311–320 of 344 posts
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> They took not just the signatures but their semantic meaning What's the difference between the signature of an API and the semantic meaning?
If you write a function int makeHash(int) which computes a trapdoor function, and I write a function int makeHash(int) which prepares breakfast and returns a status code, then they have the same signature but different semantic meaning.
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That's true, but the availability of OpenJDK (which, after all, Google have now switched to) weakens Oracle's argument on the "Effect on the market" factor.
But OpenJDK is GPL. If Google licensed their Android Java as GPL, I guess they'd be OK. However, Google's Java is NOT GPL.
They couldn't change the license
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PostgresQL is an RDBMS and has increasingly been demonstrated as able to hold it's own against closed source rivals. I think the OPs tossing NOSQL in there was poor form, and I think "SQL engines" could be replaced with DBAs. The world still needs RDBMS and we desperately need people who understand them from an engineering perspective. But as an average app developer, I can scale my product to serve hundreds of thous…
What can Oracle do that Postgres can't, then? Can Oracle function with less RAM than Postgres?
Warning: conspiracy theories ahead - I have a suspicion that the biggest reason is so that their field agents (i.e. oracle-friendly DBAs : ) out in the field can always find some reason to choose Oracle over anything else.
Also: and this is based on once working with a Oracle shop and also listening to Microsoft guys: licenses fees can be a blessing in disguise, they aren't going to pay them anyways, their customers will and they will add 15%
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Those are very damning accusations. Care to give some examples?
I think Google's quiet transformation from a search company to a data company that is trying to learn everything about everyone is the prime example. Google buzz was also one of the early moves that showed this, opting everyone who uses gmail into a social network was pretty evil if you ask me.
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The developers moved to MariaDB, which is what everyone uses nowadays anyway rather than MySQL.
Facebook, YouTube and Google are still massive users of MySQL. And MySQL development is moving along (admittedly after not much for a few years). I doubt MariaDB really figures compared to MySQL in industry use, or new installs.
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Those are very damning accusations. Care to give some examples?
I think Google's quiet transformation from a search company to a data company that is trying to learn everything about everyone is the prime example. Google buzz was also one of the early moves that showed this, opting everyone who uses gmail into a social network was pretty evil if you ask me.
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So - I'm definitely not willing to go as far as the GP was with their statement, but Oracle's database technology is pretty amazing. I love postgres, Spark, NoSQL, etc. and think the progress they have made is amazing, but Oracle's database from a raw featureset is incredible. - Shared-something database clustering - true scale-out database clustering without writing sharding logic into your application, worrying abo…
Great comment, thanks for the details on the specific tech - this is rarely captured in the regular "just replace Oracle with PGSQL" threads on HN. I think you can add to this the fact that Oracle has been hardening the platform and building/fixing edge cases for 30 years. This goes a long way to preventing procurement departments from moving away from the "no-one got fired for buying " model. I heard a crazy stat th…
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> The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad" I think that what you mean is: - they don't understand the relational model - they don't understand the tradeoffs of ACID vs BASE - they never bothered to actually learn SQL - they *think* that they have "big data" Don't get me wrong - there are compelling use cases for, and decent products for, every class of non-relational database. But the…
To be fair, most of the developers raving about ACID I have met have had trouble naming other valid use cases requiring full ACID besides the "transferring money from an account to other" that nearly every course and school uses. The thing is, most of the applications just don't need that kind of guarantees, if they can at least detect (when using BASE) when something went wrong.
For instance, "C as in ACID" enables a CEO to say things like "the number of records in the personnel database should be N, the actual number of people I have hired." Or "number of cars produced should be less than or equal to the number of engines purchased." Or "at the end of the data analytics run, there should be a single summary object for each region, containing accurate statistics of sales figures." Or "every Bitcoin transfer that has been executed should be reflected in the corresponding users' wallets." In general, C as in ACID encompasses any kind of property that can be expressed over collections of records, where these properties are application-specific, user-defined, and checkable functions over total system state.
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To be fair, most of the developers raving about ACID I have met have had trouble naming other valid use cases requiring full ACID besides the "transferring money from an account to other" that nearly every course and school uses. The thing is, most of the applications just don't need that kind of guarantees, if they can at least detect (when using BASE) when something went wrong.
You might want to read this article: http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/03/23/consistency-alphabe... For instance, "C as in ACID" enables a CEO to say things like "the number of records in the personnel database should be N, the actual number of people I have hired." Or "number of cars produced should be less than or equal to the number of engines purchased." Or "at the end of the data analytics run, there should be…
The thing just is... A CEO doesn't really care whether there are 1500 or 1502 workers. Some idiot drops one engine on the assembly floor breaking it. Accurate statistics is an oxymoron. The bitcoin transfers are reliable (mathematically proven even), but does it matter if your wallet shows a wrong number in the UI for a while? I had a good friend go to ATM on a Friday night and see that his current balance was 2.4 billion euros. Next morning it was corrected, and nothing really bad happened.
For the business it is more important to find the (very rare) screw-ups and correct them. You don't really have to do it in real-time either. A 1960s style batch job is just fine.
The reason for previous is that the full ACID model system will fail with the same starting values. The difference is that it tells that end user something like "uh-oh, something went wrong and we can't process your transfer or whatever" (common with banking applications) when eventually consistent model allows the process to continue, and the screw-up must be handled at later stage. From the end user's point of view the ACID version is usually much worse.
The entire software industry should be boycotting Oracle over this case. If they win it will ruin software development in the US.