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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#61
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the future for Oracle is much more promising that[sic] it is for Google or Apple. That is a bold statement. Google has ~1/3 of the world who have access to the internet as regular users. Apple is a hardware maker with a very desirable array of products. I won't say I am a fan of Oracle, and I agree with you on how the lifecycle of enterprise adoption works, but that is a very far fetched conclusion. First, large co…

The internet is pretty fickle though. I still remember when people switched from Altavista to Google and from MySpace to Facebook. It didn't take all that long and look at those old companies now.

Whilst Oracle has done absolutely nothing the last few years other than crappy, me-too products they do have a LOT of luck on their side. Why ? Because nobody is touching the EDW (enterprise data warehouse) space. There are no new startups. No disruptors. Nothing. All of the excitement and growth is happening in the analytics space where companies are just sucking all the data from the EDW into Hadoop. And then doing feature extraction, modelling, machine learning etc there rather than doing it in the database.

So nobody is really going after Oracle/Teradata/SAP etc core business any more. It's just kind of forgotten arguably like Windows or Office.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#62
post #25
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?

The main btrfs devs who were at Oracle have been at Facebook for a while, so you can't blame Oracle for btrfs not moving along haha

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#63
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

Let me read you a specification I got for a project a while back:

Build and implement an Intranet system based on Oracle

That was the start, and finish of the spec we got. Question about what sort of information the intranet stores? Here's your answer:

As long as it uses Oracle

Standing your ground where Oracle is involved usually just means quitting. Not every engineer has that luxury.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#65

Oracle is worth every penny that they charge. Unless you've worked with it, you won't understand the love / hate relationship toward it. Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL, while admirable, remains in a lower class. I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the open sourc…

Don't understand the downvotes?

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#66

Oracle is worth every penny that they charge. Unless you've worked with it, you won't understand the love / hate relationship toward it. Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL, while admirable, remains in a lower class. I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the open sourc…

OK, so the one point you've brought up is the query optimizer... do you have any data to back this up? a comparison between query speeds for trivial & non-trivial data sets/queries?

Could you put into words a little bit more of what the Oracle DB does that Maria/MySQL/Postgres could not?

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Support is the biggest issue with open source. It's why companies like RedHat, DataStax, Hortonworks, Databricks, MongoDB have all done so well. They basically took over their open source projects and provided official vendor support in the Oracle "style".

They all offer certifications, training and conferences around the world for you to spend company money on.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#68

Oracle is worth every penny that they charge. Unless you've worked with it, you won't understand the love / hate relationship toward it. Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL, while admirable, remains in a lower class. I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the open sourc…

I think you are not taking into account the shift out of the DB and into the application layer. People care less and less what the DB can do. Yes large slow enterprises will continue to have a need for Oracle DB. But I've never seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle. Why? Because you dont need that much complexity when you only have a collection of "simple" services.

Everyone who needs Oracle deserves Oracle.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#69

Oracle is worth every penny that they charge. Unless you've worked with it, you won't understand the love / hate relationship toward it. Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL, while admirable, remains in a lower class. I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the open sourc…

OK, so the one point you've brought up is the query optimizer... do you have any data to back this up? a comparison between query speeds for trivial & non-trivial data sets/queries? Could you put into words a little bit more of what the Oracle DB does that Maria/MySQL/Postgres could not?

I think the Oracle license prohibits people from publishing performance benchmarks of Oracle against other databases. Or at least that's what I remember.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#70

Oracle is worth every penny that they charge. Unless you've worked with it, you won't understand the love / hate relationship toward it. Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL, while admirable, remains in a lower class. I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the open sourc…

> I was always a Sybase and DB/2 guy myself, but Oracle could do things. Things Sybase couldn't be tuned for. You don't put Wordpress on Oracle. You do crazy insane shit on it that will break MySQL.

I'd highly doubt that there's something one can do with Oracle that couldn't be done with a FOSS database - although it's certainly true that it requires more servers but servers are a commodity these days anyway.

What's going to keep Oracle in the market is the amount of enterprise software that has been written without database abstraction and would require complete rewrites to support anything else than Oracle as its engine.

The only exception to that I know of is SAP which supports MySQL backends, but then again SAP is only used by companies big enough to just mindlessly shell out big bucks for Oracle too if that's what they already use.

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