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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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31–40 of 241 posts

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#31
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...

I don't think you realize how the enterprise ecosystem works. There are legacy Cobol systems scattered all around the place. Corporations stick with their platforms for decades. This isn't the web development front where we change platform every couple of years. In corporations change is slow because there are significant sums of money invested in people and procedures. You just don't change that for the next flashy thing. And thus the future for Oracle is much more promising than it is for Google or Apple.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#32
post #7
post #3

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

I bet you can get plenty of support for MySQL or Postgres

MySQL support you can get from Oracle. PostgreSQL support is very limited.

There is no vendor so you're relying on third parties many of whom are mom and pop shops. And if you're a global, multi-national well good luck finding someone who you can cut a deal with for global support. Not to mention that the support is hardly likely to be top tier.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#33
post #3

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

It's not support, it's blame. When the fertilizer hits the circular air moving device someone needs to be the scapegoat. And believe me, the CIO is not going to be the one. There isn't an entity to point to if you run MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#34
post #17

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…

> Oracle's JavaEE application server is kind of nice You mean Weblogic, right? Because OAS has been dead for a while now. Afaik, Weblogic and Websphere are practically the same, hard to say one is "just plain inferior" to the other.

...except when it comes to support for talking with Tuxedo. I guess my shop may be one of the largest Tuxedo users in the world, so it makes WLS kind of mandatory :(

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#35
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet you can get plenty of support for MySQL or Postgres

MySQL support you can get from Oracle. PostgreSQL support is very limited. There is no vendor so you're relying on third parties many of whom are mom and pop shops. And if you're a global, multi-national well good luck finding someone who you can cut a deal with for global support. Not to mention that the support is hardly likely to be top tier.

You say this garbage every time this comes up. "Mom and pop shops". Yes, those exist, but they're the minority.

You're generally either dealing with EnterpriseDB, or you're dealing with a company that is run by people who are significant contributors to the project — literally, on the core committee — or have people who have created meaningful parts of the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

You need to drop this FUD.

I will never again use or support an Oracle product after they literally, specifically cost a former employer $.75mm, on Cyber Monday by giving us factually false information.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sinc…

Yes, those issues are important, and I was aware of them

For a start, that's why I don't work (at least directly) for the enterprise world.

But I've seen companies adopt open source solutions and modernize. I've also seen companies use those "legacy" technologies. They're the ones that usually go bankrupt, unless technology is a minor part of their business.

And yes, as much as "corporate architecture" is 90% BS and politics, if you can at least explain why solution A is better than solution B in a way it's understood, then you did your part.

And the question remains, who will pick up the phone when an open source DB fails to perform as it should. Does Red Hat provide support in that area?

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sinc…

I can confirm this. Oracle goes out of their way to make senior and upper-mid management feel like rockstars. All expenses paid meetings in attractive overseas destinations, start to finish hand holding on multi-million dollar engagements, regular contact and personal attention. Management swoon and sign the cheques. And why wouldn't they? After all, it's only the company's money, not theirs personally.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#38
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...

The decision to use Oracle is often not by engineers.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#39
post #3

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

The Oracle database is a beast, both in terms of performance, performance tuning and features. It probably out performs MySQL and Postgres in most areas - and if you don't do horizontal scaling, then Oracle is probably your best bet if you want to get the most out of a server. I don't think there are any advantages of going to vertical scaling over horizontal scaling these days.

Relational databases don't scale horizontally all that far because of the challenges in replicating writes. Either you do delayed replication and have inconsistent slaves, or you do sharding and have a complicated app layer.

The trick to scaling a sql db is to either shard it and treat it like nosql with worse tooling, or go vertical as far as you can before you go horizontal. Luckily, there aren't many workloads that require horizontal scaling. Stackoverflow can run on a single beefy db server.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#40
post #31
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...

I don't think you realize how the enterprise ecosystem works. There are legacy Cobol systems scattered all around the place. Corporations stick with their platforms for decades. This isn't the web development front where we change platform every couple of years. In corporations change is slow because there are significant sums of money invested in people and procedures. You just don't change that for the next flashy…

And that's just disappointing since they're a far far worse company.
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