A Story of O(racle) • Hacker News Board

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#61

Post by ora600 » Wed, Sep 01, 2010, 8:20 PM UTC

euroclydon wrote: post #58

ora600 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't get me wrong - Postgres is awesome and I would happily use it for any project. I'm not sure Postgres is easier to manage than Oracle and places any less maintenance overhead, but YMMV.

Its just that RAC is a special technology with no equivalent on other DBs. It is usually placed where you need load balancing on the DB level. It normally has very high availability that is a good fit for mission critical DBs. I hate seeing good technology wasted, but you are right that if Postgres is already there and works well, there is no point in moving anywhere.

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#62

Post by ora600 » Wed, Sep 01, 2010, 8:24 PM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #38

ora600 wrote: post #32

Maybe I don't understand the concept of "developer mindshare" well enough but it seems to me that Oracle does engage with the user community and not just the business community. They do this through user conferences such as Collaborate and ODTUG (which is developer specific) - those conferences are much more technical in nature than the marketing oriented OpenWorld. Oracle also have the OTN and its ACE program for en…

Well of course. I don't doubt that Oracle is aware of their developers' existence and gives them some form of support. But how much of Oracle's time and money goes to developer support compared to companies like Microsoft? Much as I dislike Microsoft, I have to give them credit for engaging their developer community.

I'm not sure how to answer that. How do you know how much of Microsoft's time and money goes to developer support? How do you know that Oracle does any less? I don't have any real hard numbers.

Microsoft MSDN for developer support and Oracle has OTN. Both companies have developer oriented conferences in addition to business conferences. Both companies employ evangalists that work with startups to help them adopt their technologies. Where do you see the difference?

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#63

Post by eru » Mon, Sep 13, 2010, 6:20 AM UTC

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.

Where do I get the Haskell of databases?

Re: A Story of O(racle)

#64

Post by eru » Mon, Sep 13, 2010, 6:25 AM UTC

maukdaddy wrote: post #25

jrockway wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

I wasn't claiming that Oracle maximized their shareholder value ;) In fact I'd argue that Oracle simply burned cash.

And perhaps it was just managers expanding their empire. You know, principal agent problems between managers and shareholders.