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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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81–90 of 241 posts

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#81

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?

Example: Oracle could do live replication and HA 15 years ago. Postgres introduced it recently -- if my billion-dollar company was relying on a single logical database, I'd sure as hell wait a few years to see Postgres HA stabilizing before considering using it.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#82
post #27
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clo…

As I understand HT, in it's most basic form it will try to utilize all processing units by executing code from a second thread whenever possible. FFMPG most likely maxes out usage of all arithmetic and floating point units and limits branching to a minimum, so it would make sense that there are no real performance gains with HT.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"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."

Past performance is no guarantee for the future. We zillions of PC manufacturers before we got the likes of HP and Dell, and twenty years later, we still have them. On the desktop OS/application front, the same happened with Microsoft becoming the main player.

The common theme, I think, is that things are chaotic while there is room for everyone to grow, but get more predictable once the entire pie has been divided (aside: that's an argument in favor of Uber's "land grab at any cost" strategy)

Oracle, Google, or Facebook may eventually disappear, but it won't happen at he time scale at which Altavista or MySpace did.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#84
post #48

I think that a key explanation of Oracle success is that the complexity of their database administration has created a generation of full time jobs: DBA. These people are like salesman working for Oracle to defend the future of their job. They are well paid, but this cost nothing to Oracle. At the opposite, Oracle can sell training.

That is relevant job for any RDMS, not only Oracle.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#85
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

Well yes, engineers do need to learn how to stand their ground - over things like pay and working conditions. But no amount of standing your ground will let you overrule the CTO on a corporate strategic decision, no matter how mistaken. As the saying goes, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#86
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…

True, but I think you may be underestimating the need for a public company to grow in order to survive in its current form. Relentlessly squeezing existing customers that have no way out will only get you so far.

I do enterprise consulting, all these licensing costs are usually a small footnote in overall project costs.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Until external forces turn these monoliths into heavy liabilities and block adaptability. Another important factor is today's engineers are tomorrows architects.

They still have to answer to the managers.

Also in the enterprise space code changes are measured in dollars/euro/yan/... per hour, not engineer happiness.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#88
Oracle now owns a huge chunk of the enteprise space. They already had a significant base with their database and ERP and CRM apps. Apart from that the large multi-billion dollar acqusitions of BEA, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Netsuite and a near endless multitude of others have left them with tens of millions of high paying and locked in customers in the enteprise space.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#89

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.

> But I've never seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle.

Lots of Fortune 500 do it, even to their mainframe backends.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That shift is somewhat insane though. Moving data out from the DB just to do stuff in the app that could be done inside the database is throwing performance out of the window.

I guess so, but at our shop, if at all possible, we don't do any vendor specific SQL and all the tricky stuff is handled at the app level.
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