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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

#131

Post by Shorel »

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.

It's not that complicated.

All our business logic was into PL/SQL stored procedures, I migrated them to MySQL stored procedures.

The MySQL language is a bit retarded, and some extra work was needed, but everything was doable.

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

#132

Post by kragen »

pantulis wrote: post #118
kragen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i think that's mostly other industries where programmers work

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

#133

Post by Shorel »

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.

I have worked with Oracle and MySQL was the replacement.

I rewrote the dozens of PL/SQL SP into the retarded language that MySQL has.

It's not impossible in any way.

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

#134

Post by cyberax »

kragen wrote: post #124
cyberax wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle was a really solid choice 30 years ago, when 1Tb was an unheard-of database size. Back then, its query optimizer and a couple of strategic hints could make a huge difference in the runtime so that a report could be produced in minutes instead of hours. These days? You can buy a server with 1Tb of RAM, for the price of one Oracle license. Any Open Source database will work just as well as Oracle on these kinds…

i agree that oracle was a solid choice 30 years ago, though they were already notorious for taking advantage of their customers also postgres's query optimizer has gotten a lot better i wouldn't say any open source database. it depends on your index. there are recondite but not unreasonable queries for which mariadb and sqlite still produce pathologically poor query plans which won't complete in a reasonable time eve…

Yeah, OK. That was a bit of exaggeration for sure :)

SQLite might be a bit under-powered as well for these kinds of jobs.

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

#135

Post by rokkitmensch »

afandian wrote: post #105
everfrustrated wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker also does this too for their Desktop product. If any dev downloads and installs it within your org expect an email from them to check up on your licensing.

Maybe this is what it takes to put paid to return-to-office?

Except for the common VPN setup.

Now, perhaps this is what it takes to put paid to IPV4...

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

#136

Post by [deleted] »

kichimi wrote: post #121
kragen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

postgres dates from 01974, it used to be called ingres, so it has 50 years of engineering, not 30. the 'post' is from when they added 'object-oriented' features to make it 'post-relational' as i understand it, oracle mostly sells to executives above it management, but there are also lots of executives in it management who aren't as concerned about the survival of their company as they are their own careers. it's hard…

01974?

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by ClueslessTech99 »

seniorThrowaway wrote: post #73
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.

FreeIPA or OpenLDAP?

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

#138

Post by DANmode »

MrDresden wrote: post #119
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which mints/graduates a new generation of dummies who have "always done it this way at their old school", and spread the poison around to new firms.

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

#139

Post by throwaway44773 »

Shorel wrote: post #131
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.

It's not that complicated. All our business logic was into PL/SQL stored procedures, I migrated them to MySQL stored procedures. The MySQL language is a bit retarded, and some extra work was needed, but everything was doable.

Then mysql got bought by oracle

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

#140

Post by evanelias »

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.

MariaDB has been improving Oracle compatibility in recent years, see https://mariadb.com/kb/en/sql_modeoracle/
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