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Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

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Re: Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

#61

Post by cess11 »

fulafel wrote: post #55
ie21 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make a great database?

It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org). As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.

If you handle large amounts of geographical data you'll need to invest quite a bit to move to Postgres. It's possible but you're going to need to touch a lot of existing code and figure out new performance characteristics and so on. A lot of it will be hard for an average organisation, not because it's very sophisticated and complex but because it will be large amounts of boring rote work that many developers don't see how they could do programmatically.

Rumour has it the same holds for some other types of data as well but I lack immediate experience in other areas.

With Oracle you also have a rather robust, exhaustive documentation of error messages and even obscure stuff is likely to be figured out in some forum thread by someone and an indian guy. Postgres isn't exactly bad in this area but you can run into things where you need to go deep in debugging yourself and figure out minutiae of your specific version.

Containers also remove most of the issues with running several instances in development and CI environments.

I still don't recommend anyone to pick Oracle for greenfield stuff, instead you should work around shortcomings in other database engines, but for a large organisation with certain demands that already has buyin it makes sense.

Re: Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

#62

Post by thyristan »

fulafel wrote: post #55
ie21 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make a great database?

It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org). As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.

Even worse. It skews the architecture decisions towards few large physical database servers instead of many small VMs, because licensing cost is per core in the whole VM cluster, so totally unaffordable. So you get reduced availability, higher risk, reduced separation, reduced security, higher datacenter cost, and they bill you an arm and a leg on top...

Re: Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

#63

Post by eitland »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #40
ie21 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They make a great database?

Another curious question: what use case can only be served by an Oracle DB?

Many moons ago when I was green and my skin was a lot smoother I pointed out to my then boss that we could relatively easily (a few weeks of work) move our product from Oracle to Postgres and save n x $1000 for each installation we shipped to a customer.

My personal goal was to avoid becoming an Oracle expert. (Why? Because even as someone who passed advanced Oracle training easily it was still extremely painful. One mistake towards the end of an installation could easily result in 2 days extra work to clear it out.)

Stupid as I was I said nothing about all the work we went through and only mention all the money we could save.

The response was something I learned a lot from.

It was mild and friendly and something along the lines of "here's what you don't get young lad: the customer pays for the Oracle license on top of our original price and we get a 10% cut. Changing to Postgres will effectively cost us money. Also for when we say it is based on Oracle they feel safe."

I'm back at Oracle today after a decade of less painful options and Oracle is still painful but these days I'm not the DBA thankfully and only have to deal with connectionstrings that makes every other database look easy, different SQL syntax etc.

Re: Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

#65

Post by miksik »

znpy wrote: post #8
ziddoap wrote: post #7

> BleepingComputer has confirmed with multiple companies that associated data samples shared by the threat actor are valid. > In addition to the data, rose87168 shared an Archive.org URL with BleepingComputer for a text file hosted on the "login.us2.oraclecloud.com" server that contained their email address. This file indicates that the threat actor could create files on Oracle's server, indicating an actual breach.…

> It's not like there are any real penalties to a breach. Not in the US maybe. In the EU under GDPR you have to disclose within 48h of you realizing (or made aware of) the breach. There are fines (at least) if you don't disclose it afaik. Oracle is gonna have issue with the EU, most likely.

> In the EU under GDPR you have to disclose within 48h

72h actually, but yes, data protection and breaches to sensitive personal information is taken very seriously in the European Union and its legislation.

Re: Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

#66

Post by inetknght »

thyristan wrote: post #62
fulafel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org). As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.

Even worse. It skews the architecture decisions towards few large physical database servers instead of many small VMs, because licensing cost is per core in the whole VM cluster, so totally unaffordable. So you get reduced availability, higher risk, reduced separation, reduced security, higher datacenter cost, and they bill you an arm and a leg on top...

This isn't always a bad thing because microservice architecture isn't always the best solution.

Re: Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

#68

Post by evanelias »

inetknght wrote: post #66
thyristan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse. It skews the architecture decisions towards few large physical database servers instead of many small VMs, because licensing cost is per core in the whole VM cluster, so totally unaffordable. So you get reduced availability, higher risk, reduced separation, reduced security, higher datacenter cost, and they bill you an arm and a leg on top...

This isn't always a bad thing because microservice architecture isn't always the best solution.

This often isn't related to a monolith vs microservice comparison. Large enterprises and institutions tend to run a lot of completely separate applications, which then end up sharing database infrastructure unnecessarily. Think of universities, for example.

Re: Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

#69

Post by markandrewj »

cess11 wrote: post #61
fulafel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org). As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.

If you handle large amounts of geographical data you'll need to invest quite a bit to move to Postgres. It's possible but you're going to need to touch a lot of existing code and figure out new performance characteristics and so on. A lot of it will be hard for an average organisation, not because it's very sophisticated and complex but because it will be large amounts of boring rote work that many developers don't s…

Postgres is commonly used in GIS, via PostGIS (https://postgis.net). That said it is Oracles model to try to lock customers in.

Re: Oracle customers confirm data stolen in alleged cloud breach is valid

#70

Post by overfeed »

inetknght wrote: post #66
thyristan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse. It skews the architecture decisions towards few large physical database servers instead of many small VMs, because licensing cost is per core in the whole VM cluster, so totally unaffordable. So you get reduced availability, higher risk, reduced separation, reduced security, higher datacenter cost, and they bill you an arm and a leg on top...

This isn't always a bad thing because microservice architecture isn't always the best solution.

Oracle extends the problem to the opposite end of microservices, by encouraging monolith DB consolidation, with unrelated monolith applications on the same db cluster for purely budgetary reasons.
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