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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#21

Post by pallopiipaeri »

rosser wrote: post #11
pallopiipaeri wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MySQL and Postgres have multi-master replication. They do NOT have distributed transactions (with the distributed locking system etc). For some customers it is important. Others have delusions that they need it. Oracle has other products as well. I am generally aware of couple used widely. Their ESB is one of the heavy players, and some sausage stands always need the most advanced ones. The funny thing is that with O…

Postgres has two-phase commit, which can be used at the application level to implement distributed transactions. It does not have multi-master replication natively, though there are companion projects that enable it.

Unfortunately those are blocker level issues for most enterprisey IT managements.

Adding extra implementation to application, to do the database's work against the usual division of labor, no thanks. And bringing some shady 3rd party support package on top of the database is a second really big no.

For businesses only what you get out of the box counts. Otherwise you can always state that "the platform has C++ compiler, stfu and code". That doesn't really work. The companies are into buying complete products for a reason: they don't want to implement unnecessarily things they really should just get out of the box.

TBH I love postgres, but before they offer proper multi-master transactions out of the box most companies just still go for Oracle. That's similar as to why people buy Photoshop. GIMP fell some 10 years after in usability and features when they did not prioritize implementing the dynamic layer effect system. Instead of that they chose to masturbate with GEGL or something like that for 10 years, without providing the actual end user requested features. The situation still stands there, before they implement what Photoshop 4 or so did they got no chance of being valid alternative...

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#22

Post by raverbashing »

rosser wrote: post #5
brad0 wrote: post #3

Is support the only reason people choose Oracle databases over something free like MySQL or Postgres?

The thing you need to understand about Oracle is that it's never — well, never in my experience, and I've worked as a DBA (mostly postgres, but I have had my hands on some Oracle) for a decade now — chosen by the technologists. It's chosen by management. Usually non-technical management. Often dangerously so. But Oracle support basically doesn't answer the phone unless you're regularly cutting them six-figure checks,…

Engineers need to learn how to stand their ground

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#23

Post by djhworld »

echelon wrote: post #13

How much longer do you all think Oracle will be around as a company? They burned all bridges with engineers long ago, and they're not going to be able to keep selling their blatant and expensive lock-in strategy to management. Maybe when they finally do go under Google will be able to buy Java and MySQL...

Many years.

I've had two jobs in the past that have been in Oracle shops and from my experience those companies were so fully invested in a lot of the Oracle suite (think WebLogic, ESB, the database etc) it would be like turning a huge oil tanker around to pivot away from it.

And don't forget the reams of PL/SQL that often sits at the core of a lot of business logic

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#24

Post by rosser »

keypusher wrote: post #20
rosser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres has two-phase commit, which can be used at the application level to implement distributed transactions. It does not have multi-master replication natively, though there are companion projects that enable it.

PG 9.6 brought bidirectional replication in and supported via mainline extension (no patches). http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/bdr-is-coming-to-postgresql-9-6/

Okay, sorry, you're right. In my head "multi-master" is N > 2, for some reason. Probably because of Bucardo.

Also, we're only on 9.5, so I haven't gotten to play with BDR yet, though I do have a meeting next week to start talking about how we might use logical decoding.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#25

Post by giis »

Joeri wrote: post #19

Oracle is making a big push to move customers from aws and azure to their own cloud hosting. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-... Raising prices for hosting with the competitor makes perfect sense when viewed from that angle.

Remember, Oracle also forced 'Redhat' customers (who rely on Oracle DB) to their Linux in similar manner.

Now I wonder BTRFS is not getting enough attention, because its started by Oracle and their history with open-source?

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#26

Post by e2e4 »

Joeri wrote: post #19

Oracle is making a big push to move customers from aws and azure to their own cloud hosting. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-... Raising prices for hosting with the competitor makes perfect sense when viewed from that angle.

good point; although one would hope that they'd would simply provide better services on their cloud (for the same price) ...

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#27

Post by beagle3 »

miahi wrote: post #10
cm2187 wrote: post #2

But hyper threading doesn't really double the performance of the CPU, I understood it's a marginal improvement. It seems odd to double the cost of the license if hyper threading is switched on.

HT performance grew from generation to generation. In many cases a HT "core" has 80% of the performance of a "normal" core. A current 2-core+HT i3 CPU is almost on par with a 4-core i5 (the i3 has faster cores but less L3 cache).

What's "current", and what's your benchmark?

Mine is video encoding using FFMPEG (where I run more program threads than FFMPEG decides is optimal in order to make sure no cpu thread is idle).

I get at most 15% over hyperthreading off, and often about 5-10% less than hyperthreading off (For the whole process, beginning to end).

On real cores, it is close to being linear in the number of cores (not quite, but it is close).

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#28

Post by threeseed »

echelon wrote: post #13

How much longer do you all think Oracle will be around as a company? They burned all bridges with engineers long ago, and they're not going to be able to keep selling their blatant and expensive lock-in strategy to management. Maybe when they finally do go under Google will be able to buy Java and MySQL...

Oracle will be around for many, many decades to come. Especially since in the enterprise world nobody could care less what engineers thought. Managers determine budgets and capabilities. Architects determine what to purchase and how it fits together. Engineers implement. Pecking order that's been around as long as Oracle has.

The biggest obstacle to Oracle's future success isn't price or other databases. It's the analytics space i.e. Hadoop/Spark which is relegating big iron SQL databases to being dumb CRUD boxes. It's why both Oracle and Teradata moved into the space but have struggled to get any traction against Hortonworks or Cloudera.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#29

Post by jpalomaki »

Years ago Oracle would have been in a quite nice position to put up interesting cloud offering. Something like Java platform as a service, bundled with the message queues, database etc. Not targeted just to enterprises, but similar to AWS and Azure in the sense that you can get started small. They had quite much interesting related technology from Sun and BEA (and of course from themselves).

And maybe this would still make sense. Java is still relevant. JavaEE provides the packaging for the applications. Maybe the basis for a nice serverless offering (you have for example the message driven beans).

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#30

Post by threeseed »

raverbashing wrote: post #22
rosser wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you need to understand about Oracle is that it's never — well, never in my experience, and I've worked as a DBA (mostly postgres, but I have had my hands on some Oracle) for a decade now — chosen by the technologists. It's chosen by management. Usually non-technical management. Often dangerously so. But Oracle support basically doesn't answer the phone unless you're regularly cutting them six-figure checks,…

Engineers need to learn how to stand their ground

That's cute. And it might even work in a startup. But likely not.

But in the enterprise world nobody really cares what engineers think. You have Enterprise Architects, Technical Architects, Solution Architects etc. who get paid exorbitant amounts of money, are political animals and can masterfully straddle the line between business and technology. Most of them are ex-engineers so they aren't entirely useless and since they have their own language they will make you look stupid. Can't articulate the transition from a tactical to strategic solution and explain what business capabilities it aligns to ? Well good luck getting that past the central Enterprise Architects who will need to sign off on your choice before it heads to Procurement/Legal.

Architects along with IT managers and CIOs are the people whom the famous Oracle Sales machine targets with golf games, overseas trips and fancy dinners. It's never engineers. I spent a few years at Oracle. They are a multi billion dollar company for a reason.

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