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Comment by maxk42 | Hacker News Reader

Oracle has a very complete and much cheaper cloud solution relative to AWS. I've begun migrating my own projects over to their cloud. The savings on egress costs alone pays dividends.

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I find the comments in this article very accurate:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15160149

> ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software.

> Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely.

> They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem.

> ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat.

And yet MySQL is very much alive..? Java has fully opensource implementations too, and has had innovations like GraalVM and Jakarta EE.

I think I'm too young to hate Oracle with a burning passion. I would be very scared of their sales/corporate team, but I mean, even having large contracts with Google or Amazon is difficult to say the least.

MySQL is alive for companies already using MySQL, but would well informed companies be choosing it today? I'm not so sure.

I think you either want it to have more functionality and you choose Postgres, you want a particular performance profile and you pick MariaDB, or you want the enterprise support and you pick Oracle's database. Why you would pick Oracle-supported MySQL today I'm not sure.

> have more functionality and you choose Postgres

PostgreSQL still after all these years has a terrible story when it comes to HA and horizontal scalability. Nothing is built in or supported. And one of the only companies to provide something half decent i.e. Citus is now owned by Microsoft and so that project is now at risk.

At least MySQL has something built-in.

So MariaDB then.

Easy to operate, perhaps?

With MySQL group replication, it is pretty easy to set up a HA cluster that allows you to sleep soundly. It can also handle thousands of connections without the need of a connection pooler.

Sure, but MariaDB is the more obvious choice surely?

No, why do you think so?

Among the largest users, MySQL (or Percona Server) is chosen far more frequently than MariaDB.

GP mentioned Group Replication, which isn't even available in MariaDB.

That one is more on MySQL, isn’t it? They were the ones that sort of stopped innovating for a time.

didn't the new basecamp "Hey" email product choose to use MySQL?

I think so, but they have been operating MySQL at scale for many products for about 20 years, so I can understand why they might not choose MariaDB (or Postgres, Oracle, etc).

Most people seem to be using the Percona Server branch of MySQL.

Good point, again this seems like another alternative that makes "stock" MySQL an option that there seems to be no good reason to choose.

This is not so with Java. They have moved Java along a lot since they bought it; they released 1.8 finally, and have introduced lots of new features such as type inference since then.

MySQL is also going strong after the acquisition. Lots of new features.

This is such a hilariously myopic HN take.

I work for a government agency in a rather poor flyover state. We ran Oracle databases and a few other products for multiple decades, until Oracle conducted an audit and decided to shake us down for everything we were worth. We migrated away from their products, but only after being forced into expensive multi-year subscriptions for products that we didn't need.

I will never forget the arrogance and greed of their legal/sales people. They are bloodsucking sociopaths.

I'm no fan of oracle's audit approach but it sounds like you were expecting special leniency to not pay for their stuff - for decades - because you are a govt agency/ live in a low income place. Not how business works. If you're playing by the rules, no one can force you into any long term contracts you don't need.

I'm also a government Oracle dev. I have no way of knowing what I'm licensed for and they don't disable the features we're not licensed for. I literally have to talk to my director to talk to our account rep to figure out that I'm not allowed to use table partitioning.

portions of Salesforce are the same way. You don't know you're out of compliance until an audit happens and you get the "sure would be a shame if something happened to your instance..." speech.

Agreed that Oracle licensing is byzantine, probably deliberately. But devil's advocate says that any organization should be aware of what they are actually licensed for, even if that means contracting a third party to ensure compliance.

We have a small IT department and are running on extremely limited funds. We literally had two unlicensed dev databases, and Oracle threatened to sue us for millions of dollars, unless we bought a subscription to their shitty cloud product.

The whole process was shitty, predatory, and abusive.

That’s the usual blind rhetoric against Oracle. Any factual info on how are they worse than the “good” companies that literally track every single step you take, that attack the very democracy of countries, that help the spread of dangerous anti-intellectual rhetorics, or the “usual” anti-union, shitty working condition giants?

They dared sue the small mom&pop shop called Google for going against the Sun license of Java?

Just curious, so which companies do people consider are creating/selling interesting and innovative ENTERPRISE software?

Microsoft. King of the enterprise with no intention of losing the title.

PowerApps, Power Automate etc. - while not necessarily innovative in a vacuum - are, when you consider they are bringing cloud-based automation and RPC to the (enterprise) masses.

HashiCorp.

Tying yourself to Oracle is quite a risky choice in my opinion.

After having used their non cloud products 10 years ago, I wouldn't do any business with them. At all.

I'd say the same about Facebook.

Totally off topic, but I found it funny that in the offical oracle cloud intro video the robot arm in the background misses the box, right as the narrator mentions the advantages of automation at 1:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_BDfMdGn3M&t=61s

I hate oracle, but man do i love their art style branding, kind of a 'painting' vibe

I think you'll find the box missed the robot arm.

lol good eye! but it shows me how real tech works, nothing is 100% guranteed

That has nothing to do with MySQL. Facebook operates their own DCs and hasn't indicated any interest migrating elsewhere.

> Oracle has a very complete and much cheaper cloud solution relative to AWS

Tell us more. Ignore the haters please. I'd love to have your insights.

It's all on their site - https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ Their price list is at https://www.oracle.com/cloud/price-list.html and the egress is under the "networking" section. Basically they give you 10TB outbound data transfer for free and charge as little as $0.0085 per GB after that. That's a savings of 90% (or 100% if you use less than 10TB transfer, which most apps do)

Additionally their cloud servers (and most other services as well) are much cheaper than comparble EC2 instances and every one of their services I've used so far also includes a free tier so you can try them out without paying anything.

All in all pretty pleased so far.

Yeah, AWS (and Azure, and GCP) really has notoriously expensive bandwidth, and it's the one thing they will never budge on in negotiations, since they know it's where they have nearly 100% profit margin; you can avoid using most services, or use compute etc more efficiently, but it's hard to consume less bandwidth!

It sounds like Oracle is actually pricing bandwidth at a reasonable price. This is quite a shock, coming from a historical perspective!

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