I can't speak for HN but I don't hate Oracle. The engineering is top notch. It's the "screw the customer" attitude of the sales dept that no doubt emanates from the guy at the top that annoys me no end.
Do you still think so after reading this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
I think this is reading far too much into nothing. He writes 'bug' correctly about 5 times. I'm not an expert in psycholinguistics, but I suspect there's a phenomenon where you can mangle your internal pronunciation of the word and hit the wrong vowel.
Could be. I could have left that somewhat tenuous side note out, my argument doesn't rest on it.
Is it? Can you give me an example of the top notch engineering from "modern" Oracle?
I mean this as a genuine question, I am not that familiar with recent work coming out of Oracle.
Sure, Shenandoah (started at RedHat) is even more brutally mindblowing, but it has a constant overhead (and maybe obviously, maybe not, but it builds on the already existing pretty good GC infrastructure in the JVM).
So at least it seems the Hotspot Group is left mostly alone to do their high quality work.
The database harkens back to when computers were new. There's a ton of money that goes into continued development of it, and is vertically integrated, including custom hardware and the software to run it. It's extremely expensive hardware - they still sell SPARC servers, running Solaris if that's what you want (but they do also support a custom Linux kernel for their hardware).
It's such a high end niche that there's only a handful of companies that can even run the benchmark competitively because it just costs so much in hardware to play at that level, which makes it very opaque unless you're fluent in a lot of terms, some of them proprietary, others not. Eg https://blogs.oracle.com/exadata/post/exadata-uses-persisten... it's an absolutely fascinating journey into getting better SQL performance that involves some really high end shit, and (like kubernetes) most of the people out there just don't play in the same league. Which isn't a judgement against them and their needs, but it costs a lot of resources to wring microseconds more performance from a multi-million dollar machine. An AWS EC2 cloud VM, this ain't.
Alternatively, you don’t see benchmarks because Oracle’s licensing bans posting benchmarks - https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...
The ability to tolerate machine failure with zero downtime and zero data loss.