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Comment by gav | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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".

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.

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

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.

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