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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#151

Post by Spooky23 »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #73
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…

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.

Nope. Once you're big enough to start worrying about public company financial processes, your new CFO is going to buy Oracle Financials.

This particular price change is all about customers moving away from old RISC systems and IBM and towards x86. Amazon dramatically overprices Intel cores, so Oracle wants to capture that value. Cheap licensing for x86 is subsidy for AWS and Azure. They are spiking the pricing to push you into Oracle/Sun hardware or the Oracle cloud offerings. "Hardware and Software Engineered together" isn't limited to technology engineering!

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#153

Post by koolba »

JackMorgan wrote: post #126
masklinn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is a fantastic database. Best is a subjective term but for a MVCC translational workload it's amazing. Note that I'm talking specifically about the database itself, not the cluster fuck of end user software built atop it (ex: Oracle Financials).

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#154

Post by stuckagain »

jmiserez wrote: post #82
beagle3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For any kind of branchy pointer-chasing workload hyperthreading will easily double the throughput. These workloads spend all of their time waiting for load and recovering from mispredicted branches. Oracle is the poster child of this kind of workload.

For decades now we've had to suffer these weird internet arguments about whether hyperthreading is "real", as if there was a naturally-occuring correct number of frontends on a CPU. If someone wants to put more instruction decoders on their CPU there is no rational argument that is "wrong".

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#155

Post by grogenaut »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #146
user5994461 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little Correction: not by the average web engineer.

This is a very true statement. I laugh at how the only thing discussed here is open source software and the cloud. People forget that there's a whole entire world of enterprise software and systems. As someone else mentioned earlier, mid to large size companies don't replace systems like people do here with Javascript frameworks. It is really expensive and costly to replace systems that have been around for decades.…

I would restate it that there is deep business logic encoded solely in a system that grew organically over decades. It's not always that it would be hard to rewrite it all... It's that no one knows or has documented anywhere except this organic code base all of the requirements. And specifically no one has encoded WHY.

So rewriting and keeping the same logic is very difficult and the business risk is very high due to all the unknowns: features, time, compliance, correctness, performance.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#156

Post by [deleted] »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #146
user5994461 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Little Correction: not by the average web engineer.

This is a very true statement. I laugh at how the only thing discussed here is open source software and the cloud. People forget that there's a whole entire world of enterprise software and systems. As someone else mentioned earlier, mid to large size companies don't replace systems like people do here with Javascript frameworks. It is really expensive and costly to replace systems that have been around for decades.…

[deleted]

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#157

Post by coredog64 »

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…

At a prior employer, the CIO was so pissed off about Oracle licensing that he seriously considered freezing Oracle versions (as a prelude to migration off the platform) and buying third party support from Rimini Street.

If enough businesses pursue that option, then the cash cow of annual support dries up and Oracle is in a world of hurt.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#158

Post by x0x0 »

threeseed wrote: post #74
rosser wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this garbage every time this comes up. "Mom and pop shops". Yes, those exist, but they're the minority. You're generally either dealing with EnterpriseDB, or you're dealing with a company that is run by people who are significant contributors to the project — literally, on the core committee — or have people who have created meaningful parts of the PostgreSQL ecosystem. You need to drop this FUD. I will never…

I say this "garbage" because in my opinion it's true. EnterpriseDB has according to LinkedIn between 200-500 people mostly located in AMR and EMEA based on experience with their APAC division. They simply are NOT a top tier support company on par with Oracle, Teradata, SAP etc. I am based in APAC and so my opinion is going to be far different than other parts of the globe. And the difference with DataStax, MongoDB et…

EnterpriseDB has multiple pg core devs on staff and has been offering excellent pg support for over a decade. A former employer used them and they lived up to their reputation -- very good, not cheap (but cheap compared to Oracle.) I can't imagine they have any trouble selling the usual 30m or 60m SLA contracts into APAC, but maybe I'm wrong. For companies in EMEA or North America they're an excellent choice.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#159

Post by geodel »

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…

You are so right. The next generation of a big app at our place using Oracle fusion middleware is ~10 times slower than before. They have converted simple function calls into web service calls.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#160

Post by benchaney »

miahi wrote: post #10
cm2187 wrote: post #2

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).

Is this really true? I would have expected that as branch predicters and cache prefetchers improve, hyperthreading would become less effective.
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