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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#91

Post by pjmlp »

tlogan wrote: post #18
brad0 wrote: post #3

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

Here are some reasons (things I used in past): - ASM - DataGuard - FlashBack Query - RAC - PL/SQL (the worst language ever but very useful for building packages inside database) - Window Functions - Transparent Data Encryption - online reorg - RMAN and online backup Oracle as a company is terrible. But Oracle RDBMS is a mean machine. Do not underestimate it.

> PL/SQL (the worst language ever but very useful for building packages inside database)

Actually it is way better than the open source alternatives, but maybe my likeness for Ada makes my opinion biased

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#92

Post by jimnotgym »

webreac wrote: 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.

Please could they all retrain for Postgres!

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#93

Post by mailslot »

mschuster91 wrote: post #70
mailslot wrote: post #60

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…

SAP bought Sybase. It's the parent of MSSQL, by Microsoft.

Look, free databases are great, they just can't compete for real serious use. Not WordPress. More like NYSE.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#94

Post by jimnotgym »

elorant wrote: post #31
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...

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…

>significant sums of money invested in people and procedures

The sunk cost fallacy! A better reason not to change is that a different system would cost significant sums of money retraining people and procedures

That assumes that people act rationally though, so I am not saying you are wrong that people think like this

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#95

Post by pgaddict »

rosser wrote: post #24
keypusher wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I may be missing something, but I don't see any mention of 2 nodes in that blog post. In fact, BDR is designed to be run with many more nodes. That being said, it's an asynchronous multi-master, suitable for geo-distributed architectures. Everyone has their own concept of what multi-master is, sadly.

The other thing is that "PG 9.6 brought ..." might suggest this is built into PostgreSQL 9.6. That's not quite the case - we're working on moving it into core, but that takes time. For now it's an extension (plug-in). PG 10 will however include pglogical, which is another step in that direction.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#96

Post by jpgvm »

sz4kerto wrote: post #80
jsiepkes wrote: post #68

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.

In my experience using Oracle is throwing performance out the window. It's not uncommon to have 40+ machines running an Oracle product that struggles to support 1-2k concurrent users. For instance the Oracle Identity Manager, which is glorified LDAP was deployed on about that number of boxes at a previous company I worked at. It took over a year to implement and they still only used the LDAP functionality. In the end it was falling over under load testing of just 10k sythetic users. It needed to support 100k.

I built up a single OpenLDAP box, just using the standard mdb backend and a ton of RAM. Easily crushed the load test. Sadly could't be implemented for political reasons.

Screw Oracle, especially if you care about performance.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#97

Post by jimnotgym »

arethuza wrote: post #59
brad0 wrote: post #3

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

Main reason that I have seen for Oracle is that businesses buy applications and then install the database they need to run that application. How many ERP/CRM/HR/financials applications are there that compete with Oracle applications that run on MySQL or Postgres?

This is correct. If a major ERP/CRM player used Postgres it would be different. I guess a lot of that is down to the slow development cycle of those products.

It wont be SAP though, they seem to be all about HANNA these days

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#98

Post by pgaddict »

BatFastard wrote: post #78
threeseed wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are confusing consumers facing products( Altavista, MySpace ) with corporate facing customers. The corporations have invested 10s of million or more developing products based on Oracle products. Changing from Oracle to PostgresSQL is possibly many years of work and multiple projects for a large company.

I agree the companies are unlikely to rework the current code from Oracle to PostgreSQL (or some other database), but they'll definitely think twice when starting new stuff.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#99

Post by syshum »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #47
elorant wrote: 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.

Worked for Microsoft for Decades,

They also found a new way to apply that same model with 0365 and their continual effort to add new features that only cost a "few dollars more per user per month"

Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way... all of them do it.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#100

Post by mr_overalls »

jimnotgym wrote: post #92
webreac wrote: 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.

Please could they all retrain for Postgres!

Oracle DBA here. Oracle Database 10g through 12c have provided me with a steady income for 6+ years, but enough is enough. It's a solid, powerful product, but Oracle's behavior over the years has been so ridiculous, so abusive, so damaging to open source. . . I've had enough.

Am doing exactly what you suggest. All of my personal projects now run Postgres.

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