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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#121

Post by toyg »

masklinn wrote: post #111
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...

> 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.

> Oracle sells to managers and executives and are very, very good at it

I agree, but the point is that they are getting worse. Their cloud shift is not panning out as well as they wanted, I think, and they are actually opening opportunities for competitors: if you have to make significant efforts to migrate your existing solutions, you might as well move somewhere nicer. And by basically threatening their own partner ecosystems (which won't be needed in the new oracle-cloud era), they're losing steam in sales and presales.

(Of course, it doesn't help that Safe Harbor first and Privacy Shield now have been shot down, so European businesses are not keen on moving to US-based clouds. The sort of businesses Oracle pines for, does care about these things.)

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#122

Post by hardwaresofton »

sz4kerto wrote: post #81
hardwaresofton wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So replication & high availability -- I assume these two points are one (as replication features would enable high availability).

I understand what you're saying to mean simply replication, NOT a proper distributed database system allowing/facilitating writes using what we now know to be state-of-the-art theorems/methods. To rephrase, I assume you mean oracle dbs let people write to one database, and send updates to some mirrors somewhere else.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#123

Post by languagewars »

altano wrote: post #55
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...

| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | ------------------------------------------------------- Gross Income | 26.83B| 27.68B| 28.74B| 28.55B| 27.93B|

Isn't gross income a bit misleading if they need to buy out larger and larger companies and harvest their products/good-will with an increasing portion of that gross income?

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#124

Post by hardwaresofton »

cstejerean wrote: post #69
hardwaresofton wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Welp, that's dissapointing, but it gives me a solid reason to never ever trust the claim that Oracle is "just better" than anything else. Claims without proof should hold very little weight with any critical mind. I'm totally open to the idea that Oracle is better in at least some ways (surely their engineers aren't just twiddling their thumbs all day), but I need to see it proven.

So far the features that oracle had that people have mentioned:

- An amazing query optimizer

- Replication (enabling High Availability) features available 15 years ago

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#125

Post by scriptproof »

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.

Or less with some tools: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversi...

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#126

Post by JackMorgan »

masklinn wrote: post #111
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...

> 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.

Yeah, my new boss laughed when we complained about Oracle. He adamantly insists it was the best database in the world. He also knows only one database.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#127

Post by philipov »

pgaddict wrote: post #98
BatFastard wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When managers start a new project, they don't want to think twice. They want to grab the ass of someone else in the company who's already done the same thing and leverage their expertise to reduce the cost of the project.

My company is still stuck using CVS because when a new project starts up, they want to use the people who are already locked into the old tech and so they end up going with what people already know. Even teams that started with git have downgraded to CVS once the managers starting looking for ways reuse resources.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#128

Post by user5994461 »

ww520 wrote: post #38
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...

The decision to use Oracle is often not by engineers.

Little Correction: not by the average web engineer.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#129

Post by z3t4 »

toyg wrote: post #101
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.

Most of these jobs are offshored now, so it's not as relevant a factor as you think. What is relevant is the amount of business applications and solutions built on the database, that took years to develop and would cost a fortune to replace.

is it not standard practice to support at least two different db systems !?

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#130

Post by user5994461 »

jpgvm wrote: post #96
sz4kerto wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know about the Oracle identity suite but I'd like to say that OpenLDAP is a ridiculous joke. (Just like the MySQL/PostgreSQL vs Oracle DB debate at times).

The only scalable LDAP server is the one from Sun Microsystem (openDS). It was killed when Oracle acquired Sun because they already had identity products. Then the sun guys quit to continue the products line under their own company, ForgeRock. https://forgerock.org/opendj/

I've done load testing and this ldap is taking millions of accounts, no problem.

The best products are rarely free once you get out of the average web dev context. Funny thing, this one is both paid and open source.

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