I hate working on production systems and I hate any action that can't be easily reversed like deleting stuff.
Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
41–50 of 111 posts
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#42“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?
How do we know that it was just a "human error" as the article/headline implies?
Answer: we do not know either, but this is the standard response so that companies (or governments or whoever this concerns) are absolved of any responsibility. In general, it is not possible to know for a specific case until a proper investigation is carries out (which is rarely the case). But most of the times, experience says that it is company policies/procedures that either create circumstances that make such errors more probable, or simply allow these errors to happen too easily due to lack of enough guardrails. And usually it is due to push for "shipping products/features fast" or similar with little concern to other regards.
It could be a different case here, but seeing it is about oracle and having in mind that oracle is really bad at taking accountability about anything going wrong, I doubt it (very recently they were denying a hack on their systems and the leak of data of companies that use them until the very last moment).
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#43I don't understand why anyone buys Oracle. Every Oracle product I used over the last 15 years has been awful.
Oracle offers everything. Databases, web frameworks, programming languages, CRMs, cloud management tools, auto scaling clusters, identity management, BI, document search, email servers, colocation, mainframes, calendar sync. You name it, they've got it. Oracle has products ready to go to run an entire country if it needs to. Sure, Postgres beats OracleDB, but Postgres doesn't integrate as well with Oracle Fusion and…
Yes Oracle offers everything, but everything it offers is low-quality.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#44I hate working on production systems and I hate any action that can't be easily reversed like deleting stuff.
Yeah, I like working under ideal conditions too. And I also want a toilet made of solid gold.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#45Earlier 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.
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.
Maybe. One thing I've found is the LLMs give me a lot of short term leverage. I can (get an LLM to) program in a language I know almost nothing about. Then I hit a wall where I don't know enough to get the LLM to fix something I don't know how to ask for, and then I'm stuck. When vibe coding, I'm not learning how to solve problems myself so much, and that means anything the LLM can't do, I also can't do. When I'm coding on my own, I'm picking up lessons along the way the help me build a foundation for incrementally harder projects.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#46Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oracle offers everything. Databases, web frameworks, programming languages, CRMs, cloud management tools, auto scaling clusters, identity management, BI, document search, email servers, colocation, mainframes, calendar sync. You name it, they've got it. Oracle has products ready to go to run an entire country if it needs to. Sure, Postgres beats OracleDB, but Postgres doesn't integrate as well with Oracle Fusion and…
> Sure, Postgres beats OracleDB Are we sure? I'm by no means a DBA, but DBA at our company (who is freaking smart btw) said if money wasn't an issue, he would actually go with OracleDB.
Postgres is a better choice for 99% of the companies out there. But there are cases where you need ability to massively scale AND control your database cluster perfectly.
Postgres won't even let your force an execution plan and ignores hints (yes, there is an extension for that) so your optimized query can at some point just 10x in execution time and increase load in production when the plan changes.
In Oracle, I am told you can prioritize certain queries at certain time of day - it's crazy what it can do. Yes, it's slow and expensive. If you have money to throw at the problem, it's fast and it solves your problem, whatever the scale. Their Exadata cluster, for example, is wicked fast storage layer pre-filtering the data it sends to the database.
Of course, I despise their business practices - especially the abuse of customers via audits. As a database, it absolutely has its place regardless of lobbying, corruption, and whatever else they are doing.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#48Earlier 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.
At least as much mission critical software runs on C++, Java, and of course, plain old C.
I wouldn't portray Cobol to be some sort of magic "hardcore" pixie dust for anything.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Because some human errors are bound to happen, what is often missing is procedures to minimize them, catch them or prevent them from having catastrophic effects.
It is not even about being technical. Have a person put data on a spreadsheet and you can get into so many errors if the procedure of doing that is bad.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#50I'd risk to say it was compounding interest on tech debt, but it doesn't sound as sexy, does it?