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Oracle’s Cloudy Future

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Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#51

Post by ubercode5 »

oblio wrote: post #28
abakker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many people in IT, generally not the Hacker News crowd, but the guys in the trenches of [insert corporation name here] with ops in many countries, The Money is NOT really the important thing. Risk mitigation by having a passthrough to the big IT vendors is what they are paying for specifically. I work in the IT consulting / business research space. In our surveys, "vendor viability" is a frequent concern, and the…

Well, thing is, Open Source is changing that proposition. As long as you're prepared to be conservative in your choices, something like Debian + Apache + OSS programming language will likely be around 20-40 years from now. When is the last time an OSS programming language that took off actually died? For example, even though it's not as popular Perl 5 is still used professionally in many environments and as far as I…

I agree. However one additional thing to keep in mind in the COTS vs FOSS is if there is some bug that affects the company and requires attention. The company doesn't generally have the engineers on staff to actually change that software, and there's no guarantee that the associated FOSS community will prioritize the bug. With a COTS solution, you can pick up the phone and call the support team. Generally my company chooses COTS over FOSS because they want guaranteed support even if it costs more.

Note, some FOSS products also provide a strong support team to handle this exact thing, and in those cases they were usually the winner.

Edit: Looks like abakker posted the same idea simultaneously.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#52

Post by gaius »

dragonwriter wrote: post #49
gaius wrote: post #40

However, there were two big limitations with hierarchical databases: first, relationships were pre-determined; what was a parent and what was a child was a decision made before any data was actually entered Well, yes and no. IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing, which is a kind of thing you do in engineering to keep track of all the parts in your thing you're building. It was first used for the Saturn V…

> IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing Right, and the restrictions that are appropriate for that domain weren't necessarily appropriate for all the other domains to which it was later applied.

Sure, my point is that RDBMS are not better they are different. Right tool for the job an' all that.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#53

Post by calgoo »

oblio wrote: post #28
abakker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many people in IT, generally not the Hacker News crowd, but the guys in the trenches of [insert corporation name here] with ops in many countries, The Money is NOT really the important thing. Risk mitigation by having a passthrough to the big IT vendors is what they are paying for specifically. I work in the IT consulting / business research space. In our surveys, "vendor viability" is a frequent concern, and the…

Well, thing is, Open Source is changing that proposition. As long as you're prepared to be conservative in your choices, something like Debian + Apache + OSS programming language will likely be around 20-40 years from now. When is the last time an OSS programming language that took off actually died? For example, even though it's not as popular Perl 5 is still used professionally in many environments and as far as I…

From what I have experienced, open source is acceptable, as long as it has a support contract behind it. So basically for Linux you can use Red Hat or Suse, and with the occasional Ubuntu in there as well.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#54

Post by dragonwriter »

gaius wrote: post #52
dragonwriter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing Right, and the restrictions that are appropriate for that domain weren't necessarily appropriate for all the other domains to which it was later applied.

Sure, my point is that RDBMS are not better they are different . Right tool for the job an' all that.

> Sure, my point is that RDBMS are not better they are different.

I can't see any way in which the relational model, either abstractly in or practical application, is less suited to any task than the hierarchical model, and its clearly better suited for many tasks. Its both different and better. The hierarchical model is, especially given the alternatives that existed at the time, good enough for some tasks, sure.

There are alternative models that are better suited for some tasks (e.g., graph model), at least on a pragmatic level, but I don't see that the hierarchical model is one of them.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#55

Post by kens »

treehau5 wrote: post #5
tmptmp wrote: post #3

I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source projects. Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is n…

> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. This is also the sole reason IBM still exists, at least in services. "Oh our system is an overengineered pile of garbage that takes two weeks to deploy an update to a static asset? It's (cue dramatic music) their fault !" CTO pro…

Being able to pass the buck to IBM if things go wrong was actually the theme of IBM's ads in 2001. In a typical ad, the CEO is getting blamed because the system is down / can't be upgraded. CEO: "And whose job is it to make sure all this stuff works the way it's supposed to?" Assistant: "That would be yours." Tagline: "And that's when it hits you, you are so ready for IBM.”

(Of course I have to admit they were successful ads if I remember them 15 years later.)

Links to the ads: http://www.landscapesofcapital.com/items/show/893 http://www.landscapesofcapital.com/items/show/888

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#56

Post by Thaxll »

gizmodo59 wrote: post #11

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X be…

Good luck getting some complex problems on irc / stackoverflow.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#57

Post by jasim »

gaius wrote: post #40

However, there were two big limitations with hierarchical databases: first, relationships were pre-determined; what was a parent and what was a child was a decision made before any data was actually entered Well, yes and no. IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing, which is a kind of thing you do in engineering to keep track of all the parts in your thing you're building. It was first used for the Saturn V…

What if you also wanted to know who supplied those bolts, when, and which other parts use that same bolt?

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#58

Post by sgt101 »

elchief wrote: post #35
gizmodo59 wrote: post #11

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X be…

I work for a Fortune 1000, and we have production DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Access, and an old IBM mini computer...

wow, you need some architectural discipline there. Postgres and mysql: what was the reasoning behind that?

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#59

Post by gaius »

dragonwriter wrote: post #54
gaius wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, my point is that RDBMS are not better they are different . Right tool for the job an' all that.

> Sure, my point is that RDBMS are not better they are different. I can't see any way in which the relational model, either abstractly in or practical application, is less suited to any task than the hierarchical model, and its clearly better suited for many tasks. Its both different and better. The hierarchical model is, especially given the alternatives that existed at the time, good enough for some tasks, sure. Th…

You can do hierarchical queries in Oracle and now you can in Postgres too[1], but that's a relatively recent innovation and it's still horrible in MySQL[2]

IMS is still a huge seller for IBM and a tiny fraction is periodically reinvented and hyped as the latest and greatest thing (e.g. MongoDB) so there are use cases for which it is still the right tool. I feel dirty for saying "MongoDB" and "right tool" in the same sentence.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/q/24898681/447514 [2] http://stackoverflow.com/q/7631048/447514

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#60

Post by hinkley »

treehau5 wrote: post #5
tmptmp wrote: post #3

I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source projects. Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is n…

> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. This is also the sole reason IBM still exists, at least in services. "Oh our system is an overengineered pile of garbage that takes two weeks to deploy an update to a static asset? It's (cue dramatic music) their fault !" CTO pro…

IBM Global Services seems to prefer hiring masochists.

They will deploy the most complicated solution they can (almost) keep running and then ask for more time and materials when they miss.

The FTEs at the company will want nothing to do with their Rube Goldberg sparkly bullshit and are all too happy to walk away and work on something else.

Nobody can make XML impenetrable like IBMGS can. It is both fascinating and horrifying to watch.

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