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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

#111

Post by zaphar »

inemesitaffia wrote: post #110
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…

>Nothing Thier transactions and rollbacks and logging actually work

They work just fine on Postgres and MS SQL too.

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

#112

Post by konschubert »

kragen wrote: post #103
konschubert wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

postgres is adequately efficient technology from last millennium, but at the level of execution efficiency it's pretty much the same as oracle, maybe a bit worse more recent systems like impala, spark, kafka, cassandra, leveldb, influxdb, rocksdb, duckdb, monetdb, lmdb, sqlite, parquet, hbase, etc., are a lot more efficient at execution efficiency, though in many cases that's only 'up to such-and-such a scale' or 'ab…

Disregarding your list of "modern technologies" for a second, I think we agree on the core point here: Postgres may or may not be better than oracle DB. The sizeable advantage it has: you're not dependent on another company that will try to extract your margin as a fee.

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

#113

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

bagels wrote: post #19

Why would anyone have chosen Oracle in the last... 10 years (let alone even further back)? It's expensive, and many things I read from customers hints at deep regret.

20 years ago for me. I learned about the sleazy business tactics of Oracle when I started to read Slashdot at the university.

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

#114

Post by kragen »

konschubert wrote: post #112
kragen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

postgres is adequately efficient technology from last millennium, but at the level of execution efficiency it's pretty much the same as oracle, maybe a bit worse more recent systems like impala, spark, kafka, cassandra, leveldb, influxdb, rocksdb, duckdb, monetdb, lmdb, sqlite, parquet, hbase, etc., are a lot more efficient at execution efficiency, though in many cases that's only 'up to such-and-such a scale' or 'ab…

Disregarding your list of "modern technologies" for a second, I think we agree on the core point here: Postgres may or may not be better than oracle DB. The sizeable advantage it has: you're not dependent on another company that will try to extract your margin as a fee.

i agree with your summary

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

#115

Post by mianos »

zaphar wrote: post #111
inemesitaffia wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nothing Thier transactions and rollbacks and logging actually work

They work just fine on Postgres and MS SQL too.

Not in MySQL. DDL is not transacted last time I looked Postgres is a great choice over Oracle these days though

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

#116

Post by DANmode »

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…

You say ecosystem, but at present, I see "racket".

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

#117

Post by DANmode »

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.

They want any customers capable of avoiding their sand traps to self-select out, yes.

They want the biggest, juiciest hits, not to have to fight with savvy buyers for what they believe they deserve.

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

#118

Post by pantulis »

kragen wrote: post #104
le-mark wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the missing piece from that exchange is the reality that a lot of surviving, legacy, mission critical applications is that they are generally internal to large companies and have grown over decades to encapsulate business processes for entire industries. Consider an application that has been under active development for 30-40 years by 10-100 developers. The cost to rewrite is staggering, and the risk of failu…

i agree with that point and i would add a link to your comment if i could still add to that thread

I would add that that's the type of work our industry is mostly comprised of. What gets usually discussed here in HN is the tip of the iceberg.

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

#119

Post by MrDresden »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #98
burningChrome wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does anyone in IT management not know that Oracle is poison? That blows my mind. I encountered two Oracle audits within 7ish years in the industry, and heard about others. If anyone goes to MIS school, there should probably be a contracts day somewhere in that curriculum, and "don't use Oracle" should be the first bullet point. Maybe in the 80s and 90s without the internet it might be more hush-hush. But this is…

Oracle sells to governments, and their IT departments are often sadly lagging well behind the norms of how things are done in the private sector.

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

#120

Post by marcosdumay »

icedchai wrote: post #106
le-mark wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Many legacy apps use tons of them. In the late 90's there was a style of application development where all DB access went through stored procedures. I find PL/SQL to be terrible.

PL/SQL is terrible. But organizing your Oracle database in a way where you can do everything with only application-accessible statements is even worse.

Oracle places still do a lot of stored procedures.

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