"The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous was the company. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those."
1. I build products on Oracle at a startup.
2. Oracle has many compelling features that really don't have first-class open source alternatives: OLAP, encryption (wire and at-rest), VPD, materialized views with query rewriting, object and document storage, monitoring and tracing, among others...
3. Oracle got more compelling since being offered--license included!--on Amazon RDS.
There are a ton of responses for Microsoft; why doesn't anyone question that? Actually, I'm curious now. Is there a new incentive for SQL Server? Maybe something in BizSpark that makes it attractive?
Sybase was better than Oracle, and Postgres was just as good as Sybase at that time. But SQL Server (version 2005 on) has stood taller than all of them in my view. Excellent management tools, stable, reliable and no performance issues for our apps. Most of our apps are write light and read heavy with thousands of users hitting the db - served off one Win 2003 server (we have a warm spare).
So there is some truth to your statement about nobody choosing to use it - for us the primary motivation to not use it internally was cost. At our customer premises they picked up the tab. We have MSDN so sql server development licenses are not an issue. Have not met a Microsoft salesperson yet!
I've never had a bad experience with it, it needs a lot less maintenance than Oracle does (or did, at least), it performs pretty well (we're an insurance company with large datasets), is integrated in a .NET stack (while you might not want to go there, especially as a startup, it is very nice for corporate work), it came with Reporting Services which we used to replace Crystal Reports, it has lots of (admittedly non-standard) extremely useful SQL functions, data types, etc. And I love SQL Server Management Studio and the other Microsoft tools.
MySQL felt like a toy database in comparison (especially the management aspect), and the non-relational stuff is out of the question for now. We might not have done due diligence by not looking at other alternatives (notably Postgre I guess) but they seem like a poor fit given our developer's strong Microsoft-centric backgrounds. Most of us also have at least one Microsoft training course in their SQL server, and they have very strong support in my country (Uruguay) against nonexistant for most other platforms.
Above all, are you helping a customer? solve his problems instead of compounding it - that my friend is more important than choosing Oracle or Mongodb.
Having Oracle as your db doesn't mean that you
are not working on interesting problems
But if your company chooses Oracle, it means that you're bogged down by legacy, stupid company processes and/or clueless managers.
And in most such environments, the harder you try to change it for the better, the harder it fights back, putting yourself in an awkward position in which you are considered the bad apple of the team. So you end up either adapting (not giving a shit), quitting or finding some small project with no perspective for the company (i.e. less controlled) that can bring you pleasure.
Of course, some companies, like Adobe for example, use Oracle when it doesn't impact their core competencies, as it's a safe choice for corporate types. But a company like Adobe doesn't earn money from projects that are relying on Oracle and other projects inside Adobe are also using HBase and MySql and their own distributed file-system that can be queried and so forth.
Either way that quote is correct. I'm not promoting the latest fads (personally I'm not into NoSql unless it makes absolute sense), but you can safely ignore companies that make decisions based on brochures and lap dances.
I don't understand how using Oracle for your RDBMS is suddenly equated with all the things you mention.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/mountain-view...
[If 12 dimensional hierarchical databases with complex logic are your thing then Hyperion is really rather cool in a perverse kind of way].
BTW If anyone here is interested in this kind of space I have had some interesting experiences in building extensions to HFM...
true clustering (Oracle RAC)
multi platform
supportMy point, if all you ever need from a database is solved with key/value store then Oracle is not mildly interesting.
Forget price for a moment, any feelings you might have for Larry Ellison, the good/evil nature of the company, or whatever. Consider the software itself.
Many people aren't all that familiar with the basic things a database is supposed to do. The list is large. I can't possibly give it justice off the top of my head, but here are a few that come to mind: make it possible to see data in a consistent state (as of a single point in time), without being blocked, even as other people are changing it; support "transactions" -- a group of requests that either all succeed or all fail -- so that the database cannot end up in an inconsistent state; guarantee recoverability to a consistent state even when people change their minds, statements fails, power fails, hardware fails, or all of these things happen at the same time; and many, many other things like security, support for the relational model, SQL, joins, etc. Real databases aren’t simple key-value stores.
Historically, Oracle obtained a huge lead in market share because it delivered the most complete mix of these basic things long before anyone else.
Something not widely recognized, but that should be obvious to programmers, is that low-level architectural decisions have a huge impact on how well a database performs these basic duties. Oracle maintained its lead for a long time because it got many of the low-level architectural decisions right. It is really hard to catch Oracle if you are trying to polish up a bad locking model, for example. Oracle still does the basics better than most. That, in and of itself, is a reason to consider Oracle.
Oracle remains viable, even as others continue to catch up, because Oracle builds on its solid foundation by adding additional capability and features relentlessly. I challenge you to read the new features guide for any new release of Oracle and to remember just the names of 20% of the new features. The Oracle documentation, as of 6 or 8 years ago (10g), was 40,000 pages. No telling what it is now. I can tell you this. If you have something you need to do with databases, Oracle probably figured out how to do it a long time ago.
I, personally, am a huge fan of PostgreSQL (and it’s freeness), but I recognize that Postgres is never going to be able to touch Oracle in features. It’s impossible. Working with Postgres is just going to require a lot more manual labor. Some things aren’t going to be possible. Performance may just have to suffer sometimes. Let’s hope Postgres does the basics well (it does). That’s the most important thing. But when it comes to building spacial indexes on hierarchical dimensions, or whatever, Postgress just isn’t going to have a feature for that. I’ll have to figure that one out for myself.
One key point: if you need to build a large, high-performance, data-driven application that provides nearly instantaneous response for thousands of simultaneous users, Oracle is one option that can get the job done. If you need to build something huge, say billions of rows, that provides nearly instantaneous response to dozens of users, Oracle is one option that can get that job done. So no wonder that some companies consider Oracle.
The last thing I’ll mention is that it takes a lot of time to learn something like Oracle. I would be surprised if after a year of using it, for example, that you can really make it hum better than any of its top competitors. If you do use it for a while I think you’ll find that it is really good at the normal things and in a different league when it comes to the unusual things. This comes in handy when you are being paid to get things done (by a company that can afford Oracle) -- hence the reason that most startup-oriented people don't have much appreciation for Oracle.
Are these good things?
We can also reverse this argument: if you're using Oracle, you will never have a use for 99% of its features.
If you need Oracle, you'll know it. If you don't know that you need Oracle, you don't need Oracle.
I run MySQL, Oracle SQL Server, hundreds of databases, a couple in the 'many thousands of queries per second' range.
There are reasons for each database platform.
In this case, yes it is, Postgres probably has the best type system and extensibility of all SQL databases. GiST and GIN are very good technologies that also exist in Informix.
If I had to choose something that is missing in Postgres and very far away for sheer want of implementation effort, it's parallel execution of queries.
Oracle RAC is also quite a crazy and neat feature, except when it has problems, in which case you get even more crazy for that crazy.
On the other hand, Oracle is also not a strict superset of the features in PostgreSQL. For example, 9.1 has the only credibly fast implementation of SERIALIZABLE level isolation that I am aware of. There are also interesting features like "index exclusion constraints" that have no equivalent in Oracle, and solve problems hard to solve otherwise (example constraint: there are no overlapping circles in this table)
We use Oracle, MS SQL Server, and Sybase because that's what the vendorware we use requires. We do have some open-source software that uses MySQL for administrative purposes.
I would say all these databases are worthwhile as long as the DBA is competent. Given that, unless you have a reason to choose Oracle (e.g. familiarity, integration with other applications, a specific Oracle only feature, contractual obligation), I see no reason to choose Oracle. Many companies choose Oracle because Oracle built a solid database/brand early on while catering to big businesses. MySQL and Postgres made great progress in the past decade make them valid alternatives.