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

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

#121

Post by kichimi » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:25 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #100

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does anyone in IT management not know that Oracle is poison? That blows my mind. I encountered two Oracle audits within 7ish years in the industry, and heard about others. If anyone goes to MIS school, there should probably be a contracts day somewhere in that curriculum, and "don't use Oracle" should be the first bullet point. Maybe in the 80s and 90s without the internet it might be more hush-hush. But this is…

postgres dates from 01974, it used to be called ingres, so it has 50 years of engineering, not 30. the 'post' is from when they added 'object-oriented' features to make it 'post-relational' as i understand it, oracle mostly sells to executives above it management, but there are also lots of executives in it management who aren't as concerned about the survival of their company as they are their own careers. it's hard…

01974?

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

#122

Post by cyberax » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:26 PM UTC

geodel wrote: post #69

konschubert wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why it’s so important that competition is possible in a market. Such that legacy players with inefficient legacy technologies can be driven out of the market.

And which is efficient modern technology taking its place?

Oracle was a really solid choice 30 years ago, when 1Tb was an unheard-of database size. Back then, its query optimizer and a couple of strategic hints could make a huge difference in the runtime so that a report could be produced in minutes instead of hours.

These days? You can buy a server with 1Tb of RAM, for the price of one Oracle license. Any Open Source database will work just as well as Oracle on these kinds of datasets.

And if you have bigger datasets, then they are likely not that suitable for RDBMS anyway.

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

#123

Post by cyberax » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:29 PM UTC

falcor84 wrote: post #29

toomuchtodo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Amazon had a hard time migrating. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/amazon-databas... https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21258127 (Edit: 2019)

Do you happen to know when that took place? I can't seem to find any dates on that page

It started in the early 2010-s. First, relational databases were discouraged for new projects, then some projects started migrating from RDBMS to DynamoDB (or to the special internal NoSQL storage systems). The final push to move off Oracle (and RDBMS in general) started around 2016.

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

#124

Post by kragen » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:35 PM UTC

cyberax wrote: post #122

geodel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which is efficient modern technology taking its place?

Oracle was a really solid choice 30 years ago, when 1Tb was an unheard-of database size. Back then, its query optimizer and a couple of strategic hints could make a huge difference in the runtime so that a report could be produced in minutes instead of hours. These days? You can buy a server with 1Tb of RAM, for the price of one Oracle license. Any Open Source database will work just as well as Oracle on these kinds…

i agree that oracle was a solid choice 30 years ago, though they were already notorious for taking advantage of their customers

also postgres's query optimizer has gotten a lot better

i wouldn't say any open source database. it depends on your index. there are recondite but not unreasonable queries for which mariadb and sqlite still produce pathologically poor query plans which won't complete in a reasonable time even with all the data in ram. and a few years ago i had postgres totally fall over on important queries because we'd forgotten to add an index, and it took us days to figure it out because we were using amazon's outsourced postgres thing and didn't know how to admin it

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

#125

Post by rstuart4133 » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

zaphar wrote: post #44

whiterknight wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is there such a big disconnect between HN opinion on Oracle and business use? Is it maybe the least bad of all the bad options? Does it cover some edge cases which the obvious FOSS solutions don’t?

I honestly don't know. I don't know how they stay in business since every developer I've ever met had a bordering on irrational hatred of them. The only people I've met who like them were all Oracle consultants of some sort and not what I would call developers. When I've been forced to use an Oracle database it was because the company had a contract with Oracle and didn't want to allow any other database to be used.…

> I don't know how they stay in business since every developer I've ever met had a bordering on irrational hatred of them.

I'm sure you know the answer. Oracle doesn't sell to developers. They sell to the management of non-tech companies whose upper echelons are staffed by people with expertise whatever they do, which might be selling dresses or making plastic pipes. For what it's with SAP uses exactly the same technique.

For something truly difficult to explain, try Google replacing Oracle with SAP. https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-migrates-from-oracle-fi...

Years ago when I invoiced Google they asked me to enter the invoice into their portal. (Generally, transcribing a vendors invoice into your accounting systems is something you pay your own employees to do of course, but big companies know how to apply the screws.) I remember that web form. It proudly said is was created by a summer of code student. It was ugly, it was concise, it was straightforward, and it just worked first go. Then Google moved to SAP, and used SAP's Aruba service to do the same thing. Aruba is layer upon layer of poor design, outages and bugs. Now, if a Google employee sends you an purchase they often offer to "get it into the system" for you. The reason is Aruba is almost unusable, so it they need whatever service is being offered badly enough they shepherd it through.

I can only guess, but my explanation is assume SAP sold the system to Google's accounting department. Somehow, SAP's sales found a way to bypass the ocean of expertise inside one of the greatest software engineering companies on the planet and sell the system to a pocket of people who had no idea about what they were buying. Colour me impressed with SAP sales.

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

#126

Post by Perepiska » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

mayoff wrote: post #6

A few years ago, my then-employer (a smallish company, < 150 employees) had to deal with an Oracle compliance audit. I was shocked at the time to learn that there are companies (like Palisade Compliance mentioned in this article) that specialize in Oracle license compliance. We made it through just fine (in fact I believe we managed to get a small refund!), but having been through that (though not in any way directly…

I once worked for a vendor company that sold a workstation: a computer with Linux and full-fledged Oracle server with the appropriate license and a small application written in PL/SQL.

When I suggested rewriting everything in Python, the CEO explained that on the client side, this solution was bought by MBA graduates who only knew Oracle, and everything else would be suspicious to them.

As a result, clients bought a cheaper solution from competitors - Windows and a small application written in C++.

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

#127

Post by kragen » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

kichimi wrote: post #121

kragen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

postgres dates from 01974, it used to be called ingres, so it has 50 years of engineering, not 30. the 'post' is from when they added 'object-oriented' features to make it 'post-relational' as i understand it, oracle mostly sells to executives above it management, but there are also lots of executives in it management who aren't as concerned about the survival of their company as they are their own careers. it's hard…

01974?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingres_(database)#History

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

#128

Post by cyberax » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:40 PM UTC

lowercased wrote: post #66

Not Oracle related, but ... in the late 90s, I was at a company that was doing web stuff - number of cgi/perl projects, but they'd started doing ASP as well in 98. Had a couple clients really scale up - one client had 80 servers load balanced, all running Windows NT. A friendly MS rep stopped by because the client had been getting so much press for their ecommerce work (which we were doing) and went... "oh wow, you h…

Windows NT (just like Oracle) simply had a setting in the control panel for the number of connections allowed. You were supposed to buy licenses for all of them, but in practice nobody seriously followed that. Until they got audited by the BSA (Business Software Alliance).

To be fair, though, Microsoft typically was willing to work with companies and negotiate volume discounts. They were not interested in immediate shakedowns (like Oracle), but preferred building long-term relationships.

I guess this is why Microsoft is respected, while Oracle is despised.

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

#129

Post by cyberax » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:45 PM UTC

nlh wrote: post #91

Having gone through an IRS audit (spoiler alert: I do not recommend.), I can't imagine anyone willingly signing any sort of contract with a private company that allows them to treat you the same way.

Technically, if you buy anything in volume from Microsoft, they have the right to audit you: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/learn-more/complia...

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

#130

Post by zaphar » Wed, Mar 06, 2024, 9:48 PM UTC

mianos wrote: post #115

zaphar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They work just fine on Postgres and MS SQL too.

Not in MySQL. DDL is not transacted last time I looked Postgres is a great choice over Oracle these days though

Yeah, well MySQL or Oracle aren't the only database choices you have. And those two aren't even a choice between Oracle and something else. Both are Oracle the company properties now. Unless you meant MariaDB or something.