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A Story of O(racle)

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Re: A Story of O(racle)

#41

Post by jrockway »

kscaldef wrote: post #24
jrockway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. The higher-ups can say which database to use and hire a bunch of people to set it up. But if the developers ignore them, they have no way of actually determining this. (Which is what's so great about mandates from Higher Up.)

Relying on a conspiracy of the entire technical staff to keep your job seems like a bad idea to me.

The market is what lets programmers keep their jobs. There aren't enough of them, so they have to settle for what's out there.

Might as well make the best of it.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#42

Post by nl »

jrockway wrote: post #18
maukdaddy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.

How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

Sun has a significant hardware business, especially in the legacy SPARC products.

Combining that with Oracle's applications turns Oracle into a complete solution provider like IBM & HP.

Solaris is open source, but Oracle has dropped support for the open source version and isn't going to open source all new features.

Sun also owned MySQL, which gives Oracle a great foot-in-the-door at a whole industry segment where they weren't a player before.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#43

Post by loewenskind »

jrockway wrote: post #18
maukdaddy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.

How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

Sun has more patents than pretty much any company not called IBM. Oracle probably paid way too little for what they got.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#44

Post by mhd »

j_baker wrote: post #14

Much as I dislike this as a developer, this is a smart business strategy for Oracle. Let's face it: at the companies that use Oracle, the developers aren't the one making the call as to what database to use. That's the call of much higher-ups. About the only solution I can suggest is to avoid working for such companies, but I'm be preaching to the choir to say that.

It's only really smart if you consider the two approaches exclusive to each other. Personally, I don't see a reason why you can't pander to both managers and developers. Yes, you've got some added expenses, but certainly less than most business-centric marketing campaigns or new yachts for Larry.

Having said that, I don't think Oracle was totally neglecting that area. They had a few decent free tools available (SQLDeveloper, JDeveloper, trial DB versions) and while their articles didn't come close to the sheer amount IBM offered, there was enough information out there.

They could've marketed that better, though. But in that regard, they're certainly not much worse than a lot of other enterprise companies. You can't measure everything by the way Microsoft and Apple are doing it.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#45

Post by gaius »

cageface wrote: post #29
j_baker wrote: post #14

Much as I dislike this as a developer, this is a smart business strategy for Oracle. Let's face it: at the companies that use Oracle, the developers aren't the one making the call as to what database to use. That's the call of much higher-ups. About the only solution I can suggest is to avoid working for such companies, but I'm be preaching to the choir to say that.

Maybe. Maybe not. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Oracle in several jobs now and will emphatically advise against it at every opportunity. Postgres may not be a drop-in replacement for every Oracle use case but for those that are I'll recommend it first any day of the week. Oracle in a job description is a big red flag for me.

Technically or culturally?

Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and straightforward to use. If you even can run your application on Postgres then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's for[1].

[1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#46

Post by gaius »

jrockway wrote: post #18
maukdaddy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.

How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

Well, Sun paid a billion dollars for the domain name mysql.com, when all's said and done.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#47

Post by DannoHung »

gaius wrote: post #45
cageface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Maybe not. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Oracle in several jobs now and will emphatically advise against it at every opportunity. Postgres may not be a drop-in replacement for every Oracle use case but for those that are I'll recommend it first any day of the week. Oracle in a job description is a big red flag for me.

Technically or culturally? Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and straightforward to use. If you even can run your application on Postgres then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's for[1]. [1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.

What is it that makes Oracle more suitable for some projects?

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#48

Post by gaius »

DannoHung wrote: post #47
gaius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically or culturally? Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and straightforward to use. If you even can run your application on Postgres then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's for[1]. [1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.

What is it that makes Oracle more suitable for some projects?

Most obviously, if you want to run one of Oracle's layered applications (e.g supply chain management or whatever). Sure you probably could beat it into running on Postgres but why would you?

Oracle (the database) is meant to be the integration point for Oracle (everything else). If you aren't running any of Oracle's other products, then it boils down to a pure technical decision - do you need feature X? Is it cheaper to buy it or build it? For example do you use OpenFiler or buy VVM or use ASM that comes with Oracle since you need a database anyway? Or maybe you have exotic spatial data needs. Or you want virtual private database/label security (http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/RLS - Oracle has had this for years, the Postgres guys are still talking about it, the MySQL camp don't even know that there is such a thing).

Now, I am a long-time Oracle user, and even I say, unless you know and can say specifically why you need Oracle, then you should use Postgres or SAP/DB (or in place of Oracle XE, maybe even SQLite). But if you do need it, then it's Oracle or DB/2, choose your poison.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#49

Post by fauigerzigerk »

jrockway wrote: post #40
sandGorgon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes think that the lack of books for Postgres is because someone is paying to keep them off the market. Every few days on pgsql.general mailing lists, there is someone asking for a good Postgresql book (the "High Performance MySQL" kind) Less books = one more tick mark for Oracle.

More books = you writing one. If you won't do it, why should anyone else?

Because there are people who consider themselves technical writers. Either they do it or someone from the core postgresql team who has the credibility.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#50

Post by quanticle »

DannoHung wrote: post #47
gaius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically or culturally? Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and straightforward to use. If you even can run your application on Postgres then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's for[1]. [1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.

What is it that makes Oracle more suitable for some projects?

Well, despite some promising open-source efforts in the area (PostGIS being most prominent) Oracle is still tops when it comes to handling geo-spatial data. Unfortunate, but that's the way it is.
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