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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

Lots of negative comments about Oracle. If they're so bad, how come PMs and higher ups keep choosing them? Is there no resistance voice from engineers?

Edit: I'm getting downvoted by engineers. I guess they have to vent somehow... How about take your downvote to the PM who's going to sign a new Oracle contract?

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From experience working with these people for many years, it is mostly because they are fuckwits. No joke. Literally no objectivity or capability to reason about logically. The first vendor that gets in the door and shows them a shiny turd and they sign a contract which is difficult to get out of.

Anyone who is technical in those orgs is either very junior and stepped straight in a cow shit out of college, has a pension they are counting down to or is so utterly disinterested that they don't give a shit about anything other than the coffee break or the end of the day.

My capacity in those orgs was the overpaid consultant who came in, looked at what they were doing and told them they were stupid in a huge word document and then leave with a pocket full of cash with no changes ever being made.

In case you’re wondering if this is hyperbole — it’s not. This is my daily lived experience at $dayjob.

A good sales person on a golf course with a VP can do a lot of damage

s/golf course/[strip club|ski/beach resort|yacht vacay]/ as suits the particular VP

Selling into the enterprise is about doing your research on who the key people are, who has the purse strings, what the drivers for that company are, and what your competitors are doing with pricing, bundling, and their pitches.

Very little of this involves talking to code monkeys, unless there's a technical person who is already well-regarded enough that general managers, C*O, and the like, listen to their opinions.

The engineers in the company are usually sufficiently contemptuous of "politics" and "people pleasing" and "bean counters" and "marketing" that they aren't part of those discussions, because they've already made it clear that they hold the people making the calls in contempt. Oracle sales people are more than happy to fill the gap.

Oracle's database is actually pretty good, if price is no object and you've got a team of competent DBAs looking after it, who'll lock you out of most of the footguns. Particularly a few decades ago, when MySQL's query planning was very basic.

And sure, once you're locked in they'll jack the price up more and more every year - or worse, your business will grow and the bosses will try to control costs by not licensing more CPUs. But it's not your money, and you can always just go work somewhere else, whereupon the vendor lock-in isn't your problem.

If you have a team of competent DBAs are you going to do well with most workloads on most RDBMS?

Used to work at Oracle. They keep winning deals because at the C-level it's about:

- enterprise-grade features

- completeness of vision

- long term viability

- dependable support

- availability of talent

And no, normally they don't want to hear from engineers.

I was once apart of a team evaluating storage solutions from multiple vendors. We had rows of racks dedicated to each vendor. Between production IT, production engineers, and even the operators doing the daily grind, there was a clear loser and 2 very good/close winners. We ran our stress tests for months to generate all sorts of useful metrics. Then, corporate comes along and makes a massive PR release about the new deal they just signed with the absolute worst vendor.

Eventually, after production came to a grinding halt because the storage solution did not work, there was no follow up PR campaign about the abject failure of that partnership. C-suite people can fuck up the easiest decisions because of perks/kick backs.

Believe somewhere in the analysis of these million-dollar deals, we missed one Harvard classmate doing a solid to another.

But OCI falls down on essentially all that stuff vs AWS or even GCP.

OCI is cheap; that's the USP.

I think it is because they are significantly cheaper than the alternatives.

Oracle? Oracle is the most expensive at everything.

There were consultants specializing in optimizing Oracle bills way before they existed for AWS.

You haven’t ever compared costs of IaaS across clouds. For those that do that regularly, OCI is often half the cost of their competitors for typical compute, storage and networking workloads.

Last I looked, their core IaaS services (compute, storage, networking) were cheaper than AWS.

Oracle is in the business of selling career insurance for executives.

Because they get wined and dined? Because the salesperson made unreasonable promises? Because the people making the decisions are completely disconnected from the people that have to work with what they purchase?

My last company got tricked into buying Oracle DB servers, it was going to “solve all our problems”. Yeah, the moron who pushed for going with Oracle fucked off to screw over some other company and we were left with 2 paperweights. Not before wasting months of dev time to adapt our application code to work with Oracle’s laughable limitations. A few years later I think the production engineers turned them into a NAS so they did more than just collect dust.

I wouldn’t take free servers from Oracle (physical or in the cloud).

You think that voice carries more weight than a golf junket?

The amount of shit software my org has bought with seemingly no technical people in the meetings in mindboggling. For some reason the MO seems to be to bring the tech people in after the purchase to 'integrate'. Maybe because managers know the technical people would object and they just want to buy a solution now so it seems they are worth the inflated salary.

> How about take your downvote to the PM who's going to sign a new Oracle contract?

LOL at the thought your average Senior PM at any decent size org is the one deciding what cloud provider the company is going with...

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