Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Story of O(racle)

tbray.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 64 posts

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#51

Post by quanticle »

bad_user wrote: post #4
protomyth wrote: post #2

> The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship ... The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation Sadly, this is why Oracle could buy Sun and not the other way around.

Having an engineering culture and fostering developer mindshare ... hasn't been a bad business choice for companies like Google or Apple or Microsoft (at least in their early days). And last time I checked, all 3 companies mentioned are bigger in market cap then Oracle. What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different?

That's true, but you have to realize that Google, Apple and Microsoft all have to work much harder than Oracle to make their profits. Selling directly to the public is like that.

Oracle, on the other hands, sells only to other businesses. At this point, their reputation for being "enterprise grade" is so well established, they could probably sit still for a decade and still retain a fair amount of their customers. I don't think Microsoft, Apple, or Google could say the same for their businesses. Well, maybe Microsoft could, but certainly not the other two.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#52

Post by nkassis »

narrator wrote: post #5
protomyth wrote: post #2

> The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship ... The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation Sadly, this is why Oracle could buy Sun and not the other way around.

I think Oracle is oriented toward selling to businesses that use technology the way tech startups use office furniture. We don't want to take apart our office furniture and make it work more efficiently, or modify it and resell it to other businesses as part of a breakthrough interior decorating package. We want to sit on it and put our laptops on it and use it to get the other "real" work done. So if you're in the r…

Why do everyone always use Tallahassee as an example of a random town ? (FSU alum ;)) This includes references in LOST, Areosmith songs ...

Is it the name?

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#53

Post by cageface »

gaius wrote: post #45
cageface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Maybe not. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Oracle in several jobs now and will emphatically advise against it at every opportunity. Postgres may not be a drop-in replacement for every Oracle use case but for those that are I'll recommend it first any day of the week. Oracle in a job description is a big red flag for me.

Technically or culturally? Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and straightforward to use. If you even can run your application on Postgres then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's for[1]. [1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.

Technically. In two different jobs now I've seen a small army of consultants unable to keep an Oracle cluster running as reliably as a single Postgres instance, despite jaw-dropping license fees. It's also pretty painful to use, from simple command-line interactions to dumping & restoring data to interfacing with any code that isn't "enterprise". Blob performance was also astonishingly bad.

I guess you're stuck with it if you need to run Oracle financials or Peoplesoft or something like that but one of my professional goals is to never work for another company big or dumb enough to use either.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#54

Post by gaius »

cageface wrote: post #53
gaius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically or culturally? Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and straightforward to use. If you even can run your application on Postgres then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's for[1]. [1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.

Technically. In two different jobs now I've seen a small army of consultants unable to keep an Oracle cluster running as reliably as a single Postgres instance, despite jaw-dropping license fees. It's also pretty painful to use, from simple command-line interactions to dumping & restoring data to interfacing with any code that isn't "enterprise". Blob performance was also astonishingly bad. I guess you're stuck with…

That says more about consultants than it does about Oracle ;-)

Oracle (the database) in the hands of anyone basically competent is easily capable of 5-9s reliability. Not that I'm saying Postgres isn't mind. I'm just saying, use the right tool for the job (and hire the right people).

I find DataPump very easy to use, and very fast, it's I/O bound even on serious storage arrays. YMMV. SQL*Plus is definitely showing its age I agree.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#55

Post by CrLf »

cageface wrote: post #53
gaius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically or culturally? Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and straightforward to use. If you even can run your application on Postgres then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's for[1]. [1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.

Technically. In two different jobs now I've seen a small army of consultants unable to keep an Oracle cluster running as reliably as a single Postgres instance, despite jaw-dropping license fees. It's also pretty painful to use, from simple command-line interactions to dumping & restoring data to interfacing with any code that isn't "enterprise". Blob performance was also astonishingly bad. I guess you're stuck with…

It would be surprising if consultants could keep anything running reliably. In my experience, they provide nothing but chaos and half-baked solutions.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#56

Post by CrLf »

kscaldef wrote: post #24
jrockway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. The higher-ups can say which database to use and hire a bunch of people to set it up. But if the developers ignore them, they have no way of actually determining this. (Which is what's so great about mandates from Higher Up.)

Relying on a conspiracy of the entire technical staff to keep your job seems like a bad idea to me.

Sometimes, that conspiracy is what keeps the business running. Whithout it, there would be no jobs.

Not that this is the case everywhere and everytime, but if technical decisions were left solely in the hands of people that lack technical skills, the situation would be even worse that it is now, with all the "enterprise software" floating around and causing trouble directly proportional to their cost.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#57

Post by access_denied »

nkassis wrote: post #52
narrator wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Oracle is oriented toward selling to businesses that use technology the way tech startups use office furniture. We don't want to take apart our office furniture and make it work more efficiently, or modify it and resell it to other businesses as part of a breakthrough interior decorating package. We want to sit on it and put our laptops on it and use it to get the other "real" work done. So if you're in the r…

Why do everyone always use Tallahassee as an example of a random town ? (FSU alum ;)) This includes references in LOST, Areosmith songs ... Is it the name?

It's the first time I heard it. But I wuld do it because the name sounds so funny at the end of a rant.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#58

Post by euroclydon »

ora600 wrote: post #33
euroclydon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a place that had a huge Oracle RAC license. We ran non-mission-critical data collection apps on it, but the app which dispensed drugs in real-time, all over the world, not only ran Postgres, but 90% of the business logic was in DB functions.

I would love to hear why you made this decision.

I didn't. It wasn't subversive, like the parent comment. It just worked out that way because of technology acquisitions. Customers wanted to hear their data was "on Oracle."

My take is that the overhead of maintaining and using Oracle means that you have to cut resources somewhere else. I'm pretty sure a competent DBA and developers can ensure atomicity and integrity using Postgres (instead of Oracle), and have a lot of time left over to create more features in the application.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#59

Post by j_baker »

cageface wrote: post #29
j_baker wrote: post #14

Much as I dislike this as a developer, this is a smart business strategy for Oracle. Let's face it: at the companies that use Oracle, the developers aren't the one making the call as to what database to use. That's the call of much higher-ups. About the only solution I can suggest is to avoid working for such companies, but I'm be preaching to the choir to say that.

Maybe. Maybe not. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Oracle in several jobs now and will emphatically advise against it at every opportunity. Postgres may not be a drop-in replacement for every Oracle use case but for those that are I'll recommend it first any day of the week. Oracle in a job description is a big red flag for me.

Oracle is like the C++ of databases; Postgres is like the C#. Oracle is ugly and complex, but it can be made to do amazing things that no other RDBMS can do. Postgres is really fast out of the box for 90% of most use-cases, but it still can't do the things Oracle can.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#60

Post by cageface »

j_baker wrote: post #59
cageface wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Maybe not. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Oracle in several jobs now and will emphatically advise against it at every opportunity. Postgres may not be a drop-in replacement for every Oracle use case but for those that are I'll recommend it first any day of the week. Oracle in a job description is a big red flag for me.

Oracle is like the C++ of databases; Postgres is like the C#. Oracle is ugly and complex, but it can be made to do amazing things that no other RDBMS can do. Postgres is really fast out of the box for 90% of most use-cases, but it still can't do the things Oracle can.

I was actually thinking of exactly this analogy earlier. It holds also in that a lot of people use C++ because they think they need it but they could in fact use something simpler.
Post reply on HN