

I guess what's happening with companies such as Oracle is that the reputation is already ruined beyond repair and there's nothing else to lose by being nasty so they do it.

It's my pet peeve when people use "emotions" as the only alternative to something undesirable.

Corporations should be driven by the bottom line,no one questioned that. Having a purpose,long term sustainability and stability,maintaining your integrity ,not breaking laws,not harming other human beings is not being "emotional",it is as much emotional as greed is an emotion.

I find moralizing companies much scarier than amoral ones.

I believe he goes one farther and suggests that you don’t anthropomorphize Larry Ellison.

You really can trust Oracle to be the most disgusting version of a corporation given any set of circumstances. It's literally amazing, they're like clockwork.

I can easily amuse myself by recalling the Star Trek episode where all the evil twins had goatees, and wondering where Larry’s good twin is now.

Most economy scale transactional stuff is on things not a lot of people have experience with these days like TPF, or CICS and VSAM and to some extent DB2. Oracle is more of a "mid range" DB for financial workloads and wouldn't be comparatively hard to replace with, say, postgres, as many companies have.

Could you shed some light on the sector and infrastructure where TPF, CICS and VASM are used? I've never heard of it and had to google it all[1]. What exactly do you mean by "economy scale transactional stuff"? Is something like central bank clearing house?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Storage_Access_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS

I might be able to but you are already on your way, branch off the references links there and look at open source (in the intelligence sense) of places like resumes and linkedin to see who is using what. Some permutation is used at the nucleus of card networks like visa, ACH, most public stock exchanges, and a lot of other financial instrument markets, as well as the systems of record for some of the largest banks and governments.

In 2017 big blue had decided enough is enough. Let's move to those hip new technologies like, php and MySQl. Let's do angular too!

It was a small simple application. It took no longer than a week to migrate to mysql. Unfortunately, we had a long term contract with Oracle. It didn't matter that we weren't using their db anymore, we still had 10 more years to go.

The strength of the Oracles and IBMs of the world is not in technology. It's in sales.

The FOSS community would be a lot safer if Oracle didn't exist.

Sometimes I wonder about the type of people who willingly choose to work at Oracle. Unsurprisingly, this is Oracle's best.

I wonder what Oracle's doing to get this sort of loyalty; not many employees are willing to turn their personal twitter accounts into ad space.

I didn’t want to rush to judgement so I took a look at his other tweets. I think this person may have never actually been in situations where a decision had to be made between different db options. Such people come into technology in the world of big corps and drink the kool aid; different technologies are more of a tribal or a popularity contest rather than a genuine technical assessment. Never take these people seriously.

This sort of loyalty may come because really good companies don't want to hire former Oracle employees, and not so great companies won't pay as much. Choosing to work there sort of self-optimizes you toward continuing to work there.

Because everybody wants a promotion. People at Amazon think its a great company. There were some guys who really were with Marc Anderssen when he made the colonalism comment (and didnt bother clarifying or apologizing). You have to show "loyalty" to get out ahead.

Wake me up when they are disavowing/discontinuing "owning" mysql.

And it was removed. Wayback caught it: https://web.archive.org/web/20200216050450/https://twitter.c...

They mention distributed databases, not traditional RDBMS.

Elastic databases have been at the source of countless leaks, this tweet doesn't seem out of place.

MySQL Cluster is an open-source distributed database that about half of the world's mobile network operators use to manage and route calls (it's the DB for home location registries). It is also an in-memory distributed database. And it is owned by Oracle. And if it crashes, mobile networks can go down - and with it, much of society....

Elastic databases have been the source of leaks because of incompetency of the people deploying it, not because of its FOSS license.

This person is talking about durability and integrity of data—“safety” as it pertains to data loss and lost profits. They’re not talking about data leaks.

There are good OSS databases like Postres and MariaDB, and there's also crap like Mongo.

Even though there are OSS databases better than Oracle, it could be true that data on OSS databases might be safer on Oracle on average.

Also, even though Oracle engages in horrible unethical business practices, I hear that their database product isn't bad.

How many more businesses, if financially strained by Oracle licensing fees, would be tempted to sell data about their users to make up the difference?

I have to sell user data because my dB licensing fees are too high.... is one hell of a take. Has that happened like ever?

It's a big world. A lot of businesses are only marginally viable already, and a lot of business owners are only marginally ethical. Many already sell user data. I think it likely that squeezing such businesses even harder from the top might have negative consequences for the people at the bottom.

I laughed when I saw MongoDB on the stock ticker the other day - "They're publicly traded?", I said, "that explains everything!".

> Also, even though Oracle engages in horrible unethical business practices, I hear that their database product isn't bad.

It's not a terrible DB to work with. I'd go with something like Postgres > Oracle > MSSQL > MYSQL.

And, mind you, if you care about ease of use/maintenance rather than performance, I'd swap Oracle and MSSQL on that list in a heartbeat.

But also need to say... Every year when the Oracle folks came by, all of the managers would get super antsy/nervous. They would always find 'something' that we had done wrong to warrant an additional payment on our contract. Their shenanigans were so bad that we weren't allowed to install ANYTHING downloaded from Oracle without checking with someone first.

That Oracle VP should explain why their software puts a short limit on the length of the password (in PeopleSoft).

Whenever I see that someone limits the length of the password I know that problems are nearby.

This software is disheartening.

You would have less leaks with Oracle because you would not be able to afford the database in the first place. Can’t leak anything if it’s not stored

It’s easier to secure things when there are less of them to keep track of. They’re not wrong. Or not even wrong? One of those.

Yeah, sure. Keep dreaming Oracle, keep dreaming. World would be much better place without such greedy and nasty companies.

Scott/tiger

dual

To be fair, data would be safer if MongoDB didn’t exist. Then again maybe it’s better to have all the people working on it in one place so they can be avoided all together.

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