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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

#81

Post by Zigurd »

used2workthere wrote: post #7
soperj wrote: post #2

Oracle's favourite phrase seems to be "You're out of compliance", and their only solution is for you to pay more.

Used to work there due to acquihire (throwaway acct since regular can out me). Engineers were walked through how to interact with clients; don’t say this or that because of laws and treaties. But also to listen for customer language that suggests a customer is cheating Oracle; let Oracle know and they will send the lawyers. It was a very paranoia driven environment.

Many many years ago I was working on making a phone OS (no not that one, this was for VoIP handsets, no not Cisco's) where we built an app suite on a Java VM. We wanted to use a Sun VM, I forget the acronym, that was bigger than J2ME but smaller than SE for which Sun, as far as we could tell, had no actual customers. You'd think they would be happy to have customer interest, but we got a total horseshit runaround on pricing. We could not base a product on something for which we had no idea of pricing. We used an open source Java which turned out to be adequate, but only just - no JIT, for example.

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

#82

Post by blackhawkC17 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #68
politelemon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Spreetail, one of Nebraska’s biggest tech startups, specializes in this area. Not only for Amazon, but other marketplaces like Walmart, eBay, TikTok, etc.

https://news.crunchbase.com/retail/spreetail-nebraska-e-comm...

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

#83

Post by konschubert »

geodel wrote: post #69
konschubert wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For oracle DB, it’s mostly Postgres I guess?

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

#84

Post by zaphar »

SoftTalker wrote: post #72
zaphar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In purely technical terms Oracle is fine, really good even. The company comes with massive legal and cost risks though.

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

#85

Post by blackhawkC17 »

walrus01 wrote: post #34
politelemon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have mentally trained myself that every time I read the word "Oracle", I replace it with "Larry Ellison needs a bigger yacht". Thus far, this has worked great for me in staying away from paying that organization even one dollar.

He actually sold his bigger yacht (The Rising Sun) to David Geffen and settled for a smaller one (Musashi), lol

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

#86

Post by SR2Z »

RobotToaster wrote: post #75
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'm surprised there aren't entire businesses based around selling compatibility layers or something.

Oracle can and does sue them, and with enough money that it's easier to pay them to go away.

Hell, even benchmarking their DB goes against the license.

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

#87

Post by zaphar »

seniorThrowaway wrote: post #77
zaphar wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've used MS SQL recently and it holds up more than fine if you tune it properly. Oracle also needs tuning properly so that's not big deal.

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

#88

Post by burningChrome »

kragen wrote: post #12
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.

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…

A smaller company I worked for a few years ago was migrating its old ERP legacy system and brought in some people from Oracle, SAP and Epicor. They decided to go with SAP, but I remember my boss in several lunch meetings saying that they didn't get a sales pitch from the other vendors as much as a litany of horror stories about why they shouldn't go with Oracle.

It worked since my manager said he asked around and did his own research and wondered how they're even still in business since everybody he talked to said the same thing - whatever you do, do not go with Oracle.

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

#89

Post by icedchai »

SoftTalker wrote: post #65
lazide wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It's similar to the cloud lock-in you see today. (If all you're using is VMs, you're probably better off with something else...)

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

#90

Post by bluedino »

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."

The other side of this is having a license for something, but other users at your organization are using it as well, but don't have licenses.

The company will then want to meet and discuss licensing, and if that doesn't happen they'll cut your IP addresses off.

This is typically something that's free for personal use but requires a license for commercial use. We've ran into this with a few things.

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