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Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

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Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#21
post #3

Is it surprising startups no longer buy as many Oracle licenses as they did in the 90's?

It's hard to think of a situation where a new startup would use Oracle; it's a massive cost compared to alternatives and while it does offer some advantages over other DB choices those advantages are not very compelling for most uses.

For example, we did some rough testing recently and found that Oracle was faster for report generation than MSSQL but we can double the processing power assigned to the MSQQL to get equivalent performance for a fraction of the cost of Oracle licensing.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#22

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries. I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.

The handful of companies that I've dealt with using Oracle bought into a product that Oracle sells (like payroll) that runs on an Oracle database (obviously). Oracle convinces them to pay for way more than they need for that application and in-house development ends up being done using Oracle rather than MySQL, SQL Server, etc...

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. Their existing massive install base, aggressive salesforce, and being perceived as a "safe" choice by customers is a strong position to be in.

That, and enterprise-grade product support is often a requirement.

This. Who is going to sign a Service Level Agreement for your postgres install? Support contracts are super important for enterprise.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#25

My reaction to this article: Mwahahaha. Although surprised it is Cassandra, and not mysql thats taking the market share. Is there some technical reason for this? I'm not intimate with what Cassandra offers.

Cassandra is a distributed database that easily scales more or less to infinity. As you add more nodes to a cluster, it automatically redistributes data throughout the cluster. It "just works", and that's pretty exciting. So Cassandra at the moment seems to be enjoying a bit of the hype cycle that MongoDB enjoyed 5 or 6 years ago. It's the thing that everyone wants to try out and get onto their resume at the moment.

However, like all "NoSQL" databases, the trade-offs come with the usual severe limitations (e.g. no joins, no foreign keys, no transactions in the usual sense of the term, eventual consistency, etc). Curious people diving into Cassandra (or most NoSQL databases for that matter) typically have zero understanding of these trade-offs at first, and think that they will be easier to work with. It isn't, and it isn't supposed to be. It's harder to work with, and has fewer features, because that's the trade-off you're making for scalability. There's little reason to use it if you don't need to scale like that.

So, curiosity and RDD ("resume-driven development") aside, I don't think there are many situations in which one would be choosing from Cassandra or MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL. If you are working with multiple terabytes or more of data, then there is seldom a good reason to consider a relational database. If you are working with less than a terabyte of data, then there is seldom a good reason to consider anything OTHER than a relational database. I just don't see much overlap in which these technologies seriously compete against each other.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and enterprise-grade product support is often a requirement.

This. Who is going to sign a Service Level Agreement for your postgres install? Support contracts are super important for enterprise.

EnterpriseDB?

http://www.enterprisedb.com/ba/license-support-services-v3-0

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#28
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A number of reasons that form an important lesson in sales at the enterprise level: 1. Oracle does provide value. They have clustering and high-availability offerings that Postgres just can't touch, and those come with service and support personnel as part of the contract. A one-stop solution is a powerful sales pitch. 2. They have a massive existing install base within the Fortune 500, which spend amounts of money t…

> Companies value safety over risk Yes. In the case of a database, "safety" is safety from downtime, data loss, data theft. So companies want a database that is fault tolerant and secure. > Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike. Banks and healthcare providers strike me as f…

6 years of AT&T under my belt,

Enterprise operates differently. They don't care about what postgres or EC2 or whatever can do, it's all about not doing anything that someone can point a finger at you for later. Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. Also, companies that supply software to corps also supply something that's probably more valuable than the software itself. Support & Maintenance agreements. The fact that if anything goes wrong they can call up a phone number and immediately have a consultant($200+/hr) show up at the corp's location and troubleshoot the problem is a lot of accountability they don't have to directly absorb. There's also PCI compliance and just general fear of new things.

Accountability/blame is the name of the game. You want that value for yourself to be zero unless you get privileged info that the project has succeeded before everyone else finds out, in which case you then scramble to get your name on any documents or email chains related to said project so you can claim it was all due to your planning & decision-making.

I've seen this happen several times and was personally burned hard by people I thought were my friends back in 2006. I'm still bitter about it. I will not let that happen to me again. And I know it happened because I didn't properly document what I was doing and why. Or maybe, I just shouldn't have done it at all and just sit back and watch everyone else panic and burn.... whatever. It was my first job out of college, I was naive.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#29

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries. I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.

They sell solutions to business problems at the CEO/COO/CFO level. The database as outrageous as it is, is just a sideshow.

I think New York spent something like $40M for a general ledger system. There is ridiculous amounts of money in these projects.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#30
post #11

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries. I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.

A number of reasons that form an important lesson in sales at the enterprise level: 1. Oracle does provide value. They have clustering and high-availability offerings that Postgres just can't touch, and those come with service and support personnel as part of the contract. A one-stop solution is a powerful sales pitch. 2. They have a massive existing install base within the Fortune 500, which spend amounts of money t…

Exactly right. They have a really good product with great reputation, a ton of support resources and skill availability. Besides the features like RAC, RAT, Various security stuff (redaction, encryption etc) that enterprise customers demand are not in any open source database I know of.
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