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...
> How much longer do you all think Oracle will be around as a company?
Forever and a day. Oracle sells to managers and executives and are very, very good at it.
Your opinion of the company as a developer or engineer has literally no relevance.
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…
So Oracle's future is based on those large enterprises, while the more nimble, those that will be large enterprises down the road, steer away from Oracle? Maybe Oracle realised that they won't be winning the smaller one's over and now decided to squeeze the larger ones even more.
Or they realize that your small nimble companies will "grow up" and hire experienced managers who will put in place rules that require mature vendors and Oracle gets another generation of company. Happens a lot, sadly. Idealism gets beaten and the people who don't like Oracle jump ship to new and exciting nimble companies.
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).
I guess it must really depend on the task. My basic understanding of hyper threading is that it is typically useful in memory intensive applications, where the core spends a lot of time (20ish cycles) waiting to get data from RAM. HT then executes the other thread while waiting.
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.
>Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way No doubt about that, but for basic infrastructure like DBMSs the customer of the future will be another tech company. Try extracting the same margins for a database system from, say, Airbnb or Uber as from a mid-sized bank founded in 1888.
I bet the mid-sized bank founded in 1888 will still be around well after 80% of these tech companies failed...
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.
And potentially a lot of fuck ups along the way. Don't forget that the average CRUD developper in a corporation is usually not a PhD from MIT.
This is a plain attack on Amazon, which Oracle now sees as a competitor, that will hit customers in the crossfire. I guess Oracle expects customers will simply move to Azure, since retooling ops might be easier than rebuilding solutions on other databases. It will yet again hurt their image though; they've been hated by geeks for ages, but they are increasingly unpopular even among executives. How long can you do bus…
I would guess that Oracle isn't expecting their customers to love from AWS to Azure. They are expecting they move to Oracle Cloud. I didn't see any mention of that in the original article but I wouldn't doubt those rules either didn't apply or could be bypassed by your friendly Oracle sales person if you wanted to get a taste of the Oracle Cloud.
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
Don't forget the risk of an expensive screw-up when switching to a new system. Unless there are clear business advantages, switching to a new system from an old, archaic but battle-tested system doesn't look enticing for most companies.
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.
While I mostly agree with the general point you're making, please do not confuse one particular kind of heavy work with the much more general "real serious use". Random case in point NASA is using pgsql for handling data streams from several of their probes, is that not real serious use ?
I was thinking of something like NASA vs Farmville. Two left joins doesn't make a strong database case.
If you're willing to throw mapreduce at everything as a solution, you won't need Oracle nor will you know how to take advantage.
>Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way No doubt about that, but for basic infrastructure like DBMSs the customer of the future will be another tech company. Try extracting the same margins for a database system from, say, Airbnb or Uber as from a mid-sized bank founded in 1888.
I bet the mid-sized bank founded in 1888 will still be around well after 80% of these tech companies failed...
Being around isn't the same as growth though, and being around doesn't necessarily mean to run your own IT infrastructure either.