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Oracle’s Cloudy Future

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Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#41

Post by gjkood »

GlennS wrote: post #38
gizmodo59 wrote: post #11

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X be…

I'd say MS SQL is better than not that bad. It's an excellent product. One of Microsoft's best. It's generally comparable to PostgreSQL (also an excellent piece of software), and has a few advantages over that which may make it worth the extra cost to a business (Management Studio, Reporting Services and clustering).

I wonder how much it has deviated from its original ancestor, Sybase SQL Server/TransactSQL? Do they still have anything in common?

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#42

Post by freyr »

Earlier this week, Oracle had their OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Thousands of badge-wearing attendees swarmed the city and signs plastered all over declared Oracle "The fastest-growing cloud company."

But even the Oracle conference attendees weren't buying it. In a live audience poll held during the live keynote, they voted that Oracle would be unlikely to meet it's cloud goals, and challenged the company's "fastest-growing" claim, giving the title to Amazon instead.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/oracle_openworld1/

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#43

Post by ewams »

gizmodo59 wrote: post #11

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X be…

Keep in mind that Oracle is not just a database company. They have many server and storage products, CRM, ERM, analytics, hosting, "engineered systems", ticketing, etc. etc.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#44

Post by rb808 »

gizmodo59 wrote: post #11

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X be…

We use Oracle. When starting a new project you are told to use Oracle because that is strategic plan of the company. There are teams of Oracle specialists in house that assist us. There are Sybase, SQL Server apps around but would ideally be migrated.

I think its probably time to move off to a free open source platform like PostGres, esp for non critical apps.

Don't underestimate the power of corporate support. I had a problem with IBM DB2 in a previous job - to diagnose IBM went out and bought an exact copy of our hardware, installed the exact copy of our build and ran automated queries to match our load and recreated the problem. You don't get that support from stackoverflow.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#45

Post by gaius »

gjkood wrote: post #41
GlennS wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say MS SQL is better than not that bad. It's an excellent product. One of Microsoft's best. It's generally comparable to PostgreSQL (also an excellent piece of software), and has a few advantages over that which may make it worth the extra cost to a business (Management Studio, Reporting Services and clustering).

I wonder how much it has deviated from its original ancestor, Sybase SQL Server/TransactSQL? Do they still have anything in common?

No, as of SQL Server either 6.5 or 7, I can't remember which, it was a ground up re-write. You can do cool stuff if you're Windows-native rather than a port from Unix, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/a/5284537/447514

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#46

Post by joshyeager »

gjkood wrote: post #41
GlennS wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say MS SQL is better than not that bad. It's an excellent product. One of Microsoft's best. It's generally comparable to PostgreSQL (also an excellent piece of software), and has a few advantages over that which may make it worth the extra cost to a business (Management Studio, Reporting Services and clustering).

I wonder how much it has deviated from its original ancestor, Sybase SQL Server/TransactSQL? Do they still have anything in common?

I started with SQL Server 7, which was soon after the fork from Sybase.

The current versions still have the same syntax and core features. Performance, replication, features, and tools are all vastly improved. But it still feels like the same product.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#47

Post by gaius »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #27

> Software Development Laboratories implemented it and called it Oracle, and in 1979 sold it to the CIA... I've long suspected that Oracle's success was due to becoming the de facto RDBMS for any and all government TLA's. I think this is part of Ellison's legendary arrogance. He knows he has the US government by the short hairs when it comes to IT. I think it also ties well with Sun CEO Scott McNealy's famous, "You h…

That's not exactly how it happened - Oracle got the CIA as a customer specifically because doing so would let them skip the queue for a new mainframe, for which there was a waiting list. It was what kids these days would call a "growth hack".

The original "Oracle" was a scheme for storing data on mylar strips, getting into database game was what kids these days would call a "pivot".

(Source: Larry Ellison's bio).

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#48

Post by theandrewbailey »

gaius wrote: post #40

However, there were two big limitations with hierarchical databases: first, relationships were pre-determined; what was a parent and what was a child was a decision made before any data was actually entered Well, yes and no. IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing, which is a kind of thing you do in engineering to keep track of all the parts in your thing you're building. It was first used for the Saturn V…

> There was no conceivable case in which you'd want to make a bolt out of boosters...

That won't stop idiots from wanting it to happen.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

gaius wrote: post #40

However, there were two big limitations with hierarchical databases: first, relationships were pre-determined; what was a parent and what was a child was a decision made before any data was actually entered Well, yes and no. IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing, which is a kind of thing you do in engineering to keep track of all the parts in your thing you're building. It was first used for the Saturn V…

> IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing

Right, and the restrictions that are appropriate for that domain weren't necessarily appropriate for all the other domains to which it was later applied.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#50

Post by abakker »

oblio wrote: post #28
abakker wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many people in IT, generally not the Hacker News crowd, but the guys in the trenches of [insert corporation name here] with ops in many countries, The Money is NOT really the important thing. Risk mitigation by having a passthrough to the big IT vendors is what they are paying for specifically. I work in the IT consulting / business research space. In our surveys, "vendor viability" is a frequent concern, and the…

Well, thing is, Open Source is changing that proposition. As long as you're prepared to be conservative in your choices, something like Debian + Apache + OSS programming language will likely be around 20-40 years from now. When is the last time an OSS programming language that took off actually died? For example, even though it's not as popular Perl 5 is still used professionally in many environments and as far as I…

Open source may perpetuate, but it is the on-call, active support that enterprises value. You can't exactly demand prompt action from the support forums, can you? Now maybe open source like Red Hat works that way, but it is very much the commercial terms and operating models that businesses are interested in.

Again, for innovative new projects, this is changing.

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