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Oracle Investigation Grows
VValdo writes "Department heads resigning, millions of dollars wasted, documents shredded, the government investigating. No, it's not Enron-- as previously reported, the $95 million contract with Oracle is blowing into a full-fledged scandal in California, according to today's LA Times, The article begins, "California Highway Patrol officers moved in Thursday to halt shredding at the state's information technology department, and Gov. Gray Davis suspended the agency's chief amid a widening investigation of the state's multimillion-dollar computer contract with Oracle Corp.""
Seriously, though, it sounds like the state government there needs a complete overhaul and there don't seem to be any oversights/checks on what really is going on there....
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Hopefully, with the close media scrutiny that a scandal like this provides, there will be some spillover press onto Oracle's lobbying for a national ID (run on Oracle of course). It would be nice if this raises the public's awareness and provokes their outrage. Articles like this make me especially curious about how much money Oracle has given to Sen. Diane Feinstein's campaigns.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
there are thousands of ENRONS waiting to happen...
And this is a Good Thing. I've got nothing against relational databases where they have their uses; but in the past ten years every application has been converted to requiring a relational database. I personally know of several cases where the data - which used to be managed on an old PDP-11 or the original IBM PC in under a megabyte of disk space - has been migrated to Oracle, at enormous cost and expense. Things that used to be simple (e.g. a list of a few hundred customers) now require a team of Oracle database experts and extensive optimization just to keep up with the same performance that was achieved on twenty-year-old hardware without Oracle.
There's even an official designation for a misused and missaplied technology like this: Golden Hammer.
People and businesses are so apathetic these days that this nonsense will not spell one bad omen for Oracle.
Usually you'd think that Oracle would get a bad rap for nonsense like this. For one, offering a ridiculous price tag on its software. Second, they provided the "goods", so to speak. Oracle are as mired in this mess as the state gov't in California. So will they get any trouble for it? Of course not. They are, I presume, going to laugh all the way to the bank with the added bonus of not even being required to provide whatever goods and services were purchased. Unless this is being reversed, and assuming all the money has been paid. Usually the gov't can't just say "we made a stupid, give us our money back." Not as if they can make threats either... look how weak they are against Microsoft.
Basically I am trying to point out that Oracle had a hand in this. They are clearly shifty and underhanded. But nonetheless, businesses everywehre will still look to them and place their trust in Oracle to provide a database solution. They will not realize that these huge software companies are unusually corrupt as far as businesses go. They will not say, "let's switch our departments to MySQL instead."
Just the same as with Microsoft. No matter how many incidents creep up that show they are not to be trusted. No matter how many laws they break, everyone remains willing to shovel their money into MS in exchange for shitty software.
We've all asked this question, but I can't help it. HOW is it that these companies have become so powerful that they are legally allowed to do anything? Perhaps the movie "AntiTrust" was closer to the mark any of us might think. Will corporations next make mafia-esque killings? Will they have purchased so many judges and politicians that they can get anything pulled?
better yet, what about PostgreSQL licenses ?
Computer Associates' sales practices, or the State of California's budgeting? (Budget deficit of $12B six weeks ago, now $22B, and a certain Governor who wants to shift revenues and expenses to hide it. The accounting's legal, but it's still, IMHO, deceptive.)
All of which reminds me of an old joke:
Accounting Department: "It's March 31st, do we know whether we're gonna make our numbers for first quarter?"
Sales Department: "How the fsck should I know yet, I just got back from lunch! The quarter's only halfway over!"
- Govt. software requisitioner: "Hey, I don't need your product, at least I'm not sure if I do, but I'd like to buy $95 million worth of it anyway"
- Oracle exec: "Well, even though I have a fiduciary duty to my shareholders to maximize profits, and -- as a private citizen not elected to any office -- no duty to the taxpayers to ensure that the government is efficient in its spending practices, I feel uncomfortable taking your money. Please call IBM."
In the absence of proof of any wrongdoing on the part of Oracle (so far about the worst you can say is that they inflated the estimated cost savings -- which is nothing more than typical "lies, damn lies, and statistics" that all businesses use to convice you that you need their product-you-don't-need).And read the article, Oracle offered to terminate the deal, and is apparently standing by the offer; this is something that they're certainly not obligated to do legally (they may be obligated to do if from a PR standpoint, to deal with people like you who assume they've done something wrong before they're even done it).
Come on people, I'm as critical of big business as anyone (probably more so), but this is in fact just a case of Big Business as usual. It's like drunken sex with a stranger you don't like. It may make you feel icky, it may even be bad for you, but it's not illegal.
I'm not an Oracle champion. As a matter of fact I think they are worse than Microsoft in their FUD advertisements (unbreakable my ass!) and their underhanded business practices. Never mind the fact that their product certainly is not 'the best' for the majority (guestimating) of clients.
;)) which probably are connected to a central mainframe somewhere. They may even run desktop applications which communicate with Oracle. Is the 300,000 license a little 'far reaching'? Of course - you can't poll each and every user to say "Have you used an application which connects to an Oracle DB?". So you guess. Or in this case, you hire a 3rd party (the consulting company Logicon) to do the legwork for you. They do a survey of the enterprise and 'recommend' a solution. In this case, it appears that Logicon was/is in bed with Oracle unbeknownst to CA anyway; such is the case when you deal with mid-management who know absolutely zero about RDBMS' to begin with.
;)).
Here where I work we have an Oracle DB of like 30GB. Most of it (20GB or so) are log entries, which pretty much any RDBMS can handle. Is there a 'killer' reason why we chose Orable over MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.? Well, all of our applications (e.g. purchased, 3rd party ones) run on Oracle. There are a wealth of stable, mature monitoring, performance and tuning, backup, etc. applications already written to help us mange, backup and restore, performance tune, etc. our databases. Not only that, but we can call Oracle any time of day if something goes wrong with the database.
How much of that is directly translatable to PostgreSQL or MySQL? How many commercial-grade, large-scale applications are written to take advantage? How many billing applications, how many payroll, etc. etc. etc. Few, if any!
Are all 300,000 licenses going to developers? Certainly not; I suspect this would be per-seat type things for every employee who uses their intranet or whatever. Even DMV employees use computers (although to what degree of efficiency is debatable
I guess if there was blame to be placed, I'd put it on the whole 'system' that we have here.
1) Software company develops database.
2) It gains market share (60%+)
3) People realize there is a lot of money in developing applications focused for said RDBMS
4) Management, not knowing a single thing about competing products, hires 'Consulting' company to tell them what they want to hear "The product you've been paying a lot of money for the past few years is the right choice. Buy more of it!"
5) Management picks said RDBMS due to consultant pointing out RDBMS marketing and large application base
6) Lather, rinse, repeat the vicious cycle.
Would a different RDBMS suit CA better? Could be. It depends on what their applications are and what they do with it. However, PostgreSQL (MySQL, FireBird, other free ones, etc.) is *still* not suited for the task. Can you easily administrate PostgreSQL for 300,000 users? Can you cluster, perform fail-safe replication, etc? Can you perform not only on-line backups (which PostgreSQL can) but 'point-in-time' snapshots? How much would it cost to migrate your financial backend to something else? This includes not only re-writing the application but re-training your users to the new interface (300,000 user training-session?).
The RDBMS is quickly becoming not simply an 'island' apart from the Enterprise - it is becoming the *heart* of the Enterprise. It is increasingly taking over analytical and business roles in which the RDBMS vendors have intimate experience with, and have the resources available to commit to bringing end-user requirements to life.
Fortunately, the small, low-end RDBMS market (PostgreSQL, MySQL) has an appropriate cost - zero! This allows smaller shops to save a significant amount of money by using less advanced, less technologically superior tools. Sure, you can probably live with reconstructing a days worth of payroll for 25 people if your MySQL-backed system goes down. For 25,000 that is simply not an option.
The "Slashdot party line" for these sorts of things, and really is unfortunate that they get modded up so often, is that "Anything you do (big commercial companies) we can do better!" Well, perhaps so. In the case of the Enterprise RDBMS market, however, this has not been the case, and probably will continue to be so. Stop trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole - it aint gonna fit without breaking something (or significant pain
Thanks,
--
Matt
Agreed. The Democrats have had one-party rule in California for too long, and this kind of corruption and incompetence is the inevitable result.
That is just a silly comment. The previous governor was a Republican. California became a solid Democratic state BECAUSE of the actions of that governor and his party - anti-immigrant stuff in a state that is only 48% white.
"Oh how sweet it would be."
How, exactly, would it be "sweet"? Many large companies depend on Oracle to provide a concise, up to data database product and support. Taking such a highly advanced product and making it GPL would only lead to chaos. There would be no single source for support and updates. Just as Linux suffers from an enormous multitude of incompatible versions, so would the Oracle database be bastardized and split up into different competing products by various companies and fringe groups.
Open source may be fine for system utilities and web browsers, but not for something as complex and crucial as Oracle.
All the other replies are correct, I would just add that part-and-parcel of being the state police is that the head of the CHP works for the govenor, therefore it's would be the only law enforcement agency that the govenor could order to do something.
Please elaborate on why California "got what it deserved".
Thank you..