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

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 152 posts

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#101

Post by sbuttgereit »

RobotToaster wrote: post #75
icedchai wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you're using an Oracle database, you are probably using proprietary Oracle features, SQL syntax, client libraries, etc. The first chance you get might be a while. I once worked on a project porting an app from Oracle to another commercial DB. When Oracle is deeply embedded in your applications, it's easier said than done.

I'm surprised there aren't entire businesses based around selling compatibility layers or something.

EnterpriseDB does exactly this on top of PostgreSQL and has done so for a long time. Early on, their compatibility layer was their USP.

https://www.enterprisedb.com/docs/epas/latest/fundamentals/e...

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#102

Post by used2workthere »

Zigurd wrote: post #81
used2workthere wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used to work there due to acquihire (throwaway acct since regular can out me). Engineers were walked through how to interact with clients; don’t say this or that because of laws and treaties. But also to listen for customer language that suggests a customer is cheating Oracle; let Oracle know and they will send the lawyers. It was a very paranoia driven environment.

Many many years ago I was working on making a phone OS (no not that one, this was for VoIP handsets, no not Cisco's) where we built an app suite on a Java VM. We wanted to use a Sun VM, I forget the acronym, that was bigger than J2ME but smaller than SE for which Sun, as far as we could tell, had no actual customers. You'd think they would be happy to have customer interest, but we got a total horseshit runaround on…

I only stayed long enough to migrate the service to Oracle infrastructure. Looks like they still offer it but when I left work was underway to roadmap decoupling what was then a OOP heavy Java monolith. I want to say primarily to move the UI/UX to Oracles internal standards and tech stack for such, but this was 2015; uuuuh I forget man.

My anecdote was based on interactions with sales, product, and senior engineering professionals. Internal culture seemed very forward thinking; work from home/anywhere Oracle had a business presence. Solid benefits, new parent leave, yoga/that kind of thing stipends. Though that may have been due to contractual obligation of the aquihire, and applied to my team only at that time. :shrug: The “problems” I saw were very much “first world problems”

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#103

Post by kragen »

konschubert wrote: post #83
geodel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which is efficient modern technology taking its place?

For oracle DB, it’s mostly Postgres I guess?

postgres is adequately efficient technology from last millennium, but at the level of execution efficiency it's pretty much the same as oracle, maybe a bit worse

more recent systems like impala, spark, kafka, cassandra, leveldb, influxdb, rocksdb, duckdb, monetdb, lmdb, sqlite, parquet, hbase, etc., are a lot more efficient at execution efficiency, though in many cases that's only 'up to such-and-such a scale' or 'above such-and-such a scale' or 'for such-and-such use cases'. there's a perhaps too comprehensive overview of the scene at https://github.com/newTendermint/awesome-bigdata

but the big business inefficiency with oracle is not technical, it's the human problem of not having control over your core business processes or the ability to continue carrying them out if, when oracle says 'jump', you say anything but 'how high?'

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#104

Post by kragen »

le-mark wrote: post #93
pantulis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing that thread out!

I think the missing piece from that exchange is the reality that a lot of surviving, legacy, mission critical applications is that they are generally internal to large companies and have grown over decades to encapsulate business processes for entire industries. Consider an application that has been under active development for 30-40 years by 10-100 developers. The cost to rewrite is staggering, and the risk of failu…

i agree with that point and i would add a link to your comment if i could still add to that thread

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#105

Post by afandian »

everfrustrated wrote: post #97
Takennickname wrote: post #30

Got an email from oracle recently that said (paraphrased): "We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly."

Docker also does this too for their Desktop product. If any dev downloads and installs it within your org expect an email from them to check up on your licensing.

Maybe this is what it takes to put paid to return-to-office?

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#106

Post by icedchai »

le-mark wrote: post #67
walrus01 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that the way to do this would be to set up realtime replication from the origin oracle DB to a db with the same schema running on something much more 'normal' such as mariadb, and then set up client applications and libraries and queries to the newly replicated db in a read only mode. And then setting up test client application/libraries for write mode to a copy of the replicated db and verify everythin…

> I would think that the way to do this would be to The devil as always Is in the details. The real problem comes With stored procedures. Maybe this is why I shy away from their used to this day. The last migration I did to Postgres wasn’t too bad; the app had only a few basic stored procedures.

Many legacy apps use tons of them. In the late 90's there was a style of application development where all DB access went through stored procedures. I find PL/SQL to be terrible.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#107

Post by barryrandall »

Takennickname wrote: post #30

Got an email from oracle recently that said (paraphrased): "We saw downloads for virtual box from your IP address but no licenses for your organization. Please let us know when is a suitable time to meet to explain the benefits of being licensed correctly."

Looks like someone at Oracle discovered "customer intent" data.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#108

Post by 7thaccount »

zaphar wrote: post #39
codeslave13 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just dont go SAP about as bad as oracle haveing worked in both shops.

I have no experience with SAP. But I've heard that you could just substitute SAP for Oracle in the above and it would be just as true.

My father worked on a multi year project to replace their darling (but very old mainframe system) with SAP. Apparently it's just awful and basically everything required a custom and tons of SAP consultants. By the time you're done, you had to reimplement the entire system on top of SAP with a ton of workarounds. That was his experience anyway.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#109

Post by mschuster91 »

seniorThrowaway wrote: post #73
neilv wrote: post #33

> A user of Oracle since the 1980s, We all know about Resume-Driven Development and hopping to another company every 18 months, incidentally avoiding the consequences. But a very different model is when people are entrenched in a shop where not only is there big legacy investment/lock-in that would be hard/prohibitive for the company to shed, but also the personnel's familiarity with the legacy setup gives job securi…

For Oracle DB there are a number of viable, well built and active open source alternatives like Postgres, is there any real alternative to Active Directory? I've long considered AD to be microsoft's true killer app, especially for very large enterprises.

Depends if you're masochist enough to run Samba. It can deal with the lower stack side pretty well, but the administration UI options available all pale in comparison to native Microsoft.

In any case many are shifting towards not running AD any more and instead use JAMF and similar solutions. Less attack risk (because let's face it, it's really really easy to shoot yourself into the foot with AD), and more buzzwords for the buzzword-happy C suite.

Re: 'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

#110

Post by inemesitaffia »

zaphar wrote: post #17

Look, if you are already in business with Oracle then you have my condolences. But if you aren't in business with them then there is absolutely no world where you should ever under any circumstances consider getting into business with them. Nothing their database does can't be done with a different database. Even paying for a proprietary database can be done with a different party than Oracle. Do not, I repeat, do no…

>Nothing

Thier transactions and rollbacks and logging actually work

Post reply on HN