I think the Oracle Transaction Manager is one of the best pieces of software that I had to work with in a professional settings. Lots of other stuff in an enterprise setting is very flaky and follows trends but the Oracle internals seem very nice.
Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
101–110 of 111 posts
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#102Earlier 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.
Streisand Effect. There must be anonymous benchmarks on the web somewhere.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
> In most cases you're talking 50-60 years of "legacy" (still running, still working, still updated) code, and replacing a system that has evolved for half a century is not an easy undertaking, at least not if you plan on getting it 100% right the first time.
This seems like an application area in desperate need of applied A.I.: Analyze a codebase and replicate it (for the first few iterations at least) in the new target language.
Isn't there research on this ? Or am I full of balonie ?
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#104Earlier 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.
Every large database vendor forbids public disclosure of benchmark results these days - ie Snowflake, you name it. Privately it's a different story obviously.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Under SQL Server’s SNAPSHOT transaction isolation level, writers don’t block readers. We use it in production with good results.
While the internal implementation details differ from Oracle, the end result seems quite similar in practice.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#106Earlier 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.
Haven’t worked with Oracle in over a decade, but SQL Server’s tooling is actually quite decent in that regard. You can attach the Visual Studio debugger to a T-SQL stored procedure, set breakpoints, step, inspect variables etc. There are rough edges, but it’s good enough to be useful.
Automated tests of T-SQL stored procedures are also possible. There are couple of ways you could do that, but in our case we just write “unit” tests in C# which call the procedures. This integrates nicely into Visual Studio’s Test Explorer, is debuggable etc. You can even step through a C# test, and then just “step into” T-SQL being called from there!
There are valid reasons for not putting business logic into stored procedures, but “not being a proper language” is probably not one of them, at least in the case of T-SQL. Then again, there are also reasons for using stored procedures. Everything is a tradeoff…
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#107My company (torgen.ai) is looking for senior Oracle devs to help customers re-platform.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 strai…
On the other hand, understanding coax termination is much easier than figuring out what 5G or Wifi6 is doing with radio waves.
Sure? But I think the point stands. And why would anyone think that a terminator would go bad until you’ve tried everything else and finally you swap them out and all of a sudden the network chatter stops and things go back to normal? It’s an experience thing and I worry that most of us are too abstracted from the underlying systems these days to properly understand them. It’s pretty common in my other world (info sec policy).
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, understanding coax termination is much easier than figuring out what 5G or Wifi6 is doing with radio waves.
Sure? But I think the point stands. And why would anyone think that a terminator would go bad until you’ve tried everything else and finally you swap them out and all of a sudden the network chatter stops and things go back to normal? It’s an experience thing and I worry that most of us are too abstracted from the underlying systems these days to properly understand them. It’s pretty common in my other world (info se…
Just saying that the abstraction tower has grown a lot higher since your days and the most common tech in use today is surprisingly complicated.
Re: Oracle engineers caused five days software outage at U.S. hospitals
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Damn I’m wondering now if that’s why we studied Java as our first programming language in Australia at uni for CS. Oracle have a relatively big presence here and there’s a comfortable “mates” system that runs the Australia (soft bribery).
I was at Uni in Australia well before Oracle bought Sun. Java was used quite extensively then too.
Interesting. I wish we would have started with C / C++ personally.