I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.
1. Oracle does provide value. They have clustering and high-availability offerings that Postgres just can't touch, and those come with service and support personnel as part of the contract. A one-stop solution is a powerful sales pitch.
2. They have a massive existing install base within the Fortune 500, which spend amounts of money that the average hacker just can't grasp. Somebody that I know very recently worked on an enterprise project to create more-or-less a web page that had a $1,000,000 budget. Oracle is not asking for unreasonable amounts of money, by enterprise standards.
3. Companies value safety over risk, and Oracle has a long track record at the executive level of providing safety. The mindset goes something like: Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike. Oracle is telling the story their customers want to hear.
4. Because Oracle has such a large install base and so many success stories at the enterprise level, they are one of a very few number of default choices that an enterprise will make. They have spent decades building up sales momentum.
Business decisions usually have very little do to with the underlaying technology.
Yes. In the case of a database, "safety" is safety from downtime, data loss, data theft. So companies want a database that is fault tolerant and secure.
> Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike.
Banks and healthcare providers strike me as far more insecure than tech companies, and especially more insecure than the large computing platforms like EC2, Google Cloud, etc. Any cloud can host a postgres database, and many of them offer database-specific services.
Oracle is competing not just with Postgres, but with literally every other database offering, many from leading tech companies.
The cloud extracts value by utility billing a large customer base. Oracle extracts value by overbilling a small customer base. Which model seems more sustainable? Eventually EC2, Google Cloud, etc will overtake Oracle completely. Maybe if Oracle is lucky they can provide the overpriced consultants to manage their client's EC2 boxes.
Enterprise operates differently. They don't care about what postgres or EC2 or whatever can do, it's all about not doing anything that someone can point a finger at you for later. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. Also, companies that supply software to corps also supply something that's probably more valuable than the software itself. Support & Maintenance agreements. The fact that if anything goes wrong they can call up a phone number and immediately have a consultant($200+/hr) show up at the corp's location and troubleshoot the problem is a lot of accountability they don't have to directly absorb. There's also PCI compliance and just general fear of new things.
Accountability/blame is the name of the game. You want that value for yourself to be zero unless you get privileged info that the project has succeeded before everyone else finds out, in which case you then scramble to get your name on any documents or email chains related to said project so you can claim it was all due to your planning & decision-making.
I've seen this happen several times and was personally burned hard by people I thought were my friends back in 2006. I'm still bitter about it. I will not let that happen to me again. And I know it happened because I didn't properly document what I was doing and why. Or maybe, I just shouldn't have done it at all and just sit back and watch everyone else panic and burn.... whatever. It was my first job out of college, I was naive.
When Amazon competes with Oracle on service, what value will Oracle have to provide? Amazon is far ahead of them in platform, and catching up in service is easy. Oracle would have a much harder time doing the opposite.
Platform-first business model is quickly displacing service-first business model. Build a large customer base, use it as proof of ability to scale, then charge enterprise customers for concierge service.
EDIT: keep in mind we are discussing an article about oracle's declining sales.
On Enterprise-planet, all this "Cloud" talk is scary and you can't quickly conceptualize PCI compliance with some computer in the sky somewhere; nor can you conceptualize who/where a consultant will be to fix your problem immediately if a problem arises. Your IT department are a bunch of inflexible people who refused to learn anything beyond what they were using 20 years ago and will tell you "Cloud isn't safe! Didn't you hear on the news how such-n-such got hacked?" I have no problem accepting that you're right; I'm just telling you that Enterprise-world doesn't care how right you are. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. There's no thought-process beyond that point. You join the company, learn how they do things and do your best not to rock the boat or suggest any new fancy things that might make your coworkers antiquated skillset obsolete... or you will be back-stabbed.
Cloud in the Corp. world normally means VMWare vCloud (which we are now offering) or just VMWare ESX hosted in a remote datacenter.
So "the cloud" does exist in the Corp. world, its just that they are on average 5 years behind the rest of the tech world. I also think that a lot of these companies need to be 5 years behind, as their decision process on anything except cost savings normally takes months to complete with feature creep etc.
PCI compliance is a solved problem, whether it can be used as a cloud cudgel says more about the state of knowledge and power at a place than reality.
The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
Let's not forget quality support cost a fortune, and that quality part is more important than some numbers on budgeting spreadsheet. Bear in mind, these static part of IT budget are carved in stone, nobody is questioning them.
Your anecdotal experience doesn't necessarily translate to all corporations.
This is not even remotely true any more.
They DO care about what products do. Obviously engineers/managers wan't the best technology they can get. The difference is they also care very much about support, long term roadmap, company health, ability to hire staff etc. They are often dealing with systems which tend to stick around for a decade or longer.
I can put an ad up for Oracle and get a lot of really good people or I can hire a consultancy or get support from Oracle. I can't do that with many open source technologies.
THIS ^
"Groupthink" writ large - BUT, it is the unfortunate reality.
By the time a small dynamic, free thinking company becomes an "Enterprise", it has metamorphosed into something almost unrecognisable.
The manager in charge of the process was A LOT more interested in CYA and selecting the product that had the most documentation to defend his choice (Gartner quadrants, other customers, etc.) than in taking risks or actually selecting the "best" product or sticking his neck for whatever he believed the best provider was.
Not unsurprisingly, Oracle and IBM provide a lot of what he needs to show upper management, and so tend to be in the discussion a lot.
You don't have to defend hiring IBM, but you DO have to defend using open source software X with support from local company Y. RedHat and similar do provide a level of "IBM-like" services for large companies, but most open source software doesn't have the support levels and on-site teams required (or sometimes IBM offers those !! Edit: as someone else pointed out, Oracle offers MySQL support too).
smtddr's point about having someone to phone is VERY true for these kind of conservative companies. (also, I've seen the kind of behaviour he documents about people trying to - and succeeding at - claiming credit for projects)
If you decide widget Y is now the way to go, you get to answer all the questions already answered for widget X: Who supports it? How? How to do we back it up and restore it? Who can tune queries? How does this differ from our build patterns for servers that host X? Can the two live on the same machine or are there potential conflicts? Etc.
Don't get me wrong - with proper planning you can educate the X guys on how to support Y and smoothly add it or even transition to it. But for large-scale systems it requires a great deal of planning and forethought if you want to do it without any bobbles.
My experience with [current] Oracle support and the ability to "call things in": (via the sort-of-usable support portal)
My org has paid millions for software and support on the Oracle products we run, and have "dedicated" support team ... it's worthless.
Dumb, uninformed 1st/2nd tier "engineers" who do not understand the products they are supporting, or basic tenets of system and application administration (https, sql, oel mgmt, etc), let alone understanding how their products integrate, or how to debug issues with those integrations.
It takes days to get a real response to a P1 ticket, and even if we've supplied all of the logs and information needed for the case, the first response we get is always canned "please supply xxxx logs" -- if we have an info level ticket, responses can take weeks even with escalation.
Oracle is an option in AWS RDS, though I'm not sure what the instance count is relative to the other options.
"Safety" is also having someone to blame when things go bad. That's the hardware/software vendor or the integrator doing the implementation. Where do you think the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" saying came from?
I don't know why people always mention clustering. It provides so many downsides and complications that it hardly ever seems worth it. I don't know my people never mention instrumentation, monitoring and plan management. These things are there you help you when you need them.
not that the topics you mention are not important part of equation :)
I attribute their slow but inevitable death to a slow learning curve in Fortune 500 companies.
Also I imagine they're likely involved in a large number of government contracts.
This is uncomfortably close to the truth, and the reason why government procurement projects often overrun so badly with so much spent is that the budget is set high in the first place. This creates an opportunity to pile on consultants and complexity which can all be billed for.
The size of the budget determines the size of the solution, not the other way round.
Also oracle has a very large reach with salesforce so I've seen many former employees pitch oracle products heavily. Seems like once you work there you're part of the forever cult of ellison.
Not just working at Oracle. Once Oracle bought Sun our Oracle DBAs started relentlessly agitating for us to buy SPARC servers because they were now the best, obviously, and a failure to use them meant we clearly were doing it wrong.
Their existing massive install base, aggressive salesforce, and being perceived as a "safe" choice by customers is a strong position to be in.
If you're an enterprise customer with IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft, you know that you can have someone onsite within 24 hours if you have a critical failure, sometimes even sooner. You know that you can have people engaged 24/7 for as long as it takes to get you back up and running and you'll have not just technical people, but also incident managers who will keep you updated and help the engineers locate additional resources. They'll have someone sit in a conference bridge around the clock if you want, ready to provide updates.
Enterprises are also thinking about long time spans. With IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Redhat, and others, they generally guarantee at least 10 years of support for their products, plus the ability for custom agreements that go beyond their normal support dates. Offering 3+2 is a good start, but that's not long enough. Remember, many (probably most) banks still have applications written in COBOL running.
Don't get me wrong, I think everyone should look at all the available options - free and paid. At the end of the day, though, there are a lot of projects where the risks and expected application lifecycle pretty much mandate the level of support you only get from the big companies.
I think New York spent something like $40M for a general ledger system. There is ridiculous amounts of money in these projects.
What is this money spent on? Well, if you consider knowledge a scarce resource.... Capital is a poor substitute but all you've got when you're clueless.
It looks like they sell software but I think it closer to the truth to say that they are an insurance company.
... to choose an established vendor with a big name and large resources, so that you won't get fired if things don't work out. Even if your project goes down in flames, you can blame the vendor, snatch a "compensation" discount or freebie on some other license renewal, and you'll be fine.
Nobody in the enterprise space will ever get fired for choosing IBM, Oracle, Microsoft or SAP.
1. lock entreprise in a 5 year contract. 2. when contract is about to expire lower prices to match wathever other companies are offering for the next 5 years + migration cost. 3. Win the deal as you offer the best value for the money : same ammount + no risk. 4. repeat
This is the main reason why you can see companies running on mainframe in 2015.
Queries per second is simply not a relevant question.
[Edit: Clarified the wording.]