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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

#51

Post by consp »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #28
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…

> young people not taking an interest in COBOL and Mainframes It is more like young people not wanting to: - throw their careers out of the window by pigeonholing themselves into zombieware tech - experience high levels of stress trying to debug code older than their parents, writing code that can't be unit tested and pushing said code to production

> writing code that can't be unit tested and pushing said code to production

Isn't that just "move fast" these days?

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

#52

Post by cheema33 »

Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information execs.

When I worked at a megacorp as a dev, I had near zero say in such purchase decisions. I had to work with what I was given. Thankfully I work for a much smaller shop now. Better pay and much better decision autonomy.

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

#53

Post by keyle »

cheema33 wrote: post #44
xupybd wrote: post #41

I 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.

You sound sarcastic. It's not too much to ask to have all actions reversible in 2021.

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

#54

Post by pastage »

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.

Fair point! From a personal perspective it was about interfacing with the real world like parsing data, bitbanging or writing drivers. I actually have no problem with doing BI web apps with COBOL.

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

#55

Post by reactordev »

cheema33 wrote: post #52

Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information execs. When I worked at a megacorp as a dev, I had near zero say in such purchase decisions. I had to work with what I was given. Thankfully I work for a much smaller shop now. Better pay and much better decision autonomy.

This is exactly right - they say the right things, to the right people, over the right sized bribe rib.

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

#56

Post by arandomhuman »

cheema33 wrote: post #44
xupybd wrote: post #41

I 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.

Yeah database backups are just too hard for a multi billion dollar corporation to handle.

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

#57

Post by Pinus »

Is this the same Oracle/Cerner system ("Millennium", I believe) that, despite protests from the medical staff, was deployed "big-bang style" in the Swedish region of Västra Götaland, with much the same results? (And where during a press conference, where the management was explaining how nearly everything was going to plan, a doctor, who had somehow sneaked in, got up, shouted something to the effect of "you’re lying, it’s a bloody disaster!" and stormed out.)

(That was not an outage, though — as far as I understand the system was working, it just didn’t actually work...)

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

#58

Post by forinti »

cheema33 wrote: post #52

Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information execs. When I worked at a megacorp as a dev, I had near zero say in such purchase decisions. I had to work with what I was given. Thankfully I work for a much smaller shop now. Better pay and much better decision autonomy.

Devs get Oracle's best side. They don't know how lucky they are. PL/SQL is a fine language and Oracle throws everything and the kitchen sink into the APIs available inside the database.

As a sysadmin/dba I get to handle the nasty side of Oracle: the bugs, the patches that fail, the redundant tools, the wordy documentation that always feels like a never-ending advert.

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

#59

Post by collingreen »

ie21 wrote: post #33
parthdesai wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Same. I work with engineers and technical managers with 25+ years of experience, building and maintaining serious business software 'you could run a country with' - people here build react web apps or do scientific research, or work for a SaaS provider - completely different view than building highly complex, regulated, mission critical software that supposed to run for decades and be supported at this level.

I think it's an arrogant and naive mistake to think nobody reading hacker news has ever built anything complex, regulated, mission critical, or intended to last.

A more useful line of conversation might be discussing the vastly different requirements and environments (both physical and bureaucratic) that span our industry. Right now I'm a one man dev team slinging multiple products as fast as I can, trying to find revenue as the runway burns up. It would be silly to think everyone is in my same position with my same tradeoffs and I don't expect that to be particularly controversial.

If you have some good insight about when Oracle products are particularly well suited to the task I think many folks would love to read and discuss it. If you just want to act like you're the only one taking your job seriously then I suggest you just save your keystrokes and everybody's time.

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