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Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

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Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#211

Post by aNoob7000 »

edblarney wrote: post #183
Helmet wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You will be investigating likes of Microsoft, IBM, and even Amazon.

As an example, I can't stop the CIO and board at my company from talking about the cloud because of all the consultants and sales guys talking to the C suite. You want to see something really oversold right now look no further than the cloud.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#212

Post by koolba »

brianwawok wrote: post #210
dpb001 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrase "tune it via their CBO" doesn't make sense. Oracle DBA here who hates their licensing, practices, etc. as much as the next guy, but I have to hand it to their query optimization. I've seen their optimizer get better with every major release, and yes, regression testing will always turn up a few problems but Oracle gives you the best tools to analyze and override the decisions that the optimizer is making w…

Until someone switches a table name from lowercase to uppercase and the hand rolled optimizer stops working?

You clearly have no idea what you are talking about.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#213

Post by syshum »

rodgerd wrote: post #165
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.

> Worked for Microsoft for Decades, Even at their most dominant, Microsoft kept adding things customers wanted. AD was a big leap forward for customers, when Microsoft could have rested on the domain model. SQL Server kept adding capabilities, Exchange, etc.

All designed around Vendor Lockin, then putting the screws to business with various and complex licensing

CAL's for example would never be possible with out Vendor Lockin, What kind of extortion scheme do you have to have to sell a server licence then charge for every thing that wants to connect to the server.....

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#214

Post by racecar789 »

A huge lock-in for Oracle is packages. Packages make it easy to organize functions/procedures into groups (one package per group, within the same schema).

Oracle is the only db that supports packages. Packages make migrating away very difficult. However...I don't think companies will want to migrate without package support anyhow...

The alternative to packages are schemas. One schema for every group of objects. Personally, no thanks. I cannot live without packages.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#215

Post by edblarney »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #211
edblarney wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

You will be investigating likes of Microsoft, IBM, and even Amazon. As an example, I can't stop the CIO and board at my company from talking about the cloud because of all the consultants and sales guys talking to the C suite. You want to see something really oversold right now look no further than the cloud.

'Wining and dining' is very common, but it's not necessarily considered 'corruption' because a meal is well, just a meal, after all. The occasional tickets etc. are just a 'gift' not ostensibly supposed to interfere with the purchasing decision.

Of course they do on some level.

But it's a fine line.

It's crazy how many CEO's will let purchasing decision makers be taken on these things and junkets, I would just not allow it.

But also don't doubt the ability of people to just drink koolaid. There are tons of non-thinkers out there who just 'buy' the story presented to them.

Also - I don't think 'the cloud' is oversold. It's definitely the future, and it's going to be the 'new normal' and it's here to stay.

The notion that anyone would 'host their own' stuff just doesn't make sense anymore - unless there are specific reasons for it. 'The cloud' is now the 'default choice' for most things, unless you have a need not to use it.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#216

Post by bane »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #209
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…

Not to be a dick, but what kind of issues did you have with their import/export tools? As someone who has worked with Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases for many years, you sound like someone who has never worked with their database. Oracle databases might be expensive but you can move data between instances and schemas using SQLLDR or DataPump with ease.

It's a fair question. Keeping in mind that we literally had nobody who'd ever used Oracle in their careers (or at least beyond fairly basic uses a decade ago)...we had a fairly simple set of tables, one of which had a CLOB attribute.

Every single export option available in Oracle SQL Developer truncated the CLOB field whenever it felt like, and half of the exported formats were exported without escaping content in the CLOB so that they were unparseable on import.

When we finally called in the Oracle consultants, they said "we never use the import/export tools in SQL Developer" and moved on to SQLLDR, but failed for exiting reasons last seen in 1980's computing like "Error in Index ORA-42321" and then other issues with the parser.

Data Pump didn't work for some reason only the consultants know, but "minor version mismatch" was something they liked to say.

I don't remember the final solution, but I believe it was a hackneyed combination of writing some python code to connect to one of the databases, dumping the table data to a bunch of INSERT statements then just copy-pasting the whole output back into SQL Developer and running it in chunks until everything could be inserted into the new table. We couldn't just write more python code to pump the data back in because of some permissions problem that nobody could ever quite resolve satisfactorily. We also couldn't just load the file through the SQL Developer because it would only load files that were sitting in a specific, inaccessible directory on that specific server, not through the GUI.

I think this was when the lightbulb went off in all of our heads and we collectively realized "it's this terrible on purpose"

Total shit show with hundreds of thousands of dollars flushed down the toilet for no additional capability, huge program delays and a good reminder why nobody uses Oracle for new starts on software these days, it's absolute garbage and a curse on any organization that sustains it.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#218

Post by DrScump »

bastardoperator wrote: post #204
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…

Companies these days chose Oracle for one reason. They're scared of being sued. Several operations I've been involved with chose it as insurance policy. They want the ability to defer litigation to Oracle should it occur. Oracle touts its support and aggressive legal defense as a selling point. Engineers don't recommend Oracle, C titles and Sr. Management do. Sorry to hear about your issues, I'm sure the product work…

In a sense, it's become the 21st Century version of the old IBM meme: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#219

Post by tw04 »

syshum wrote: post #213
rodgerd wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worked for Microsoft for Decades, Even at their most dominant, Microsoft kept adding things customers wanted. AD was a big leap forward for customers, when Microsoft could have rested on the domain model. SQL Server kept adding capabilities, Exchange, etc.

All designed around Vendor Lockin, then putting the screws to business with various and complex licensing CAL's for example would never be possible with out Vendor Lockin, What kind of extortion scheme do you have to have to sell a server licence then charge for every thing that wants to connect to the server.....

CALs - you mean like literally every successful SaaS solution on the market today? CALs are alive and well and aren't EVER going to die. Salesforce.com? CAL. Openair? CAL. Workday? CAL.

Etc. etc. etc.

Re: Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

#220

Post by aNoob7000 »

bane wrote: post #216
aNoob7000 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be a dick, but what kind of issues did you have with their import/export tools? As someone who has worked with Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases for many years, you sound like someone who has never worked with their database. Oracle databases might be expensive but you can move data between instances and schemas using SQLLDR or DataPump with ease.

It's a fair question. Keeping in mind that we literally had nobody who'd ever used Oracle in their careers (or at least beyond fairly basic uses a decade ago)...we had a fairly simple set of tables, one of which had a CLOB attribute. Every single export option available in Oracle SQL Developer truncated the CLOB field whenever it felt like, and half of the exported formats were exported without escaping content in th…

Based on your reply, you had a bad consultant and you used the wrong tool to load the data. Dealing with CLOB/BLOB fields can be a hassle sometimes but that shouldn't kill a project. Both Datapump and SQL-loader could have both been options.

This brings me to one of my pet peeves, programmers tend to trash databases because most of them don't understand how they internally work. If you ask most corporate developers to generate an explain plan and tell you what is going on in the output, most couldn't generate the plan.

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