Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 111 posts

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

#71

Post by vkazanov »

forinti wrote: post #58
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.

When I was young and beautiful and naive I enjoyed playing with setting things up, even though my main focus was on backend dev. Like, setup postgres, tweak settings to performance, that kind of thing. So I was the first one to get the "figure out on site installation steps" task to share with client admin.

Our small company was building enterprises things for large clients. And one of them wanted Oracle on Windows server. They also wanted a failover setup. How hard could that be?

Now I hate Oracle. I hate Oracle consultants. I despise the ignorance.

My favourite bit was Oracle uninstall procedure. I had like 4 pages printed just for this case.

Oracle bad. Postgres good.

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

#72

Post by apercu »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #20
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.

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.

> 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? Back when I had to troubleshoot coaxial network terminations uphill both ways in the snow, we had to learn how things actually work (e.g., what's in a tcp header, how to read an RFC) and that made debugging things a little more straightforward.

I'm pretty insulated from young developers these days, but my limited experience is that they might know the application, presentation and maybe session layers (if using the old OSI model) but everything below that is black magic.

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

#73

Post by abirch »

jasode wrote: post #68
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.

>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. That is only partially true. Oracle has a wide portfolio of a bunch of products and the "wine & dine the execs" is the sales cycle for software like ERP Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Health (Cerner). E.g. it's the hospital CFO & CIO that are the…

I’d take oracle over MS SQL any day. That said I’d take PostgreSQL over oracle any day.

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

#74

Post by apercu »

sofixa wrote: post #17
nxm wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

> 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.

Look, I've been an executive and a management consultant for a long time now (started as a sysadmin and developer), and it's quite often the case that everything was late (decisions, budgets, approvals, every other dependency) but for some reason it's ok that the planned 4 months of development is now compressed in to 2.5 months.

I have been involved to some degree or another in probably close to 300 moderately complex to highly complex tech projects over the last 30 years. That's an extremely conservative number.

And the example I describe above is probably true for 85% of them.

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

#75

Post by parthdesai »

iinnPP wrote: post #46
parthdesai wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on, let's be honest. All of us have colleagues who we don't trust with mission critical stuff.

Your manager should also know that though.

Yes, but that's not the point OP was making here

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

#76

Post by parthdesai »

jeroenhd wrote: post #34
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.

OracleDB forbids benchmarking it in the license, so I just presume it's inefficient and too slow to compete.

An example, Oracle has global unique index when a table is partitioned, Postgres doesn't.

Again, I haven't worked with OracleDB at all, and my postgres knowledge is limited, but assuming without having experience with both systems isn't fair to either DBs IMO.

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

#77

Post by harvey9 »

Pinus wrote: post #57

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…

Could be, but oracle only bought cerner a few years ago and millennium has been around much longer. Other EMR systems are also dreadful - my spouse has some stories about EPIC for example.

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

#78

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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.

Steaks and strippers!

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

#79

Post by shigawire »

Pinus wrote: post #57

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…

Swedish privacy laws for EHRs are quite different compared to other countries.

So I'm not surprised any software not purpose built for for that market would fail. And we know Oracle is not investing in R&D for Millennium since all efforts are out into their forthcoming AI based EHR - whatever that actually means....

Post reply on HN