Don’t work for evil companies.
So exactly what for profit company is on the side of the angels?
Sometimes the lesser evil is truly a lesser evil.
Oracle slashes 30k jobs
541–550 of 890 posts
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction processing workloads...
DB2 was crazy good for certain use cases but very weird. For one, the pattern for DB2 efficiency was pretty much the exact opposite of every other database. Every other database would say "Normalize your tables, use BCNF, blah blah, small reference tables, special indices etc". DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely fast for the time and could handl…
That sounds oddly similar to how people recommend using Dynamo. It's super hard to do coming from SQL because everything just feels wrong.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no zfs grenade. It's CDDL, feel free to use it wherever you want. Oracle can't come after you for violating the gpl even if somehow using zfs on linux violates the gpl.
Everything I have read is that the cddl is not compatible with binary deployments of zfs on linux so actually wouldnt that mean yes they could press that if you bundled it with gpl? Actual lawyers have said yes it could which is what I am refering to, however I think the actual answer is that Oracle has created a latch by inaction on this subject for so long now.
CDDL is more permissive than gpl. It's not a violation of cddl to intermingle with code under a different license. GPL is the issue and it's the individual contributors to linux that _could_ sue.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#544Earlier quoted context omitted.
The wasted cashed is only part of the story. Just think of the wasted man hours spent on integrating 30K new employees that supposedly the company didn't need. The time spent in meetings about restructuring departments, new points of contacts, reassignment of duties, figuring out who to promote, training the new hires, etc. Now the company gets to it all again in reverse with much lower moral and excitement. The amou…
> Just think of the wasted man hours... That's all money.
I view the opportunely cost, moral reduction, corporate politics, etc. differently then just money. I wanted to emphasize the long term effects of hiring then firing 30K has on businesses beyond what people typically focus on like payroll.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#545Earlier quoted context omitted.
SQL Server's claim to fame was GUI admin tools making life easier for many who bore DBA responsibilities only in anger. It remains one of the most reliable Microsoft products, but few would claim that is a high bar.
TOAD was fantastic for Oracle, though. I liked it better than SQL’s stuff.
I can't really speak to 3rd party utilities, I think Management Studio was sufficient to keep most competition from ever starting.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#546The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is. Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it,…
maybeeee SPARC based Solaris? Probably not a major usecase nowadays (Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun) but it seems to be limping along
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#547Earlier quoted context omitted.
Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition. A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain…
"At the time, MySQL existed ..." You had to be careful with MySQL back then as constraints were syntactic sugar but not enforced. PostgreSQL was indeed much tougher to manage but more full-featured.
I love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#548The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is. Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it,…
They aren't a database company. They are a full spectrum B2B SaaS contract company. They make far more by up selling services than they do from databases total. Half of their stack will run on whatever db you want.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#549Unless you're being offered a very good package, any firing email is cold. Let's be honest
It's crazy to me that companies are allowed to do this, given that staff are generally expected to be accommodating and give notice when they quit.
Re: Oracle slashes 30k jobs
#550The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is. Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it,…
Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition. A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain…
We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped after a couple of years.
To get to the level of scale that oracle can handle we had to build sharding and cluster replication from scratch. It still didn’t get to even 1/10th of a single oracle node. Obviously we made a lot of poor architecture decisions as well - in hindsight, of course.