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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the old performance ads of Oracle where they would show you how everything ran better on Oracle. They used to put those ads at airports, business lounges and the back cover of newspapers and magazines read by non-technical executives like the FT and Economist.

Everyone technical knew they would game every environment to come out with superior results. I suppose it worked. As the top executives buy big system software and ignore the IT crowd who could easily point out the flaws in the methodology of the"studies".

Breakdown of one of those example ads:

https://db2news.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/a-closer-examinatio...

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A key part of the Oracle strategy is making it a breach of license to publish any benchmarking data. No performance data about Oracle's database is allowed to be published without their approval, which means no negative results are published.

They also sue you for so many other reasons. It's like the management hierarchy joke that Oracle is a litigious law firm with a sales team.

https://palisadecompliance.com/oracle-org-chart/

Also, if a sales rep or manager are struggling to make their numbers, they will audit customers.

Here's some background for those who are interested [0].

[0] A solution to DeWitt clauses. https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/

I think this has been quite common clause in the license contracts. Databrics has a blog post about it: https://databricks.com/blog/2021/11/08/eliminating-the-dewit...

This is kind of understandable. Benchmarking complex software is complicated. It’s easy to give totally wrong picture of things either accidentally or deliberately.

Oracle Exadata is very fast but expensive. I bet it would beat a similarly sized cluster from these 2 vendors. The problem is price to performance and elasticity. Because DB and SF are in the cloud, they have a lot more options that Oracle doesn’t have. This is why Kurian left Oracle to go to Google, because LE would not allow Oracle to make cloud native products that would run in other clouds. The SF cofounders are ex Oracle engineers and LE was not interested in creating a cloud native DB from scratch. If he did, we wouldn’t have a SF computing right now.

Yeah, the biggest benefit something like Snowflake or Databricks or whatever AWS tools has over the more traditional technologies is the pay-as-you-go pricing.

We're are now trying to scale unnamed technology running on EC2 from 100 nodes to 200 cores and the process to buy larger license is pretty painful. If we were using Snowflake or Databricks, we could just scale it up and update our opex estimate.

Who could forget the Unbreakable and Unhackable Campaign...

The "Unbreakable" Marketing Campaign:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-oracle-hackers/9780...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/invincible-oracle-not-so-secur...

The first thing unbreakable Linux did was break.

similiar as to how SAP is still showing growth even thought their core product (ERP Financials) hasn't changed much.

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