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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

#141

Post by kamaal »

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.

There are still tons of PL/SQL developers, and a huge ecosystem that uses these things. Triggers were big at one time too.

You will be surprised how H1B 'specialised talent' developers are just people who have worked on these ancient technologies all life, are near impossible to replace so you are left with no options but to hire them.

Oracle is a whole different specialisation in itself and its tentacles go very deep and afar.

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

#142

Post by greazy »

Perepiska wrote: post #126
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…

I once worked for a vendor company that sold a workstation: a computer with Linux and full-fledged Oracle server with the appropriate license and a small application written in PL/SQL. When I suggested rewriting everything in Python, the CEO explained that on the client side, this solution was bought by MBA graduates who only knew Oracle, and everything else would be suspicious to them. As a result, clients bought a…

There's a disconnect in my understand of MBAs. How and why do MBAs only know Oracle?

Why are they making wild business decisions. Yeah I'm probably living under a rock so apologies for the ignorant question.

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

#143

Post by aflukasz »

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.

Was just about to write that AWS does that, but no, it's only for MS SQL Server: https://babelfishpg.org/, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide....

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

#144

Post by Shorel »

throwaway44773 wrote: post #139
Shorel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It doesn't matter. The important point is we are no longer being tied to Oracle for it.

Now the code runs in both MariaDB and Aurora in AWS.

We only pay AWS for the servers now.

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

#145

Post by krylon »

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.

That's why I wrote "naively". I know it's more complicated than I made it sound. It's the same with companies using mainframes, after a while you are so deeply invested (both financially and technically) that migrating might be more expensive than just feeding the corporate machine.

Still, depending on a vendor that treats their customers as rudely as Oracle does must be really annoying.

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

#146

Post by icedchai »

cyberax wrote: post #123
falcor84 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you happen to know when that took place? I can't seem to find any dates on that page

It started in the early 2010-s. First, relational databases were discouraged for new projects, then some projects started migrating from RDBMS to DynamoDB (or to the special internal NoSQL storage systems). The final push to move off Oracle (and RDBMS in general) started around 2016.

Dynamo locks you in as much as Oracle. This is not a problem for Amazon, but if you're a normal customer, you should should think carefully.

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

#147

Post by tatersolid »

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.

> is there any real alternative to Active Directory?

Yes, it’s called Microsoft Entra ID…

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

#148

Post by kragen »

cyberax wrote: post #134
kragen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

usually sqlite is several times faster than postgres or oracle unless you have a high update rate, but there are cases where it just fails

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

#149

Post by MikeDelta »

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?

Maybe 1974?

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

#150

Post by matrix87 »

kevinherron wrote: post #10
BenoitP wrote: post #4

> Earlier last year, it made changes to the Oracle Java SE subscription model, basing it on a per-employee metric many said would increase costs for users. Would running Java under Corretto 21 change this?

Yes, all of this Oracle Java licensing drama only applies if you're using the Oracle JDK. The vast majority of people can just use a JDK from any of the other vendors and tell Oracle to pound sand. Even if you do need paid support, you should pay Azul instead of Oracle, just out of principle.

> Even if you do need paid support

By paid support, you mean free steak dinners for middle management?

After dealing with Azul people, give me Oracle. Instead of seeing Azul people shuffling a bunch of charts around and making up shit on the fly to make it sound like their garbage product performs better than OpenJDK (it didn't for us. we benchmarked it. but shame on us, because I guess the steak dinners kept rolling in).

Look at this website, do you think it belongs to a legitimate company? https://www.azul.com/

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