'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit
theregister.com
theregister.com
Oh but it gets better. Many of them are ex oracle employees. It's a huge racket that exists for itself.
Honestly, the Amazon hustle is a crazy and fascinating little ecosystem in a bunch of ways.
https://news.crunchbase.com/retail/spreetail-nebraska-e-comm...
When I started, I asked about licensing while setting up a new production server and the CTO admitted they were under licensed and were planning to true up licenses next quarter, but over a year went by and they never did. I suggested that they work on porting to Postgres or MySQL/MariaDB and get off Oracle (or at least consolidate into fewer servers to reduce the socket count), but they never had the time to do that.
The company went out of business shortly after the bill from Oracle came due (not sure if Oracle ever got any money). I'd already left by then since I saw the writing on the wall -- as soon as they stopped providing snacks in the break room and the coffee switched from Peets to Folgers, I knew they were running out of money.
When I suggested rewriting everything in Python, the CEO explained that on the client side, this solution was bought by MBA graduates who only knew Oracle, and everything else would be suspicious to them.
As a result, clients bought a cheaper solution from competitors - Windows and a small application written in C++.
Why are they making wild business decisions. Yeah I'm probably living under a rock so apologies for the ignorant question.
I would (naively, I know) imagine that if you need to hire a third party to help you sort out your licenses with a vendor, you would do whatever it takes to get rid of that vendor. It's almost as if Oracle wants their customers to ditch them the first chance they get.
Oracle's got a lot of nasty things going for it, for sure. But there's a reason people still use it: part of it is vendor lock-in, of course; the other is that the database is actually really nice.
And chances are, you started using Oracle because of some enterprise software somewhere for which you don’t even have the source - so good luck.
And don’t forget, Oracle will encourage you to use all their Oracle specific stuff everywhere in their documentation. It’s a giant, idiosyncratic mess.
I guess you could call it "vendor lock-in" to use the more advanced SQL, analytic functions, and stored procedures or you could call it "getting what you paid for."
Migration Complete – Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database
Today I would like to tell you about an internal database migration effort of this type that just wrapped up after several years of work.
After confirming everything is working okay, at some point in time, have a "rip off the band aid" moment of cutting off the oracle db and declaring the replicated one as the new primary.
I rewrote the dozens of PL/SQL SP into the retarded language that MySQL has.
It's not impossible in any way.
The devil as always Is in the details. The real problem comes With stored procedures. Maybe this is why I shy away from their used to this day. The last migration I did to Postgres wasn’t too bad; the app had only a few basic stored procedures.
Oracle places still do a lot of stored procedures.
You will be surprised how H1B 'specialised talent' developers are just people who have worked on these ancient technologies all life, are near impossible to replace so you are left with no options but to hire them.
Oracle is a whole different specialisation in itself and its tentacles go very deep and afar.
Hell, even benchmarking their DB goes against the license.
https://www.enterprisedb.com/docs/epas/latest/fundamentals/e...
All our business logic was into PL/SQL stored procedures, I migrated them to MySQL stored procedures.
The MySQL language is a bit retarded, and some extra work was needed, but everything was doable.
Now the code runs in both MariaDB and Aurora in AWS.
We only pay AWS for the servers now.
Still, depending on a vendor that treats their customers as rudely as Oracle does must be really annoying.
more recent systems like impala, spark, kafka, cassandra, leveldb, influxdb, rocksdb, duckdb, monetdb, lmdb, sqlite, parquet, hbase, etc., are a lot more efficient at execution efficiency, though in many cases that's only 'up to such-and-such a scale' or 'above such-and-such a scale' or 'for such-and-such use cases'. there's a perhaps too comprehensive overview of the scene at https://github.com/newTendermint/awesome-bigdata
but the big business inefficiency with oracle is not technical, it's the human problem of not having control over your core business processes or the ability to continue carrying them out if, when oracle says 'jump', you say anything but 'how high?'
These days? You can buy a server with 1Tb of RAM, for the price of one Oracle license. Any Open Source database will work just as well as Oracle on these kinds of datasets.
And if you have bigger datasets, then they are likely not that suitable for RDBMS anyway.
also postgres's query optimizer has gotten a lot better
i wouldn't say any open source database. it depends on your index. there are recondite but not unreasonable queries for which mariadb and sqlite still produce pathologically poor query plans which won't complete in a reasonable time even with all the data in ram. and a few years ago i had postgres totally fall over on important queries because we'd forgotten to add an index, and it took us days to figure it out because we were using amazon's outsourced postgres thing and didn't know how to admin it
SQLite might be a bit under-powered as well for these kinds of jobs.
It worked since my manager said he asked around and did his own research and wondered how they're even still in business since everybody he talked to said the same thing - whatever you do, do not go with Oracle.
That blows my mind. I encountered two Oracle audits within 7ish years in the industry, and heard about others. If anyone goes to MIS school, there should probably be a contracts day somewhere in that curriculum, and "don't use Oracle" should be the first bullet point.
Maybe in the 80s and 90s without the internet it might be more hush-hush. But this is now two decades of aggressive Oracle audits. Two decades is a LONG TIME for companies to get off of a vendor.
And now there's Postgres with, what, 30 years of engineering into it? Honestly if your database scale exceeds Postgres, you should be on Cassandra or other specialized database that will actually scale to really large sizes, not some weirdo hyper-hardware Oracle setup.
Virtually every large org has a very involved process for vendor selection. HOW DOES ORACLE SURVIVE THESE? How does any IT organization not have a standing policy of "generally don't use oracle unless you absolutely have to"?
as i understand it, oracle mostly sells to executives above it management, but there are also lots of executives in it management who aren't as concerned about the survival of their company as they are their own careers. it's hard to point to cases where company failure can be specifically pinned on oracle licensing fees, but since a company running on oracle can never switch away, ultimately there's no reason for oracle to leave any profits for the company shareholders when they could simply extract them in licensing fees. unless the company has pre-existing licensing contracts in place, i guess, and successfully defends them — which it won't be able to do if it fails oracle's licensing audit, and obviously copyright infringement is ubiquitous in every company, so most will fail, and then oracle can alter the deal
https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon-databas...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21258127 (Edit: 2019)
They want the biggest, juiciest hits, not to have to fight with savvy buyers for what they believe they deserve.
"We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly."
From the point of view of ISPs receiving such threats it is the most preposterous thing ever.
The company will then want to meet and discuss licensing, and if that doesn't happen they'll cut your IP addresses off.
This is typically something that's free for personal use but requires a license for commercial use. We've ran into this with a few things.
If any dev downloads and installs it within your org expect an email from them to check up on your licensing.
Now, perhaps this is what it takes to put paid to IPV4...
FWIW, I have no doubt that story was not isolated at the start of the web boom. I just happened to see inside a company when it was happening. It's also why I tend to take a FOSS-first attitude to tech.
To be fair, though, Microsoft typically was willing to work with companies and negotiate volume discounts. They were not interested in immediate shakedowns (like Oracle), but preferred building long-term relationships.
I guess this is why Microsoft is respected, while Oracle is despised.
Engineers were walked through how to interact with clients; don’t say this or that because of laws and treaties. But also to listen for customer language that suggests a customer is cheating Oracle; let Oracle know and they will send the lawyers.
It was a very paranoia driven environment.
My anecdote was based on interactions with sales, product, and senior engineering professionals. Internal culture seemed very forward thinking; work from home/anywhere Oracle had a business presence. Solid benefits, new parent leave, yoga/that kind of thing stipends. Though that may have been due to contractual obligation of the aquihire, and applied to my team only at that time. :shrug: The “problems” I saw were very much “first world problems”
Would running Java under Corretto 21 change this?
The vast majority of people can just use a JDK from any of the other vendors and tell Oracle to pound sand.
Even if you do need paid support, you should pay Azul instead of Oracle, just out of principle.
Oracle ones are exactly as layer8 wrote. Moreso, if you also need windows or macos build; there's no Debian or Redhat then.
By paid support, you mean free steak dinners for middle management?
After dealing with Azul people, give me Oracle. Instead of seeing Azul people shuffling a bunch of charts around and making up shit on the fly to make it sound like their garbage product performs better than OpenJDK (it didn't for us. we benchmarked it. but shame on us, because I guess the steak dinners kept rolling in).
Look at this website, do you think it belongs to a legitimate company? https://www.azul.com/
I wasn't involved in the decision but it's my understanding that they did not even try to engage their vendor. They got legal threats from Oracle and put in a different solution on the same day. If you develop for java make sure your install process doesnt have something like "step 1: install java" cuz guess what they're going to download.
Short of imagining some long ongoing legal action, is there really any incentive for Oracle to be truthful about anything?
It seems like this entire auditing system is just a wildcard as far as time / money sunk into the auditing process and Oracle can deploy it at will...
We'll have a contract signed and everything is OK for a couple years. Then someone goes ham on inventing an approval matrix and other policy/rules to keep the offshored workers from making mistakes, and we have problems. Vendors getting paid late because of policy.
Even if we provide the contract we'll get arguments that it can't be so because it says something different in their database. It's that way in their DB, because if unknown, they default to whatever is best for our company.
My first thought was that you'd want to have ongoing diligence to be compliant. (Just like you don't want to have a delinquent debt with a loan shark who relishes penalties.)
But my second thought was that, if the audits are infrequent, some companies might intentionally violate the licenses. Or not want to know nor have a paper trail if there are inadvertent violations. (Both companies and individuals tend to like to kick problems down the road. Due to short-term thinking by businesses, and individuals who might be gone before chickens come home to roost.)
Frequently kicked off by aggrieved ex-employees.
Nothing their database does can't be done with a different database. Even paying for a proprietary database can be done with a different party than Oracle. Do not, I repeat, do not do business with Oracle under any circumstances.
If you are already an Oracle customer and you have the opportunity to drop them from your stack. Do not hesitate, Do not pause, Immediately take that opportunity. There is no downside only upside in not doing business with Oracle.
Is it maybe the least bad of all the bad options? Does it cover some edge cases which the obvious FOSS solutions don’t?
The only people I've met who like them were all Oracle consultants of some sort and not what I would call developers. When I've been forced to use an Oracle database it was because the company had a contract with Oracle and didn't want to allow any other database to be used. The decision was always several levels above my paygrade. I no longer accept positions at the kind of place that will do business with Oracle. It tends to signal that leadership of that place has some serious problems and too much money to realize they have those problems.
I'm sure you know the answer. Oracle doesn't sell to developers. They sell to the management of non-tech companies whose upper echelons are staffed by people with expertise whatever they do, which might be selling dresses or making plastic pipes. For what it's with SAP uses exactly the same technique.
For something truly difficult to explain, try Google replacing Oracle with SAP. https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-migrates-from-oracle-fi...
Years ago when I invoiced Google they asked me to enter the invoice into their portal. (Generally, transcribing a vendors invoice into your accounting systems is something you pay your own employees to do of course, but big companies know how to apply the screws.) I remember that web form. It proudly said is was created by a summer of code student. It was ugly, it was concise, it was straightforward, and it just worked first go. Then Google moved to SAP, and used SAP's Aruba service to do the same thing. Aruba is layer upon layer of poor design, outages and bugs. Now, if a Google employee sends you an purchase they often offer to "get it into the system" for you. The reason is Aruba is almost unusable, so it they need whatever service is being offered badly enough they shepherd it through.
I can only guess, but my explanation is assume SAP sold the system to Google's accounting department. Somehow, SAP's sales found a way to bypass the ocean of expertise inside one of the greatest software engineering companies on the planet and sell the system to a pocket of people who had no idea about what they were buying. Colour me impressed with SAP sales.
FOSS often has a Batphone, but few people pay for it. As a result management doesn’t want their Ops to be the only possible team to correct things.
Oracle gets consideration because teams want to have a lifeline if something goes wrong or (worst case) someone else to pin the blame on when it does. And this happens because some businesses are actually so big that that level of comfort doesn’t even dent the budget.
Oracle actually has some nice parts and some rough edges (a statement that applies equally to PG and SQL Server too, for instance), but it comes with a king-sized security blanket.
My objections against Oracle are not technical in nature. It is almost entirely cost and legal risk related.
Business people are those, who get to go to nice trips and dinners for their "right" decision.
Any other questions?
Thier transactions and rollbacks and logging actually work
We all know about Resume-Driven Development and hopping to another company every 18 months, incidentally avoiding the consequences.
But a very different model is when people are entrenched in a shop where not only is there big legacy investment/lock-in that would be hard/prohibitive for the company to shed, but also the personnel's familiarity with the legacy setup gives job security. So there are multiple reasons to pay the Oracle Tax (and/or Microsoft Tax) and not disrupt the status quo.
In any case many are shifting towards not running AD any more and instead use JAMF and similar solutions. Less attack risk (because let's face it, it's really really easy to shoot yourself into the foot with AD), and more buzzwords for the buzzword-happy C suite.
Yes, it’s called Microsoft Entra ID…