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Comment by wcfields | Hacker News Reader

Timing is right before their largest conference in Las Vegas next week on the 17th, Cloud World[1]

Every single person hates Oracle to death on HN and elsewhere, so I should probably do the exact opposite and try to see what cool new things they're doing. I dabbled in their cloud offerings (hey, free arm core instances) and everything looks super polished and excellent. Pricing is fair, interface is way better than AWS. I am tempted to tune into Cloud World.

Anyone got any positive things to say about Oracle? What cool things are they doing?

Their RDBMS is an amazing product. There’s reasons you might _prefer_ SQL Server, or reasons you might need something more specialized, and the open source alternatives are really quite good as well. But I’ve always loved their RDBMS technology. None of the reasons that I hate Oracle relate to the quality of their products.

That reminds me of this hilarious comment of 25 million lines of code in Oracle DB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

> The only reason why this product is still surviving and still works is due to literally millions of tests!

So basically the same strategy as Hwaci with SQLite, except with precisely opposite results.

> Their RDBMS is an amazing product.

I hope you're referring to MySQL!

The Oracle DB is a crufty old throwback to the bad old days where you needed highly specialized experts to spend dozens of hours to install, configure, and tune a massively admin unfriendly piece of software.

It comes with a command-line tool (psql) with NO command history, NO tab completion, or other interactive help system. Only uncompressed file import/export formats. The need to manually manage data files when creating a table, and even specifying their file sizes. Oracle's DB is quite stable and reliable, but it is practically a biplane or steam locomotive compared to almost any other DB out there. Even the similarly aged PostgreSQL is an absolute joy to work with in comparison.

> Oracle's DB is quite stable and reliable

Can't speak for the OP but I think that's what he/she meant. Tooling might not be the best due to their proprietary nature, but the software itself kicks ass.

It does it really? I’ve worked in a company who had to file bugs against data access components and they point blank refuse to fix the issues.

Tuning an Oracle database is a dark art of undocumented parameters.

Increasingly, you can swap out Oracle with Postgres.

> Increasingly, you can swap out Oracle with Postgres.

Well, there is also a huge decrease of DB competencies around (myself first, not shifting the blame on anyone). So, now finally all you need is "just a db", DBAs are gone. Most people don't even need non-relational DBs but hey that's cool. Don't get me started :) I wouldn't blame it on the software (oracle) itself but on the fact that with microservices (and managed DBs) the role of a specific DB seems to have decreased significantly.

I'd say the 'increasingly' isn't simply because of the loss of DB competency.

I worked at a shop that for years was an 'always oracle' even though every license renewal visit left management paranoid and dejected, that got won over by the level of similarity between the two.

MSSQL doesn't mesh well with oracle because it isn't MVCC by default, so risk of conversion goes WAY up.

MySQL, well it was(is?) missing a number of other features alongside a touchy datatype model and other warts in people's memory.

PG tends to do well at picking the right features from other DBs, and you just pay a quote tax to enjoy the benefits.

> the fact that with microservices (and managed DBs) the role of a specific DB seems to have decreased significantly.

I do think this is the third point in the trident. In some shops (I've yet to see one!) you can get a database per-microservice. More frequently I see 'database-per-ecosystem' which means your microservices share a DB.

Oracle RAC runs rings around pretty much any other RDBMS in highly available database clustering. It’s very good (and very $$$).

Bubkis. SQL Server's high availability is a dream to use and rock solid. Everything else is a joke in that space.

And how do you fix such a mess? Fork postgreSQL.

You need to have database expertise if you want to operate a database at any significant scale. All of those configuration parameters don’t go away just because you’re not asked by the software to configure them. There are a lot of use cases out there where a more simple product would be most suitable, but I’ve seen plenty of instances of choosing a more simple tool and then one by one encountering every single problem that a more sophisticated RDBMs would be capable of easily solving.

Also, I really like Postgres, but it’s a nightmare to work with at scale. Even simply things like execution plan monitoring and management are tedious in Postgres, but incredibly easy to stay on top of with the _tooling_ provided by Oracle.

Having migrated large codebase/product from SQL Server to Postgres, can definitely relate. I love Postgres as a developer, but from DBA/devops perspective, Postgres requires babysitting where SQL Server just works. Things like having to manually customize work_mem for complex queries feels very cumbersome and is very inefficient, - it should be solved by software.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/16/oracle_settles_with_s...

They're incredibly innovative in the intellectual property space. Their lawyers have successfully sued an incredibly diverse range of people using a wide range of unique and esoteric arguments.

Even when they're not successful in court, they're still generally successful in a business sense by forcing smaller companies into bankruptcy, takeover or into accepting licensing on terms favorable to Oracle.

They're doing lots of "cool" things, it's just all evil corporate legal things. They don't do anything "cool" in terms of developing technology.

Graal VM is cool:

https://www.graalvm.org/

Do you need an Oracle license to use it commercially?

No - GPLv2

https://github.com/oracle/graal#license

They basically saved Java when they bought it, tons of great features and quick updates nowadays. There was almost zero innovation for about a decade while it was with Sun.

Their treatment of OpenSolaris is unforgivable in my opinion. We can now run ZFS on mainstream Linux as of a year or two ago, but it's too little, too late.

ZFS is mostly developed by the OpenZFS community, not Oracle. OpenZFS is creating all the new developments, including ZFS on Linux, while Oracle is over in the corner with their little fork, pretending it doesn't exist.

To put it more succinctly: Oracle ZFS is OpenOffice. OpenZFS is LibreOffice.

Yes, what I mean is Oracle could have relicensed it so that the Linux ZFS port could actually be in the kernel source tree.

They also crippled Java on Android by suing Google.

They leverage their hard won reputation to provide business opportunities for smaller rivals, an act of selfless business practice I have not seen from any other organisation outside of, say, Norton.

That's like saying everyone hates going into that part of the forest because there's a grizzly bear roaming around so I should probably do the exact opposite. Look how many berries there are, and I wonder if there's any good salmon in that creek over there.

Good luck getting mauled to death. I'd rather chew on a stick than go into business with Oracle.

Their stewardship of Java is great. I have high confidence that both language and runtime will evolve in direction useful to giant majority of Java devs.

I have a friend who works in Oracle Cloud, he convinced me that it would be good and that there was a "forever free" tier to try it out.

I had a really really bad experience with their cloud relating to billing, they are still chasing me for it, basically they forced me to pick one of two "shapes" and both shapes were paid. I should have had alarm bells ringing when they asked for billing info.

I saw the payment on my card and tried to shut everything down, it was something like $80 which for me was a lot at the time, but even when deleting as much as I could something remained and it was still charging me $80 every month.

I'm not stupid, I use cloud's professionally, so I'm not sure what I did wrong.

Essentially they kept charging me and I cancelled my debit card, which caused them to finally shut down my account and then they put the outstanding amount ($160~) to collections.

I can definitely be in the wrong here, but I really did try to give them a shot and all I got was bitten, which is literally what everyone says about Oracle.

So, no, don't give them a chance, they are trying to rob you.

Not my experience at all, If someone is deterred after reading above experience.

I run a small Http server, and I never had problem with billing, However the control plane UI is not as refined as AWS or GCP.

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