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'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

theregister.com

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Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#61

Post by walrus01 »

shrubble wrote: post #59
walrus01 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that the way to do this would be to set up realtime replication from the origin oracle DB to a db with the same schema running on something much more 'normal' such as mariadb, and then set up client applications and libraries and queries to the newly replicated db in a read only mode. And then setting up test client application/libraries for write mode to a copy of the replicated db and verify everythin…

Far easier said than done. And that you mentioned MySQL/MariaDB as a possible replacement means that you have never worked with Oracle's SQL dialect.

Didn't say it would be easy - and indeed I'm well aware that Oracle is very different than MySQL. It's a painful transition process that more organizations will find necessary as the costs and hassle of oracle increase. If the end state goal is to have zero oracle in production use, people will have to figure out some kind of transition process to migrate away incrementally.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#62

Post by kragen »

vetinari wrote: post #56
kragen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty sure you can get your openjdk lts updates from debian

Those are Debian's (or Redhat's, or Fedora's) builds. Oracle ones are exactly as layer8 wrote. Moreso, if you also need windows or macos build; there's no Debian or Redhat then.

true!

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#63

Post by icedchai »

shrubble wrote: post #59
walrus01 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that the way to do this would be to set up realtime replication from the origin oracle DB to a db with the same schema running on something much more 'normal' such as mariadb, and then set up client applications and libraries and queries to the newly replicated db in a read only mode. And then setting up test client application/libraries for write mode to a copy of the replicated db and verify everythin…

Far easier said than done. And that you mentioned MySQL/MariaDB as a possible replacement means that you have never worked with Oracle's SQL dialect.

Oracle even has its own proprietary, alternate JOIN syntax. The devil is always in the details.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#64

Post by walrus01 »

Takennickname wrote: post #30

Got an email from oracle recently that said (paraphrased): "We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly."

They have actually been scraping ARIN IP space registration data for this and sending threats to people who hold IP space that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual business end user with a DIA circuit and static /30 that downloaded virtualbox. It's a ridiculous abuse of ARIN WHOIS data.

From the point of view of ISPs receiving such threats it is the most preposterous thing ever.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#65

Post by SoftTalker »

lazide wrote: post #45
__loam wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good thing there aren't numerous open source alternative databases that can be hosted by numerous other services then.

Oh man, in theory SQL is standard - in practice, you’ll need to rewrite (or do major surgery) on nearly everything that interacts with your Oracle instance. Unless you’ve been incredibly careful, which is unlikely. And chances are, you started using Oracle because of some enterprise software somewhere for which you don’t even have the source - so good luck. And don’t forget, Oracle will encourage you to use all their…

If you were using SQL so generically that you could easily substitute another database, you never should have been using Oracle to begin with.

I guess you could call it "vendor lock-in" to use the more advanced SQL, analytic functions, and stored procedures or you could call it "getting what you paid for."

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#66

Post by lowercased »

Not Oracle related, but ... in the late 90s, I was at a company that was doing web stuff - number of cgi/perl projects, but they'd started doing ASP as well in 98. Had a couple clients really scale up - one client had 80 servers load balanced, all running Windows NT. A friendly MS rep stopped by because the client had been getting so much press for their ecommerce work (which we were doing) and went... "oh wow, you have 150 servers that each should be licensed at $8k/server... let's talk!". The very next day the CEO came to a big dev meeting and started ranting that we needed to optimize the hell out of the sites to get the server count down ASAP. And... we also became an 'official' MS partner, which seemed to put the kibosh (officially or otherwise) on more expansive work in to Java. We were doing a bit of Java, but I think we'd have expanded more in that direction without the MS pressure. Yes, they fed us more work... but it meant... we were doing more hands on work (fixing loads of bugs in their commerce server) while they just collected license revenue. Great business if you can get it, I guess...

FWIW, I have no doubt that story was not isolated at the start of the web boom. I just happened to see inside a company when it was happening. It's also why I tend to take a FOSS-first attitude to tech.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#67

Post by le-mark »

walrus01 wrote: post #54
icedchai wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you're using an Oracle database, you are probably using proprietary Oracle features, SQL syntax, client libraries, etc. The first chance you get might be a while. I once worked on a project porting an app from Oracle to another commercial DB. When Oracle is deeply embedded in your applications, it's easier said than done.

I would think that the way to do this would be to set up realtime replication from the origin oracle DB to a db with the same schema running on something much more 'normal' such as mariadb, and then set up client applications and libraries and queries to the newly replicated db in a read only mode. And then setting up test client application/libraries for write mode to a copy of the replicated db and verify everythin…

> I would think that the way to do this would be to

The devil as always Is in the details. The real problem comes With stored procedures. Maybe this is why I shy away from their used to this day. The last migration I did to Postgres wasn’t too bad; the app had only a few basic stored procedures.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#68

Post by CobrastanJorji »

politelemon wrote: post #22
mayoff wrote: post #6

A few years ago, my then-employer (a smallish company, < 150 employees) had to deal with an Oracle compliance audit. I was shocked at the time to learn that there are companies (like Palisade Compliance mentioned in this article) that specialize in Oracle license compliance. We made it through just fine (in fact I believe we managed to get a small refund!), but having been through that (though not in any way directly…

> that specialize in Oracle license compliance Oh but it gets better. Many of them are ex oracle employees. It's a huge racket that exists for itself.

These kinds of things are everywhere. To pick one at random, if you want to list a product on amazon.com, there's no shortage of consulting companies that will figure out how to make it happen. And then you can get a consultant for your amazon advertising (the ads that go on amazon.com to advertise other products also on amazon.com) and a consultant to help make your company the default choice when a customer clicks the buy button in the "buy box," and a few more. You can easily spend hundreds of thousands on these consultants.

Honestly, the Amazon hustle is a crazy and fascinating little ecosystem in a bunch of ways.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#69

Post by geodel »

konschubert wrote: post #43
kragen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oracle products aren't really products you can ditch in most cases. generally what it takes to get rid of them is to go out of business and be replaced by a business that isn't an oracle customer. i had a very interesting thread about that dynamic on here with pamar three weeks ago, which will be very interesting reading for anyone who is wondering why people don't ditch oracle https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39…

That’s why it’s so important that competition is possible in a market. Such that legacy players with inefficient legacy technologies can be driven out of the market.

And which is efficient modern technology taking its place?

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#70

Post by seniorThrowaway »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #51
whiterknight wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is there such a big disconnect between HN opinion on Oracle and business use? Is it maybe the least bad of all the bad options? Does it cover some edge cases which the obvious FOSS solutions don’t?

Many large companies want a Batphone to call someone for support. They think that the vendor will magically just make things work. Normally that’s not the case. They might get it to work faster than your people, but probably not much quicker. FOSS often has a Batphone, but few people pay for it. As a result management doesn’t want their Ops to be the only possible team to correct things.

support contracts are mitigations to management career problems, not to technology problems. Managers always want that throat to choke to deflect blame or buy time
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