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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#181

Post by edblarney »

geodel wrote: post #163
jpalomaki wrote: post #29

Years ago Oracle would have been in a quite nice position to put up interesting cloud offering. Something like Java platform as a service, bundled with the message queues, database etc. Not targeted just to enterprises, but similar to AWS and Azure in the sense that you can get started small. They had quite much interesting related technology from Sun and BEA (and of course from themselves). And maybe this would stil…

5 years back it would be very interesting proposition. But today a lot of modern cloud infrastructure is getting written in Go. IBM/SAP/Apple betting on Swift for server side applications. So in past it could have been Swift app + Java backend now it is more likely Swift app + Swift backend. I also think with Rust taken up by programing enthusiasts which otherwise would have prefered Scala on JVM is also going to put…

"But today a lot of modern cloud infrastructure is getting written in Go"

I don't think so. I our circles, we think 'Go' is a thing, but in most of the world, it's not.

Rust, Go, these are all popular with new companies.

Enterprises are so often .Net/Java + Oracle etc..

It's a big world of hospitals, large companies, government agencies etc..

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#182

Post by [deleted] »

mavelikara wrote: post #166
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...

> They burned all bridges with engineers long ago But those engineers retire, new ones without memory of Oracle's past take their place, and all will be forgotten. Remember how Microsoft was the company many engineers hated when the Halloween Documents [1] came out? Yet, they have managed to patch up that relationship since 1998. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

[deleted]

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#183

Post by edblarney »

Helmet wrote: post #172
raverbashing wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be fun if Oracle is investigated relating this practices

Why? This is basically how the business world operates. There is nothing wrong with a private business wining and dining a potential client to swoon and sell them something.

"here is nothing wrong with a private business wining and dining a potential client to swoon and sell them something."

Yes it's called 'kickbacks' and it can be illegal or considered corruption.

If you were a CEO would you want your team buying a product because they were given $5000 tickets to the superbowl?

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#184

Post by bane »

One of the projects I'm working on is suffering from many of the ills that come with using Oracle on a project. At first we built the entire stack using PostgreSQL (like most sane projects should), but when it came time to deliver to the customer, they had not yet chosen to allow it as an approved software component and suggested we move to Oracle -- that was over a year ago.

We've fought every kind of licensing issue you can imagine, shitty support, broken tools. A simple migration of a few hundred rows in a very simple table turned into a month long exercise that required 200 billable hours to Oracle consultants because all of the import/export tools that Oracle provides are broken in subtle, different and incompatible ways. At one point we saved time by copying and pasting data from one table into another through the management GUI rather than fight all the bullshit Oracle puts in your way.

The customer, now irate that we've been in standstill for a year, doesn't understand and hasn't made any progress in getting Postgres signed off on by their security idiots and now they're out an extra million dollars or so.

From initial install to development to deployment it's been a nightmare and the only conclusion anybody can reasonable come up with is that it's because Oracle purposely breaks their software in subtle ways so that the only paths of execution require deep Oracle lore that only somebody who dedicates their job to being an Oracle DBA could possibly know.

Oracle can't die fast enough as a company. They're an enormous drag on the entire technology industry and I'm convinced a force for evil.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#185

Post by nitrogen »

bane wrote: post #184

One of the projects I'm working on is suffering from many of the ills that come with using Oracle on a project. At first we built the entire stack using PostgreSQL (like most sane projects should), but when it came time to deliver to the customer, they had not yet chosen to allow it as an approved software component and suggested we move to Oracle -- that was over a year ago. We've fought every kind of licensing issu…

I heard once that they actually try to dumb down the books they publish so that people will need to pay Oracle for more support.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#186

Post by nitrogen »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #110
syshum wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oracle's lockin doesn't just come from their database. There are also behemoth business/logistics/financial applications that exist only as PL/SQL packages and a bit of Java UI. Moving off Oracle Applications is a lot harder than switching databases.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#187

Post by 65827 »

bane wrote: post #184

One of the projects I'm working on is suffering from many of the ills that come with using Oracle on a project. At first we built the entire stack using PostgreSQL (like most sane projects should), but when it came time to deliver to the customer, they had not yet chosen to allow it as an approved software component and suggested we move to Oracle -- that was over a year ago. We've fought every kind of licensing issu…

What a great takedown, couldn't agree more

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#188

Post by tannhaeuser »

cneumuel wrote: post #176
tannhaeuser wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PL/SQL (the worst language ever but very useful for building packages inside database) I've heard that "in the database" sentence many times but never got it. PL/SQL is just another programming language VM that happens to have SQL types as native types, and syntax for SQL cursors. Other than for triggers and possibly indexed deterministic functions (both of which are inessential/questionable), you don't want your c…

There are several unit testing frameworks for PL/SQL. Code in the database encapsulates business logic, it gives you unified access from all clients. It can also be orders of magnitude faster. The presentation linked here https://thehelsinkideclaration.blogspot.co.at/2016/09/noplsq... proves that with flame graphs for a simple workload done from the app server vs. implemented in PL/SQL.

The performance argument I can accept (I've done PL/SQL coding and administered Oracle clusters years ago). But when it comes down to it, PL/SQL can possibly only benefit from lower inter-process or JDBC driver overhead vs. Java, say. I've seen PL/SQL becoming a CPU bottleneck in large real-time migration projects.

To encapsulate business logic using PL/SQL, however, is crazy IMHO. Rather than coding your business logic in a mainstream language (with incomparably better staffing and tooling), you now have it in a proprietary niche language with awkward or even non-existent debugging.

Also, the relational model is (or should be) the unified access at this level IMHO, rather than some ad-hoc data access layer.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#189

Post by pfarnsworth »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #66
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…

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 hate when people ask for "data to back it up".

Just google it for yourself. This is a forum, not every post needs to be a peer-reviewed scientific paper. If you don't believe the OP then go ahead, but getting him/her to jump through hoops to try to prove a point is dumb.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#190

Post by Dangeranger »

user5994461 wrote: post #132
hardwaresofton wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

- Oracle was the only SQL DB able to shard. (might still be) - Oracle was the only database able to take multi GB or TB of data in a single table/DB. (Old MySQL/Postgre had various limitations like X GB per table for a long time, they still do). If you worked in the DB in the 200X years, Oracle was the standard and for good reasons. MySQL/Postgre were considered like toys, for good reasons.

We are not making the comparison 10 years ago, we are making it now. What real features does Oracle have that MySQL/Maria/PostgreSQL do not have now.
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