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Oracle’s Cloudy Future

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Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#71

Post by erikpukinskis »

andrewbinstock wrote: post #68
rb808 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Oracle. When starting a new project you are told to use Oracle because that is strategic plan of the company. There are teams of Oracle specialists in house that assist us. There are Sybase, SQL Server apps around but would ideally be migrated. I think its probably time to move off to a free open source platform like PostGres, esp for non critical apps. Don't underestimate the power of corporate support. I had…

This! Enterprise DB vendors like Oracle will send a team of engineers to your site and work with you until the problem is solved. For IT managers, knowing they can rely on this level of commitment is something they will happily pay for.

So, IT managers like Oracle because they can pay someone else to do their job for them?

What are they getting paid for then? They take the TPS reports from the in-house engineers to the Oracle managers? They're people people?

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#72

Post by yankoff »

freyr wrote: post #42

Earlier this week, Oracle had their OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Thousands of badge-wearing attendees swarmed the city and signs plastered all over declared Oracle "The fastest-growing cloud company." But even the Oracle conference attendees weren't buying it. In a live audience poll held during the live keynote, they voted that Oracle would be unlikely to meet it's cloud goals, and challenged the company's…

Oh, this con.. they blocked Howard st. and majorly have been disrupting traffic downtown the entire week.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#73

Post by Jweb_Guru »

js8 wrote: post #65
calpaterson wrote: post #6

This is a wonderful explanation of the original rationale for relational databases. Periodically poeple re-invent IMS' hierarchical design only to rediscover why relations are important. MongoDB's "document database" is a current example.

Actually, I just got a little training on IMS last week, and I have to say, IMS should be reinvented. But not for its weaknesses (hierarchy), but for its strengths (speed). The idea that the application program gets a compiled representation of the exact data pointers that are in the database, and those data pointers optimized for the problem, is very sound, IMHO. IMS is very close to the metal, at the expense of fle…

That's essentially the idea behind Protobuf and friends, is it not? It's not quite as optimized because there's a bounds check, but that's about it (and in many languages you can't get around a NULL or bounds check anyway, and just rely on the branch predictor).

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#74

Post by tensor »

andrewbinstock wrote: post #68
rb808 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Oracle. When starting a new project you are told to use Oracle because that is strategic plan of the company. There are teams of Oracle specialists in house that assist us. There are Sybase, SQL Server apps around but would ideally be migrated. I think its probably time to move off to a free open source platform like PostGres, esp for non critical apps. Don't underestimate the power of corporate support. I had…

This! Enterprise DB vendors like Oracle will send a team of engineers to your site and work with you until the problem is solved. For IT managers, knowing they can rely on this level of commitment is something they will happily pay for.

There are such vendors for Postgres too.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#75

Post by rconti »

andrewbinstock wrote: post #68
rb808 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Oracle. When starting a new project you are told to use Oracle because that is strategic plan of the company. There are teams of Oracle specialists in house that assist us. There are Sybase, SQL Server apps around but would ideally be migrated. I think its probably time to move off to a free open source platform like PostGres, esp for non critical apps. Don't underestimate the power of corporate support. I had…

This! Enterprise DB vendors like Oracle will send a team of engineers to your site and work with you until the problem is solved. For IT managers, knowing they can rely on this level of commitment is something they will happily pay for.

I guess the number of millions you need to spend per year to get this service is in the double digits, because it sure ain't in the single digits.

Oracle will let the ticket bounce around Tier 1 asking you basic questions for months until you just give up, just like every other vendor.

Sure, we've had our reps bring in pizza and beer during huge Oracle downtimes, but they never actually SOLVE anything. "Escalation" means "get a manager really mad at the poor support person", not "give it to somebody who knows what they're doing", because those support orgs don't have those people anymore.

OTOH, Oracle knows you're not about to stop your business for a year or two so you can figure out how to migrate a 150TB DB, and figure out how every little piece of code written over the past decade or two will handle the migration to different software.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#76

Post by scholia »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #29
treehau5 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Don't forget the original reason: backward compatibility with complicated, mission-critical software on weird hardware nobody can legally clone. These businesses would have to port all their stuff to avoid IBM. They probably don't even know what it does. So, they stick with them to mitigate that risk.

Plus, the time to transition off it is far longer than the next quarterly results. It may well be longer than the expected tenure of the CEO....

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#77

Post by zigzigzag »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #71
andrewbinstock wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Enterprise DB vendors like Oracle will send a team of engineers to your site and work with you until the problem is solved. For IT managers, knowing they can rely on this level of commitment is something they will happily pay for.

So, IT managers like Oracle because they can pay someone else to do their job for them? What are they getting paid for then? They take the TPS reports from the in-house engineers to the Oracle managers? They're people people?

Almost all companies need databases. Very few companies can or want to hire highly skilled database engineers with years of experience of debugging and performance profiling complex applications.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#78

Post by js8 »

Jweb_Guru wrote: post #73
js8 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I just got a little training on IMS last week, and I have to say, IMS should be reinvented. But not for its weaknesses (hierarchy), but for its strengths (speed). The idea that the application program gets a compiled representation of the exact data pointers that are in the database, and those data pointers optimized for the problem, is very sound, IMHO. IMS is very close to the metal, at the expense of fle…

That's essentially the idea behind Protobuf and friends, is it not? It's not quite as optimized because there's a bounds check, but that's about it (and in many languages you can't get around a NULL or bounds check anyway, and just rely on the branch predictor).

Protobuf is not a database. What comes close is DataDraw, but that is an embedded database, not a server.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#79

Post by heisenbit »

jdcarter wrote: post #34
toyg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why Oracle is trying to take on Amazon, despite being years late to the party. I believe it's a defensive move Ellison is all about the money. When "the cloud" started, he quietly bankrolled a bunch of companies spearheading the space, so he didn't have to risk his cash-cow. Once the space was proven, he's steered the whole company - and he didn't do it yesterday, he's done it about 6 years ago. You're seeing resul…

Oracle selling higher-end products as a service makes total sense, and I agree, the subscription model has potential to make them a good deal of money. What I'm getting at, however, is why are they so aggressively taking on Amazon in the IaaS space? That's the part which doesn't make sense on the surface--they show up late and then attempt to compete on price. Since when has Oracle competed on price? The conclusion I…

They are not taking on AWS but they are talking about taking on AWS and to show that they are serious they invest some money.

Since they are now a "serious" cloud player with whom one has already ties they get invited to tenders that threaten the status quo.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#80

Post by dkarapetyan »

SEJeff wrote: post #19

Quote Larry Ellison in 2008: What the hell is cloud computing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0 "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion driven than women's fashion."

He's not wrong. He brings up several good examples and how "cloud computing" is basically meaningless. He says they're gonna change the marketing to be "cloud computing" friendly since both gmail and salesforce are considered "cloud computing". In that world Oracle DBs are also cloud computing.
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