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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

I think it was a very deliberate strategy by Oracle to undermine open source RDBMs by extinguishing the number one solution if it failed to attract customers to Oracle db. Their major mistake seems to be that they underestimated just how skeptical the foss community is of them - and rightly so - and how fast it can re-group and create alternatives. But you know what I really like? The fact that virtually no startups these days talk Oracle when discussing big data, which used to be the domain that Oracle truly dominated. Seriously, when did you read about Oracle (db) here on HN? It's interesting that Oracle focused so much on fighting open source RDBMs when NoSQL databases were the real threat all along.

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Is the fact that almost no startups talk about or use Oracle that much of a problem for Oracle? Those startups wouldn't have generated much revenue for Oracle anyway. Those startups will forever be in search for a free solution.

Startups targeting enterprise or government customers might well use Oracle. It's free* to develop on, and something a lot of those sorts of clients use anyway.

* Last I checked, Oracle allowed you to use Oracle RDBMS free for "prototype development" but once you were actually generating revenue from that you are supposed to buy the necessary licenses, even for continued development or support purposes.

It's still the case - we had a free license from Oracle for the first 3-4 years of our company's life - We just had an account manager call us ever 6-9 months, see how we were doing. Eventually we got some real customers, revenues, and negotiated a several million dollar license purchase + 18%/year maintenance.

> Oracle allowed you to use Oracle RDBMS free for "prototype development" but once you were actually generating revenue from that you are supposed to buy the necessary licenses, even for continued development or support purposes.

Hm... I vaguely remember (but it was a really, really long time ago) you could use Oracle for as long as you wanted as long as you didn't process your own or your customers' business data.

What about when startups grow? Take Facebook as an example. Microsoft seems to be doing a good job targeting startups with Bizspark - not sure if Oracle has a similar program.

Microsoft seems to be making an effort with BizSpark, I don't know that I'd call it "a good job" in terms of actually getting startups to adopt MS stacks for the basis of their tech.

An entire eco system - many which are at the forefront of big data - disinterested about Oracle's products is cause for concern, yes. And it's not just the startups but every person who reads about and tries to emulate them in the future, people who are now very unlikely to even look at Oracle's offerings let alone use them.

I don't think those people and corporations matter to Oracle.

Oracle doesn't go after startups. Or even companies like Facebook or Dropbox etc.

It goes after: government agencies, banks, insurance companies, multi-nationals, huge retail chains, logistics, payroll, and such. And it does a killing at it.

Web style big-data are not Oracle's domain.

And it's not like those startup people will afterwards (when they "grow up") go work in the enterprise and use Mongo and MariaDB there. It's just different kind of problem domains altogether.

It could be, fast forward ten years and the majority of the smartest minds in the industry will have no experience with your flagship product.

Only a few, but some of those startups will become the software giants of tomorrow and they will not use anything from the Oracle ecosystem. Something to be really worried about.

>Only a few, but some of those startups will become the software giants of tomorrow and they will not use anything from the Oracle ecosystem. Something to be really worried about.

As per my comment above, Oracle doesn't care about those startups, whether they become the "software giants of tomorrow" or not.

They sell to government agencies, logistics, payroll, multi-nationals, banks, finance, insurance companies, etc.

Those sectors do not overlap with the startups using MariaDB, Mongo, or what have you. Totally different problem domains and people.

Oracle (and IBM) will continue to dominate in industries that are not particularly subject to competition (especially not from startups), due to regulatory capture.

In particular, this is banking (an extremely heavily controlled industry), and telecom (regulation here is mainly just to keep out competition, not as much to control).

This is a really narrow-minded perspective, and quite incorrect. Oracle and IBM will continue to do well in big organisations where the company isn't IT-focused, and where the license cost makes sense. I see a lot of big Oracle HA configurations where downtime or data-loss is unacceptable (and very pricey), where management wouldn't risk their careers choosing something that a start-up would consider.

You're going to see more open-source based solutions on the periphery, but core systems are a whole different thing.

> This is a really narrow-minded perspective, and quite incorrect.

I agree that it's sort of narrow-minded, in that there are reasons to use Oracle and IBM outside of the industries and use cases I singled out. I'm not sure why it's incorrect, though (feel free to enlighten me).

where the license cost makes sense. I see a lot of big Oracle HA configurations where downtime or data-loss is unacceptable (and very pricey), where management wouldn't risk their careers choosing something that a start-up would consider.

Is it really true that Oracle's products are superior if you're going for "no downtime, no data loss, cost not so important"? I don't have any experience in that arena. But I would expect an open source options to be competitive.

If the Oracle products are really worth it, what explains that?

Is it that you can get Oracle people on the phone at any hour whose sole job is to fix it, and there isn't similar open source support? (If so, why isn't there? Red Hat plays this role for Linux.)

Is it that Oracle software is just too complicated and well-done and smart to be replicated in the open source world? "In theory," that should not be the case, but maybe the database equivalents of Linus Torvalds always end up just working for Oracle, or something.

There are a number of reasons why Oracle dominates the enterprise and will forever remain so.

One. The products are well understood. Not just from a technical perspective but operationally as well. Generally enterprise companies have dedicated DBAs either in house or on call. Two. There are unlimited support options. Three. Almost all enterprise software works with Oracle and many are only supported for use on Oracle.

You ARE seeing open source adoption in particular MongoDB, Cassandra in specific areas of the business. But they are almost exclusively "non-core business".

"Forever remain so"? It's impossible that the infrastructure you describe could eventually exist for another database?

I spent some time last year at a bank setting up an Oracle DB that would replicate data from MongoDB, for reporting. The Oracle DB, once set up right, was considerably faster with the queries we wanted than MongoDB, and that was in between running massive imports. MongoDB was running on 6 big physical boxes with loads of RAM, while Oracle DB was only running on a single virtual machine using 16GB of RAM. The reason this worked was because of the wealth of Oracle knowledge out there, access to experienced DBAs with knowledge of good methods, etc. I found MongoDB to be a bit young in this sense, performance tips were down to 'change your schema' which is also true for Oracle but there are many ways to make Oracle work better with a legacy bad schema. That said Cassandra, MongoDB etc. seems to be taken up by the banks at a rapid pace, mainly for analysis tools e.g. in trading.

> Is it really true that Oracle's products are superior if you're going for "no downtime, no data loss, cost not so important"? I don't have any experience in that arena. But I would expect an open source options to be competitive.

Pretty much - Oracle's clustering/replication options are still considerably superior to even a 'real' open source RDBMS like Postgres (as well as providing better performance). MySQL, by contrast, is missing so many important capabilities (transactional DDL, check constraints, window functions, joins other than nested loop) that it's not (imo) especially worth considering.

If you look outside the realm of open-source RDBMSs to NoSQL, you tend to find that they'll be missing some critical feature for reliable database operations, like transactionality, or simply won't be that feature rich (i.e. key-value stores). This is not to say that NoSQL stores don't have a place, just that they tend to be designed around web use cases where trading off consistency can be worth it.

I'm not meaning to hate on open source DBs here - I think Postgres is fantastic and easily sufficient for most use cases. Technologically Oracle/DB2 are still better products, though.

The problem with that perspective is that as markets shift over time, what was once the perifery will soon be the core. That will put the open-source solutions that can handle it in a very good spot long term, as these are exactly the kind of systems that don't end up with big rewrites of their data layer.

A good number of my consulting clients start off by telling me they think that they'll need Oracle.

When it comes to the people in charge of the money, it seems Oracle's not doing too bad a job.

Wasn't it PostgreSQL the RDBMS that was competing with Oracle anyway? And PostgreSQL has been doing fine lately.

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