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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

#91

Post by cduzz »

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 is in the small family of companies that have a business model of "you give us money and we solve _all_ your problems."

So it's likely that, for a specific task, the oracle solution is crap, but oracle has crap for everything so the oracle sales droid can sell a "one throat to choke, one check to write" policy to a company that likely has technology problems but produces a "not technology" product.

Amazon's moving into this space and their crap is even stickier than oracle's...

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

#92

Post by abirch »

deskamess wrote: post #85
abirch wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Curious if that is from recent experience? I used Oracle decades ago but these days it's all SQL Server.

Yes, it's the isolation levels. I want row level locking. I want to have 1 insert and 20 selects running at the same time without getting a lock.

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

#93

Post by alwa »

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.

As I recall, the Guggenheim offered theirs for loan to the White House a few years back…

https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/maurizio-cattelan-amer...

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

#94

Post by alwa »

aeonik wrote: post #84
cheema33 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I like working under ideal conditions too. And I also want a toilet made of solid gold.

Why solid gold? It would be way too ductile, heavy, and conduct far too much heat. Diamond might actually be better: low surface energy means a low coefficient of friction, so it would be much easier to clean. It would still suck the heat right out of your cheeks, though. Realistically, porcelain or other ceramics are probably the ideal material.

Or plastic, backed by electric heating!

https://www.totousa.com/washlet

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

#95

Post by aeonik »

rat9988 wrote: post #27
wiseowise wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in 99% cases it is “when we succeed it’s a team effort, when we fail it’s the engineers”.

Feels like the exact opposit story when I read engineers commenting online.

Engineers aren't shy about eviscerating each other's work when mistakes are made—sometimes too eager, frankly.

Whole courses are built around forensically dissecting every error in major systems. Entire advanced fields are written in blood.

You probably don't hear about it often because the analysis is too dense and technical to go viral.

At the same time, there's a serious cultural problem: technical expertise is often missing from positions of authority, and even the experts we do have are often too narrow to bridge the levels of complexity modern systems demand.

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

#96

Post by hahn-kev »

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.

The problem is that putting code into your database has all the problems of data migration with no testability. It's really hard to write tests and debug code compared to a proper language.

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

#97

Post by aaronbaugher »

hahn-kev wrote: post #96
forinti wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that putting code into your database has all the problems of data migration with no testability. It's really hard to write tests and debug code compared to a proper language.

I took over support for a small ISP after the previous sysadmin died unexpectedly. He was a big fan of putting code in the PostgreSQL database, which I had never done before. That was fun to figure out and debug issues.

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

#98

Post by netdevphoenix »

1718627440 wrote: post #66
netdevphoenix wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is how they grew and how they remain big. While smaller companies aim for managers, Oracle targets CTOs and CEOs, takes them out for expensive dinners and promises them the world. Then, they legacy handcuffed them forever. And virtually no one chooses to invest crazy amounts of money on migrating or even starting a new codebase when your company lifeblood has been poured into the Faustian Oracle machin…

Are managers really not doing background checks about company behaviour before signing a contract?

The ones targeted by Oracle salespeople don't. And when they do, it's too late. And most just hope things "will work out". I was third party witness to one of these transformations and I correctly predicted the chaos, uncertainty and sense of powerlessness that it would cause

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

#99

Post by anonymousiam »

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.

The same could also be said about Microsoft.
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