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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

#131

Oracle never really cared about the developer experience. Eventually that wears out whatever market lead a company might have. Oracle can be very fast and well setup but the tools to work with are not good and the general optimization now is not as needed with cheaper hardware and more horizontal systems. There are so many other options out there now. PostgreSQL is great to work with and is so good now that it just m…

Postgres is great, but sadly it's not really in contention for being the RDBMS leader right now: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms , but it is steadily climbing.

Look at the YOY change - if the trend continues Postgresql will be right up there in 3-4 years

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#132
post #2

Article fails to identify if the sales figures are limited to database or whether they include the enterprise apps (i.e., EBS/Fusion). Regardless - the quote "Does the cloud-related business grow quickly enough to offset any long-term weakness in new software licenses? To us the answer is yes" seems to indicate that this is all sales for ORCL. Oracle relying on cloud is pitting them against some more entrenched cloud…

Salesforce.com runs on Oracle DBs, is in fact the largest customer. Benioff was a SVP at Oracle before he founded SFDC.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#133

I disagree. Startups have always embraced Free software since I know of this field. What changes is when those startups become mature business, and they realize they don't need Oracle as much as "Mammoth" companies do. It is the reason a company that disrespect geeks has not a good future. When years ago I went to a geek convention and everybody had a mac, I instantly thought: Microsoft future is not good and bought…

Oracle doesn't care about the developer experience? Oracle doesn't care about startups? Disrespect geeks? Huh? Do you have any real justifications to these or are you just basing this on your perceptions? Why would Oracle continue driving developments in JAVA, MySQL, OpenSTACK, etc and many other open source projects if it wasn't after the developer community? And have you seen the latest Software in Silicon Cloud Development platform that’s free? https://swisdev.oracle.com

And did you know that Oracle has the Oracle Database Personal Edition which is designed to provide software developers a cost effective, yet full featured Oracle Database environment on which to develop, test and run custom or packaged applications?

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:product:0::NO:...

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#134
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ag…

Nothing about EC2 precludes it from offloading accountability from its clients to itself. Amazon operates infrastructure for the CIA. Consultants are plentiful and cheap. Amazon can provide handholding-as-a-Service just as well as Oracle. At some point, Amazon may invest more resources into its service business. But now it makes sense to grow its platform. That is the difference in Amazon vs Oracle model. Amazon is p…

Amazon doesn’t have any control of its IP, Oracle does. Public clouds are becoming commoditized just like a majority of x86 vendors and eventually they'll abandon the low margin business or be required to increase pricing. Not every organization is going to move to a public cloud and therefore the areas of real growth in cloud is private and hybrid, which Amazon doesn't do. What happens when your startup company grows to an Enterprise and you start having governance requirements that don't allow you to run in a public cloud? You can't go private with Amazon. Oracle cloud allows you to seamlessly move from private, hybrid to public cloud and back, providing cloud goers freedom of choice with different levels of security and integration.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#135
post #133

I disagree. Startups have always embraced Free software since I know of this field. What changes is when those startups become mature business, and they realize they don't need Oracle as much as "Mammoth" companies do. It is the reason a company that disrespect geeks has not a good future. When years ago I went to a geek convention and everybody had a mac, I instantly thought: Microsoft future is not good and bought…

Oracle doesn't care about the developer experience? Oracle doesn't care about startups? Disrespect geeks? Huh? Do you have any real justifications to these or are you just basing this on your perceptions? Why would Oracle continue driving developments in JAVA, MySQL, OpenSTACK, etc and many other open source projects if it wasn't after the developer community? And have you seen the latest Software in Silicon Cloud De…

Oracle just like Microsoft just aren't trusted by the community at large.

History tells us why. And there are good reasons:

[1] Oracle tells Open Document founders to leave the project

[2] Oracle takes over KSplice and stops providing it for free to competitors of Oracles Linux Distribution.

[3] Oracle suing to maintain the position that APIs are copyrightable.

---

[1] https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#136
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ag…

> 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.

My experience with [current] Oracle support and the ability to "call things in": (via the sort-of-usable support portal)

My org has paid millions for software and support on the Oracle products we run, and have "dedicated" support team ... it's worthless.

Dumb, uninformed 1st/2nd tier "engineers" who do not understand the products they are supporting, or basic tenets of system and application administration (https, sql, oel mgmt, etc), let alone understanding how their products integrate, or how to debug issues with those integrations.

It takes days to get a real response to a P1 ticket, and even if we've supplied all of the logs and information needed for the case, the first response we get is always canned "please supply xxxx logs" -- if we have an info level ticket, responses can take weeks even with escalation.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#137
post #133

I disagree. Startups have always embraced Free software since I know of this field. What changes is when those startups become mature business, and they realize they don't need Oracle as much as "Mammoth" companies do. It is the reason a company that disrespect geeks has not a good future. When years ago I went to a geek convention and everybody had a mac, I instantly thought: Microsoft future is not good and bought…

Oracle doesn't care about the developer experience? Oracle doesn't care about startups? Disrespect geeks? Huh? Do you have any real justifications to these or are you just basing this on your perceptions? Why would Oracle continue driving developments in JAVA, MySQL, OpenSTACK, etc and many other open source projects if it wasn't after the developer community? And have you seen the latest Software in Silicon Cloud De…

I think the MySQL strategy is something like this: Oracle knows MySQL is defective, so they promote it as THE open source database, in the hopes that serious customers will get frustrated and just buy a license for a real (Oracle) database.

Elsewhere on this thread, somebody posted a link to a DB use survey which showed PostgreSQL as the #4 DB, behind Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server. Can't let that leak out, though.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about EC2 precludes it from offloading accountability from its clients to itself. Amazon operates infrastructure for the CIA. Consultants are plentiful and cheap. Amazon can provide handholding-as-a-Service just as well as Oracle. At some point, Amazon may invest more resources into its service business. But now it makes sense to grow its platform. That is the difference in Amazon vs Oracle model. Amazon is p…

nice writing and all, but sir you have no first hand clue about corporations. not everybody is using new cool toys of the day as backbone of their whole company. For example i work at the bank, the whole core banking package is basically app build in pl/sql on top of oracle db. i like cool new technologies, but to even think they would run in next 20 years anything else than their super-cluster is funny and ridiculou…

You could do with toning down the personal attacks. "no clue", "stupid" - these do nothing to add to the conversation.

Your anecdotal experience doesn't necessarily translate to all corporations.

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres is great, but sadly it's not really in contention for being the RDBMS leader right now: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms , but it is steadily climbing.

Look at the YOY change - if the trend continues Postgresql will be right up there in 3-4 years

Consider this graph: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/relational+dbms

Re: Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

#140
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much legacy still runs on it. I've seen many projects at the top of very very large companies (think telcos) that still use Oracle DB. The cost to upgrade these systems with full end to end testing is not worth the investment. Every system I've seen that has this setup is extremely archaic in every way. We're talking java applets in the browser to show a form where you choose options that compose a query in the ba…

> Seems like once you work there you're part of the forever cult of Ellison. Not just working at Oracle. Once Oracle bought Sun our Oracle DBAs started relentlessly agitating for us to buy SPARC servers because they were now the best, obviously, and a failure to use them meant we clearly were doing it wrong.

I can understand why. They specialize in a very niche product and their entire worth to the tech industry is based on the adoption of that product. I get it, but I dont like it.
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