Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

Honestly (having been through plenty of meetings where this type of stuff happens) it's because Oracle has someone out there spreading the word to The decision makers. The Oracle sales team isn't converting developers, they're in the ear of the person who signs the check.

Nobody is out there on the Postgres side doing the same, so that decision maker doesn't even know who they are. Then when someone suggests pgsql for something, the first question is, "Where do we get support?" Everyone then looks around the room and starts searching the web for support.

There is no question if and who will support you with Oracle (which is why I will never choose them).

I think you're right, particularly about the apps – if you don't work at a large shop it's easy to forget how many businesses run the various financial apps which Oracle sells, and such apps tend to be used by senior management so e.g. the CFO is voting against changes unless there's a really good justification. Once you've got it in house, the argument will be that you don't want to have to hire experts for more than one database, which is how some people end up running a normal web app on Oracle because it's the only supported HA/backup/etc. option offered by the central IT group.

At one previous employer, we had to deal with several hours of downtime daily because they kept not getting the $$$$ budget needed for Oracle's online backup product and so it went down for how ever long it took to write data out to a poorly configured tape backup. Trying to use MySQL or Postgres happened by necessity but was heavily FUDed over what might happen and all of the (internal) users had just been trained that the systems weren't available before 7:30 AM.

If your operations are tied in some way to government, it might be required that software you are using have legally recognizable developer or owner, officially certified by competent government structures (e.g. in terms of being secure) and/or has someone who is contractually obliged to help you resolve any issues you might face while using it.

I would assume Oracle has a very strong presences in Russia in those terms. Unlike Postgres until Postgres Pro.

More details (in Russian): http://obartunov.livejournal.com/181484.html

Oracle is beginning to find they are in trouble. Here's a small example: I'm hearing from a fairly reliable source that quite a few large Australian banks are replacing Oracle (my source didn't say with what). They are citing the enormous cost of the licenses, along with difficulty getting adequate support without paying a fortune. My contact himself is in upper management of a large corporation and Oracle screwed him on licensing, forcing him to pay a huge amount of money from his budget that he badly needed to spend on other projects. This delayed these projects by about 3 months, and put a bit of pressure on the area of the business he oversaw. He's also investigating the best way of quietly getting rid of Oracle as fast as possible. That will take some time, but he's at the point of rejecting any new solutions that require Oracle products.

I'm not at all surprised. Medium sized businesses used to use Oracle due to perceived reliability and features, however there have been a number of things that are making them reconsider:

* A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don't need.

* difficulty in getting support - Oracle are notorious for not responding in a timely fashion to tickets, and a willingness by the CSO to completely ignore serious security flaws.

I experienced this myself four years ago when my boss put me in charge of a clear Unicode bug in their OLEDB driver - the bug had been open for 2 years and by the time I left a year later Oracle had almost wilfully ignored everything we wrote, even ignoring a program we built in .NET that showed the problem. Throughout the ticket we dealt with something like 4 support people, each of whom didn't understand Unicode and who needed a basic backgrounder on how UTF8 works.

* license costs are ridiculous, and frankly not worth it.

* it can often be hard to find people who can troubleshoot performance issues. Even highly skilled people face a black box when they work on improving query performance as the CBO is largely a black box that can change from version to version. Without a clear explanation of how the CBO actually makes decisions it's often a bit of a crapshoot when tuning queries.

* Oracle DBAs are very expensive, compared to how much you can pay an equivalent skilled DBA who knows Postgres or even SQL Server.

* there are few features most medium sized businesses need that can't be done in Postgres.