Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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Oracle offers everything. Databases, web frameworks, programming languages, CRMs, cloud management tools, auto scaling clusters, identity management, BI, document search, email servers, colocation, mainframes, calendar sync. You name it, they've got it. Oracle has products ready to go to run an entire country if it needs to.

Sure, Postgres beats OracleDB, but Postgres doesn't integrate as well with Oracle Fusion and you need to migrate the code yourself. They're like SAP: they're big enough that you can make a career just out of configuring their software packages and make good money while doing so.

It's expensive and certainly not the best, but it's reasonably stable and has a huge company backing it. Oracle won't disappear any time soon and they're not as likely as Google or Microsoft to shut down their services within a few years notice.

In some countries, Oracle is also very good at doing what Google and Microsoft are doing to students. The Brazilian programmers I've spoken to specifically learned OracleDB when they were taught relational databases. They learned to program in Java, and I'm sure Oracle also sponsored other parts of the professional tooling they got to use for free. Microsoft, on the other hand, didn't seem to generous towards their educational facility (no free MS tooling for their schools like they offer over here). If all you know is Photoshop/Windows/Maya/OracleDB/iOS, you're going to look for jobs where you can use Photoshop/Windows/Maya/OracleDB/iOS, and employers looking for cheap juniors will need to offer Photoshop/Windows/Maya/OracleDB/iOS to make the best use of them.

> Sure, Postgres beats OracleDB

Are we sure? I'm by no means a DBA, but DBA at our company (who is freaking smart btw) said if money wasn't an issue, he would actually go with OracleDB.

OracleDB forbids benchmarking it in the license, so I just presume it's inefficient and too slow to compete.

An example, Oracle has global unique index when a table is partitioned, Postgres doesn't.

Again, I haven't worked with OracleDB at all, and my postgres knowledge is limited, but assuming without having experience with both systems isn't fair to either DBs IMO.

Every large database vendor forbids public disclosure of benchmark results these days - ie Snowflake, you name it. Privately it's a different story obviously.

Streisand Effect. There must be anonymous benchmarks on the web somewhere.

Same.

I work with engineers and technical managers with 25+ years of experience, building and maintaining serious business software 'you could run a country with' - people here build react web apps or do scientific research, or work for a SaaS provider - completely different view than building highly complex, regulated, mission critical software that supposed to run for decades and be supported at this level.

I think it's an arrogant and naive mistake to think nobody reading hacker news has ever built anything complex, regulated, mission critical, or intended to last.

A more useful line of conversation might be discussing the vastly different requirements and environments (both physical and bureaucratic) that span our industry. Right now I'm a one man dev team slinging multiple products as fast as I can, trying to find revenue as the runway burns up. It would be silly to think everyone is in my same position with my same tradeoffs and I don't expect that to be particularly controversial.

If you have some good insight about when Oracle products are particularly well suited to the task I think many folks would love to read and discuss it. If you just want to act like you're the only one taking your job seriously then I suggest you just save your keystrokes and everybody's time.

The Oracle database is an amazing piece of software. The problem with it is as open source and SQL Server started eroding its share, Oracle pivoted to owning vertical line of business software.

My employer probably spends more money on databases for our learning management system than we do for one of our main customer facing apps with thousands of concurrent users. It’s literally a tally of training courses.

Postgres is a better choice for 99% of the companies out there. But there are cases where you need ability to massively scale AND control your database cluster perfectly.

Postgres won't even let your force an execution plan and ignores hints (yes, there is an extension for that) so your optimized query can at some point just 10x in execution time and increase load in production when the plan changes.

In Oracle, I am told you can prioritize certain queries at certain time of day - it's crazy what it can do. Yes, it's slow and expensive. If you have money to throw at the problem, it's fast and it solves your problem, whatever the scale. Their Exadata cluster, for example, is wicked fast storage layer pre-filtering the data it sends to the database.

Of course, I despise their business practices - especially the abuse of customers via audits. As a database, it absolutely has its place regardless of lobbying, corruption, and whatever else they are doing.

> Postgres won't even let your force an execution plan and ignores hints

Finally, an actual technical argument. I agree that PostgreSQL's absolute insistence on trusting the query optimiser to Do The Right Thing is weird and annoying (despite being sound general strategy). It even seems to contradict its own general spirit of being on the whole extremely customisable -- you can make your own data types, operators, indexing data structures, complete scripting language plugins... but not, ya know, a way to 100% guarantee that this here query will use this here execution plan.

Beats at what? Not mission critical multi decade setups that can be easily repeated by hiring someone from postgres consultancy. Oracle handles every use case you throw at it: maybe not optimally, but that is not what you care about at that level anyway. They suck but what are the actual alternatives: not postgres or supabase for most orgs of significant size.

Damn I’m wondering now if that’s why we studied Java as our first programming language in Australia at uni for CS.

Oracle have a relatively big presence here and there’s a comfortable “mates” system that runs the Australia (soft bribery).

As much as I hate Oracle, there are huge advantages to Java. Java is strongly typed, free, and runs damn near anywhere. It's pretty much the go-to language when people think about OOP and for good reason. It has some excellent open source IDE support and it's widely used in the industry. With the current OpenJDK setup, it's also free of Oracle's licensing issues. It runs fast and can support most algorithms you'll probably ever study, without the manual memory management troubles of something like C++.

I was taught C# in uni for very similar reasons except the entire uni ran on Windows and the Microsoft platform, which made doing assignments on Linux rather inconvenient. With the status of dotnet core, I'd say Java finally has a good competitor when it comes to teaching OOP languages.

Java has been a staple of university courses since before Oracle bought Sun. I guess I am getting old now, if the kids all want to program in Python and Javascript for 4 years...

I was at Uni in Australia well before Oracle bought Sun. Java was used quite extensively then too.

Interesting. I wish we would have started with C / C++ personally.

I think it’s from Sun Microsystems who had the friendly to edu strategy

Java was taught far before that: we got taught the first public beta version in the 90s in uni. Thought it was nonsense compared to c, prolog, lisp and Haskell.

Yes Oracle offers everything, but everything it offers is low-quality.

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