“Stop reverse engineering our code”

> Edit2: Seems like the blog was cracked. At least the "About" on the side seems to indicate that.

That's just the crappy Oracle blog platform presentation. Many of the Oracle blogs have that there, presumably a username.

Yes, agreed. Especially if, after checking out the first 100 or so, all of them are false positives.

But the big difference is that it's realistic, allowed and in many cases warmly welcomed if you submit actual problems.

The statement itself is basically 98% false. I've been a Coverity user since very early days, and have used a few other static-analysis tools as well. Every such tool that I've seen runs multiple separate kinds of checks. Yes, the false positive rate for some of those checks can be alarmingly/annoyingly high. OTOH, any software developer with half a brain can see that other checks are much more accurate. Some are darn near impossible to fool. If you focus on those, you can find and fix a whole bunch of real bugs without too much distraction from false positives.

Her statement gains 1% truth because Oracle might already have picked the low-hanging fruit, and any more reports they get really are full of chaff. I find this unlikely, but it's possible. She gets another 1% for this.

> A customer can’t analyze the code to see whether there is a control that prevents the attack

That's actually a pretty decent point. Anyone who has actually studied static-analysis reports for any length of time has probably encountered this phenomenon. For example, you might find a potential buffer overflow that's real in the context of the code you analyzed, but the index involved can't actually be produced because of other code that you didn't. Or maybe a certain combination of conditions is impossible for reasons related to a mathematical property that has been thoroughly vetted but that the analysis software couldn't reasonably be expected to "know" about. Ironically, these kinds of "reasonable false positives" tend to show up more in good programmers' code, because they're diligent about adding defensive code handling every condition - including conditions that aren't (currently) possible. In any case, while it's a good point, it's applicable rarely enough that it doesn't really support the author's broader position.

Stanford was taken to the cleaners to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD in the deployment of Oracle Financials and related products via endless "consultant implementation" charges that didn't really deliver much value, were rarely on schedule or on budget. Oracle's enterprise calendaring program was totally inadequate and had UX that made most point-of-sale systems look effortless by contrast. Also, the assets managing app, Sunflower, was another dud. The only thing Oracle Database had going for it was no crippling license activation (license scofflaws are/were sued or fined into oblivion worse than M$FT), which one could say was equivalent to MS SQL. Unlike MS MSQL, Oracle DBMS has/had bazillions of support patches to apply to run a real production box, analogous to the previously separate Sun's Solaris patchsets.

Btw: For smaller enterprisey shops, either MS SQL or Postgres are the way to go. Often multiple similar components are needed because different apps have firm requirements that only support one or another; but generally try to avoid this because supporting too many heterogenous components is expensive (laborious)... hence the prevalence of local "standards." Deploying everything with cfengine3 or puppet can help reduce the manualness and nudge vendors into repeatable, idempotent deployments rather than clicking on inane GUI installers like an animal.

ProTip: Don't let consultants "provide" oversight / free-reign for their own projects, budgets, etc., that's like the wolf guarding the henhouse. The client must hire their own project managers, have clear accountability/authority paths to their management and know exactly what they need (avoid endless upselling). Or lots of money will be transferred from idiots to crooks (enterprise caveat emptor).

Edit: fixed grammar