321–330 of 344 posts
Is there anyone that's not on Oracle's payroll that sides with them on this case?
Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner…
Basically, instead of innovating, or as the hip kids nowadays say, "pivoting", they just want to make easy money with stupid copyright claims and harmful tactics. I find this strategy extremely toxic and malicious. Google may do a lot of stupid things, and people often make fun of their "don't be evil" motto, but let's be honest, the shit Oracle keeps pulling here over and over is the real definition of evil. It's pu…
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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.
Use case for yesterday:
- create a user and it works, create a default access right for this user for one of our most important service;
- if this doesn't work, cancel everything.
Now I had the creation of user working, but the creation of the access right had some problems unrelated to the code.
Without a transaction, this bugs led to 100 of user accounts created without a default right access, and we had to clean it up after ward.
With a transaction, this bug would have not affected us in any way.
Transaction are safety net for data corruption. When you are using mongo, you have to manually do that logic again, and again and again.
In my experience, most mongo coders don't do it, and their DB is riddle with duplicates, incomplete inserts and such. Transactions give it to you, for free.
There are many other wonderful things about transaction:
- free manual rollback. Even when you don't have an error, reverting an operation is one line of code. Even if it affects many tables. Doing that with mongo or redis is terrible.
- free race condition handling. This one is huge because race condition are very, very hard to deal with. E.G: you want to limit the number of comment per day for untrusted users. You just add the comment, THEN check if you have more comments that acceptable, and if yes, roll it back. This way if your system if flooded with comments, you never have one slipping through.
- free ability to split your process in small units. You can create subtransaction inside transactions, and just say you want to rollback one but accept the other part. This give you huge granularity on your error handling.
Basically you get precise, clean, strong and easy reliability for close to nothing.
As soon has you have many untrusted users using your system, it becomes a fantastic asset.
I hope google just abandons java altogether if this is gonna continue.
There are only a few details about this, but some googlers are working on Fuchsia, a new OS for constrained devices, with apps written with Flutter.
Flutter can also be used to write Android apps by embedding its own runtime in the apps. In both cases, apps are written in Dart.
This would be a huge transition though ... it means rewriting the apps from scratch in another language with a completely different tooling.
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One wonders how much the taint of Java factored into the decision to invent Go.
My impression is that the Go team had two targets, both based on languages in common use at Google: C++ programmers, and programmers using languages like Python who wanted more type safety but didn't want to use a language with a massive ecosystem.
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No. Everything that gets linked to GPL has to be GPL.
That's not true. OpenJDK is licensed under the GPL v2 with the Classpath Exception.
Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner…
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/oracl...
> essentially stopping development work on anything that is not directly tied to revenue generation
Oracle is set to repeat the trajectory of SCO. Their primary product (the Oracle DB engine) is being displaced by the NoSQL and things like Postgres. The "next generation" of developers equals SQL engines with "old and bad", and when forced, it ends up with Postgres anyway. Oracle used to survive in significant part by the support of the "database administrators" class. This layer of support is also becoming thinner…
While in the SV start-up world it may seem like NoSQL is taking over, the Enterprise database market is massive, and replacing the relational databases behind corporate ERP systems with NoSQL based solutions, (to the extent that is even possible/wise), will be a long time coming.
Oracle has a giant footprint in a huge number of organizations across multiple industries. Love them or hate them, (and right now there is good reason to hate then), they are not going away anytime soon, and calling them "irrelevant in the tech landscape" seems premature/myopic given their massive install base and influence in the corporate/enterprise IT space.
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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?
Provide enterprise level support. That is, they provide 24x7 support with technicians who can troubleshoot problems with the database or provide basic indexing support, etc. They also will write specific patches for specific customers as needed.
It also has more features than PostgreSQL (more indexing options, custom SQL extensions, a better optimizer), is more stable, and has a lot more developers working full time on it.
PostgreSQL is good, no doubt, and GAFA have shown that you can take an open source DB and throw engineers at it to make it handle ridiculous scale. But what if you don't have those engineers to throw at the problem and constantly patch/update the DB? Finding people qualified is going to be both hard and expensive. An average MySQL DBA can easily fetch $200 an hour for routine work, and over $400 an hour for emergencies (my numbers are about 4 years old; it's probably gone up), and never be out of work or job offers. I don't imagine a good PostgreSQL admin is worth any less.
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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…
That is a very good article! I bookmarked it in 2013 for that reason. :) 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 frien…
Yes, they would have tracked it down and eventually recovered all or most of the money, but at significant cost.
Had the issue never occurred due to constraints of the system not allowing it to, time and money would have been saved.
Allowing a gap between the error condition and its remediation is an opportunity for exploit.