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Comment by fhoffa | Hacker News Reader

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fhoffa

"More popular"? Citation needed, please.

In terms of measuring popularity, I love

https://db-engines.com/en/ranking

Google Trends is interesting too

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2021-04-24%202...

Disclosure: I work for Snowflake

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Oracle is the most popular DB? I’ve never run into an Oracle DB in my entire career

Sounds like that's a you issue, not one for Oracle.

Don't mean to sound dismissive but that what your post reads like, jut because I've never encountered a brown rat does not mean it's not the most populous animal species on earth

It's extremely possible to have never run into an Oracle DB in an entire career (in the depts you worked in), and moreover it's quite possible to use one database in finance and another in engineering or operations (Postgres or cloud). It merely means you haven't worked at the type and size of organization that tends to license Oracle, or more specifically only in some depts. And sometimes the org didn't voluntarily pick Oracle for technical reasons, it was mandated by the end-user, or for compliance, or application stack, or Oracle's sales team beat out technically superior/more cost-efficient competitors.

None of that is denying Oracle exists.

And that isn't even an 'issue', just an observation. I imagine this used to be similar with encountering IBM DB2 or SAP or Amdahl or melamine deskphones and partitions, but I assume you wouldn't say those are issues.

PS Oracle cloud didn't even have EU sovereign regions until 2022(!)

Pretty sure the most populous animal species on earth would be some type of insect, probably an ant or a locust. According to wikipedia there are estimated to be over 1.4 billion insects for each human on Earth. Rats are numerous but not nearly that numerous.

I've seen the opposite: It's hard to find a large company that doesn't use Oracle (but many would love to get away from it)

See this chart from Gartner DBMS Market Share stack ranks - Oracle was #1 for a long time:

- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/aronthal_dbms-gartnerda-cloud...

Snowflake is now #9 on this chart.

(high res: https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4D2CAQGZqgH3ta2R0A/commen...)

What I’ve seen: most big companies have one or a few Oracle databases and hundreds or thousands of “all other DBs”, including licenses for MS SQL Server.

Example: Amazon

(Formerly)

It's interesting that Alibaba cloud and Huawei are ahead of Snowflake

Corporate and education is infested with Oracle due to an army of salesdroids and large technical platform decisions being made by upper mgmt instead of infra staff.

I've also observed that Oracle stack people generally don't have experience with other platforms, so push it in whatever org they're working for.

The Google Trends for "Snowflake" the company are clearly polluted by "Snowflake" the topic: https://screenbud.com/shot/1df2725e-0faf-4795-b066-585d0857d...

don't disagree with what you said, but your Google Trends argument has a big asterisk against it - right in the page it says "This comparison contains both Search terms and Topics, which are measured differently. LEARN MORE"

I hear what you say. But does it change anything?

Yes, efficacy of your argument

As a data point, if you examine something more granular and trend/topic tied, like Snowpark (which is close to Clickhouse alone) or "Snowflake Table" I would propose the overall point being made kind of stands.

The original term is ambiguous (I wish Snowflake had different branding) but more specific terms to Snowflake still rank high and are maybe less wonky of a comparison.

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