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Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

cnbc.com

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Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#11

Post by baridbelmedar »

gonzo41 wrote: post #5
buyucu wrote: post #2

I don't understand why anyone buys Oracle. Every Oracle product I used over the last 15 years has been awful.

It's legacy lock in. You can't just switch stuff. it's incredibly hard to move logic out of store procedures from on DB to another. Its the same reason why the US government runs on Cobol. People don't think about the strategic implication of the tech they choose and how it may come back to limit them in the future.

It's pretty common for business contracts to just end up stuck on mainframes or scattered across various systems from vendors like Oracle (the paper trails are often thrown away long time ago).

And let's be honest, a lot of folks in IT aren't exactly top performers and don't seem to care all that much. It's really the developers you find on forums like this who are genuinely passionate. You're not likely to bump into the people actually buying those big Oracle or IBM systems around here though :)

Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#12

Post by Ygg2 »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #10
wiseowise wrote: post #6

“Engineers” Must be engineers who write requirements and unrealistic deadlines that lead to such issues.

I just watched a YC video about vibe coding. He says he used Claude Sonnet 3.7 to configure his DNS servers & Heroku hosting. What could possibly go wrong?! "How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School " => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJjsfNO5JTo&t=494s I like his advice on downloading relevant documentation and putting it in the code base. That makes sense to me for targeted use cases.

How it actually went: https://youtu.be/_2C2CNmK7dQ?feature=shared

Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#13

Post by decimalenough »

pastage wrote: post #9
8fingerlouie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Oracle "shops" i know have used it for decades. When they started using it, there weren't many options, so Oracle was what was used. COBOL is in the same category. When invented, it was the absolute easiest programming language to learn and use, so of course it gained popularity. It then turned out to be rather good at what it did, along with running on hardware that "never fails", so most places didn't even thi…

> due to young people not taking an interest in COBOL and Mainframes Having only fleeting professional experience with COBOL during a summer my view of it is that it is a mix of dataanalyst job and programming. Where the programming is horrible and the report making is ok though archaic. As long as you modify processes already available it is not so bad, but the developer experience was horrible. With all that said I…

The "real world" of airline reservations, the world's financial infrastructure and basically anything involving hardcore real data processing runs on COBOL.

But yeah, if you're looking to code up a progressive web app or next blockbuster MMORPG, I wouldn't recommend COBOL.

Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#15

Post by devoutsalsa »

Ygg2 wrote: post #12
devoutsalsa wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just watched a YC video about vibe coding. He says he used Claude Sonnet 3.7 to configure his DNS servers & Heroku hosting. What could possibly go wrong?! "How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School " => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJjsfNO5JTo&t=494s I like his advice on downloading relevant documentation and putting it in the code base. That makes sense to me for targeted use cases.

How it actually went: https://youtu.be/_2C2CNmK7dQ?feature=shared

I didn't need a header anyway.

Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#16

Post by Scoundreller »

jackvalentine wrote: post #3
buyucu wrote: post #2

I don't understand why anyone buys Oracle. Every Oracle product I used over the last 15 years has been awful.

Nobody bought Oracle here - they bought Cerner which was gobbled up in 2022.

Sorta, Cerner uses an Oracle backend

Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#17

Post by sofixa »

nxm wrote: post #14
wiseowise wrote: post #6

“Engineers” Must be engineers who write requirements and unrealistic deadlines that lead to such issues.

How do you know requirements or deadlines were a contributing factor here?

It's a very common cop out by engineers/technical folks when something goes wrong somewhere else, to blame it on management/deadlines/customers/etc.

Sometimes people make mistakes, sometimes people are incompetent, sometimes managers suck, sometimes it's a multi-layered issue.

Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#18

Post by vlovich123 »

buyucu wrote: post #2

I don't understand why anyone buys Oracle. Every Oracle product I used over the last 15 years has been awful.

I know they get a lot of hate but I personally used Oracle’s cloud and it seemed like a decent piece of infrastructure with really solid engineering team behind it. They had their share of problems (and their first line of support is really really bad and not well suited to handle real issues) but not really any different from any other similar products.

Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#19

Post by sofixa »

decimalenough wrote: post #13
pastage wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> due to young people not taking an interest in COBOL and Mainframes Having only fleeting professional experience with COBOL during a summer my view of it is that it is a mix of dataanalyst job and programming. Where the programming is horrible and the report making is ok though archaic. As long as you modify processes already available it is not so bad, but the developer experience was horrible. With all that said I…

The "real world" of airline reservations, the world's financial infrastructure and basically anything involving hardcore real data processing runs on COBOL. But yeah, if you're looking to code up a progressive web app or next blockbuster MMORPG, I wouldn't recommend COBOL.

The top (in the world) 2 airline reservation system Amadeus have ported everything to Kubernetes for years now. In fact they were among the top contributors to the project a few years back.

It's all a matter of age and maturity. Nobody starting an airline, or financial company, or "hardcore data processing" today even bothers considering a mainframe or COBOL.

Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals

#20

Post by BiteCode_dev »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #10
wiseowise wrote: post #6

“Engineers” Must be engineers who write requirements and unrealistic deadlines that lead to such issues.

I just watched a YC video about vibe coding. He says he used Claude Sonnet 3.7 to configure his DNS servers & Heroku hosting. What could possibly go wrong?! "How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School " => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJjsfNO5JTo&t=494s I like his advice on downloading relevant documentation and putting it in the code base. That makes sense to me for targeted use cases.

I managed to break production before vibe coding was cool.

20 years old me had rm -fr root access to way too many systems.

I don't think it's much different today.

If anything, I think the youngsters will learn faster from their mistakes because they already have good mentor for the easy stuff and will get grinded on the hard stuff sooner.

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