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Oracle’s Cloudy Future

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Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

ubercode5 wrote: post #51
oblio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree. However one additional thing to keep in mind in the COTS vs FOSS is if there is some bug that affects the company and requires attention. The company doesn't generally have the engineers on staff to actually change that software, and there's no guarantee that the associated FOSS community will prioritize the bug. With a COTS solution, you can pick up the phone and call the support team. Generally my company…

Indeed. It seems that the most sustainable business model for Open Source so far is a combination of FOSS product + paid support / consulting company. It has some potential conflict of interest (e.g. deliberately not improving some aspects of the product that brings in support calls), but being a successful open-source product often depends on outside contributions which themselves depend on reputation, and that may keep companies honest.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#82

Post by TeMPOraL »

kens wrote: post #55
treehau5 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. This is also the sole reason IBM still exists, at least in services. "Oh our system is an overengineered pile of garbage that takes two weeks to deploy an update to a static asset? It's (cue dramatic music) their fault !" CTO pro…

Being able to pass the buck to IBM if things go wrong was actually the theme of IBM's ads in 2001. In a typical ad, the CEO is getting blamed because the system is down / can't be upgraded. CEO: "And whose job is it to make sure all this stuff works the way it's supposed to?" Assistant: "That would be yours." Tagline: "And that's when it hits you, you are so ready for IBM.” (Of course I have to admit they were succes…

Honest ads describing the business value directly. I like that. We could use more of that these days.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#83

Post by davidgerard »

tmptmp wrote: post #3

I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source projects. Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is n…

I just spent today in meeting hell with networking vendor sales engineers. One thing everyone agreed on was what an absolute delight it was moving from Oracle to Postgres. Oracle is a top-class database - it saves your data, it gives it back really fast and reliably - but every other detail of dealing with them is awful. The biggest benefit of moving to PG is we never have to think about licenses again.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#84

Post by TeMPOraL »

b2m9 wrote: post #4
tmptmp wrote: post #3

I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat), one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source projects. Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too. But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is n…

> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something goes wrong. Well, this can be said for any big business software company. It's the same story with SAP, IBM and friends. Business software is simply not about spending money well.

Big companies are often are complicated mess, and I can emphasize with desire to simplify and streamline operation. There's some benefit with setting your infrastructure in such a way that there's a known party you can pay to fix things quickly, and that you can sue if they can't.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#85

Post by sgt101 »

elchief wrote: post #63
sgt101 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, you need some architectural discipline there. Postgres and mysql: what was the reasoning behind that?

We've acquired many companies over the years.

Ok that makes sense to me.

Post mergers the mantra is "you say that we will get $n from putting all our systems together and it will cost $n/10 but I say you are a bloody liar and want proof and hostages."

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#86

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

elchief wrote: post #63
sgt101 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, you need some architectural discipline there. Postgres and mysql: what was the reasoning behind that?

We've acquired many companies over the years.

"Clump soul" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#87

Post by threeseed »

calpaterson wrote: post #6

This is a wonderful explanation of the original rationale for relational databases. Periodically poeple re-invent IMS' hierarchical design only to rediscover why relations are important. MongoDB's "document database" is a current example.

I wish people would stop projecting this relational databases are the only solution to storing data nonsense.

If you are storing a single customer view a document database is the best option since it is a single request per entity id. Likewise if you are storing highly nested data it sometimes is extremely cost to try to model that relationally.

It's akin to saying C++ is the best choice for ALL programming choices.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#88

Post by threeseed »

planetjones wrote: post #66

Are any new companies choosing Oracle products? Or are they really only relying on banks,insurance companies and other blue chips to take up their 'cloud' offerings?

No. And banks, insurance companies etc are moving rapidly to try and get away from Oracle, Teradata etc.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#89

Post by adzm »

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).

The query optimizer takes some of the most insane, convoluted, gargantuan queries and somehow produces relatively good plans. I've messed with a variety of DBMS but I've never encountered one with such a forgiving optimizer. Unfortunately, that is also a downside, since it lets people get away with writing truly maddening T-SQL queries in the first place.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#90

Post by Karunamon »

planetjones wrote: post #66

Are any new companies choosing Oracle products? Or are they really only relying on banks,insurance companies and other blue chips to take up their 'cloud' offerings?

This is actually a question I never had a good answer for.

If I'm a developer, and am going to create a complicated line of business application, are there non-political reasons that I'd want to target Oracle as opposed to, say, Postgres or Maria?

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