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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

#71

Post by JoshuaRogers »

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.

Absolutely. I’m surprised that the belief in much of the comments is that the technical input of developers (like myself) affects whether Oracle gets consideration.

Oracle gets consideration because teams want to have a lifeline if something goes wrong or (worst case) someone else to pin the blame on when it does. And this happens because some businesses are actually so big that that level of comfort doesn’t even dent the budget.

Oracle actually has some nice parts and some rough edges (a statement that applies equally to PG and SQL Server too, for instance), but it comes with a king-sized security blanket.

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

#72

Post by SoftTalker »

zaphar wrote: post #44
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?

I honestly don't know. I don't know how they stay in business since every developer I've ever met had a bordering on irrational hatred of them. The only people I've met who like them were all Oracle consultants of some sort and not what I would call developers. When I've been forced to use an Oracle database it was because the company had a contract with Oracle and didn't want to allow any other database to be used.…

I never worked for Oracle or as an Oracle consultant, but used to develop on Oracle RDBMS. I liked it quite a lot and it was very powerful. But today, I'd use Postgres.

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

#73

Post by seniorThrowaway »

neilv wrote: post #33

> A user of Oracle since the 1980s, We all know about Resume-Driven Development and hopping to another company every 18 months, incidentally avoiding the consequences. But a very different model is when people are entrenched in a shop where not only is there big legacy investment/lock-in that would be hard/prohibitive for the company to shed, but also the personnel's familiarity with the legacy setup gives job securi…

For Oracle DB there are a number of viable, well built and active open source alternatives like Postgres, is there any real alternative to Active Directory? I've long considered AD to be microsoft's true killer app, especially for very large enterprises.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

whiterknight wrote: post #40
zaphar wrote: post #17

Look, if you are already in business with Oracle then you have my condolences. But if you aren't in business with them then there is absolutely no world where you should ever under any circumstances consider getting into business with them. Nothing their database does can't be done with a different database. Even paying for a proprietary database can be done with a different party than Oracle. Do not, I repeat, do no…

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?

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by RobotToaster »

icedchai wrote: post #8
krylon wrote: post #5

"a specialist advisory company helping clients deal with Oracle licenses" I would (naively, I know) imagine that if you need to hire a third party to help you sort out your licenses with a vendor, you would do whatever it takes to get rid of that vendor. It's almost as if Oracle wants their customers to ditch them the first chance they get.

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'm surprised there aren't entire businesses based around selling compatibility layers or something.

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

#76

Post by LanceH »

neilv wrote: post #25

How frequent are these Oracle audits? My first thought was that you'd want to have ongoing diligence to be compliant. (Just like you don't want to have a delinquent debt with a loan shark who relishes penalties.) But my second thought was that, if the audits are infrequent, some companies might intentionally violate the licenses. Or not want to know nor have a paper trail if there are inadvertent violations. (Both co…

> How frequent are these Oracle audits?

Frequently kicked off by aggrieved ex-employees.

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

#77

Post by seniorThrowaway »

zaphar wrote: post #60
gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can get a Batphone without doing business with Oracle. Microsoft SQL Server will give you a Batphone and would still be better than doing business with Oracle.

I don't know if it is still the case but MS SQL was very deficient tech wise against Oracle DB, and never really a contender for a large OLTP DB. To the point that for some applications, it simply would not work due to excessive locking.

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

#78

Post by dsign »

At my job, we have been merrily replacing Oracle products by open-source ones. You know, the common thing any employee feels morally obligated to do as soon as they realize there is an Oracle product in the stack. But the interesting bit is how those products got there: in some companies, you call it "modern stack" if the tech is less than fifteen years old. Sometimes they will replace a part of it and instead of jumping all the way to the present, they go like "Well, it's 2024 now. So, we need to migrate our stack from 2009 to 2010 this year. What version of Jboss came out in 2010? We need to update to that one. PostgreSQL? No, PostgreSQL 8 doesn't support deferrable unique constraints, which we need. We need to keep paying for OracleDB until June."

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

#79

Post by RobotToaster »

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."

Out of interest, what happens with this sort of thing if you direct them to the reply given in arkell v pressdram?

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

#80

Post by zaphar »

JoshuaRogers wrote: post #71
gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely. I’m surprised that the belief in much of the comments is that the technical input of developers (like myself) affects whether Oracle gets consideration. Oracle gets consideration because teams want to have a lifeline if something goes wrong or (worst case) someone else to pin the blame on when it does. And this happens because some businesses are actually so big that that level of comfort doesn’t even den…

What is weird is that there are many good technical reasons to use Oracle. It's a very advanced and impressive database. The risks from doing business with Oracle are nearly all legal and business cost related. The sort of thing that are squarely under the supposed expertise of the non developer folks.

My objections against Oracle are not technical in nature. It is almost entirely cost and legal risk related.

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