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What's the Oracle Trial Against SAP Really About?
Ponca City writes "Chris O'Brien writes in the Merucry News that Larry Ellison's lawsuit against bitter rival SAP gives Ellison the opportunity to deliver the final humiliation to his company's greatest foe of the past decade while sending a blunt message to Oracle's next great enemy, Hewlett-Packard: 'This is who you are fighting. This is how determined we are to win. Get ready.' O'Brien writes that it's a crafty bit of psychological warfare that is already having the desired effect. When Oracle decided to subpoena former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker after he was appointed president and CEO of HP, Apotheker decided to stay out of the country to avoid testifying so now we have the bizarre spectacle of the new CEO of the largest technology company in the world unable to show his face in Silicon Valley. Ellison loves to fight. In gaining control of PeopleSoft, Ellison demonstrated the love of combat and confrontation that has made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He waged an 18-month hostile takeover bid to acquire the company, and fought off an effort by the US Department of Justice to torpedo the deal. 'Oracle probably could have settled this case [with SAP],' writes O'Brien. 'But why pass up a glorious chance to subpoena Apotheker and send your new opponent running in circles?'"
I've known a few people like that, very combative types. They tend to wind up being very lonely and pathetic later in life.
C|N>K
Oracle seems to be an EXTREMELY abusive company.
Let's route around it. One way: Use PostgreSQL.
Some billionaires only care about being able to abuse people.
I have no clue if this is important in this discussion, but SAP acquired Sybase earlier this year.
Will Ellison's douchemonkeyness detriment the people? The community? If his fights are just and his gains are pure and the losses he causes others to incur do not get passed onto the populace, cool. Otherwise, I don't think they're going to have too many friends after the dust settles.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
By what measure?
Sounds wrong to me and I cant find a measure by which they would be the largest, but maybe there is one.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Firing Hurd was one thing, but hiring Apothekar was a total disastrous. In connection to this, Jack Welsh mentioned that he wouldn't admit knowing anyone in HP board even if knew anyone. These are rather strong words coming from a neutral person who was declared manager of the century in 1999. HP was fully aware of SAP-Oracle lawsuit going on and also of the fact that SAP had accepted the blame and Apothekar was the CEO at the time TomorrowNow was stealing. HP got what it deserved or wanted.
What database does slashdot run on, by the way?
These companies are situated in the center of one of the largest changes in human history. Computers and software applications have enabled numerous advances in civilization and benefitted society in countless ways. Despite all the good that has come from computers, it seems like without exception, every single large computer company is lead by a bunch of douche bags who apparently have little concern for anything beyond themselves and their vision of how they want things to be.
Rustling up a quick summary here for anyone looking for background:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Oracle_v._SAP_(2010,_USA)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Why would anyone want Peoplesoft?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Why?
Because I work with closed source software from a vendor that gives me access to Technical Reference Manuals, complete descriptions of all fields and behaviors of the tables?
Is it because I enjoy having full access to the pl/sql code in triggers, stored procedures, workflows, forms and reports, which I can then modify to my own purposes and business objectives of my company?
Or is it that I think SAP acted like a bunch of greedy fucks who gave Oracle very reason to limit my access to the info?
c'mon anon, show me your mighty insight
Wherever You Go, There You Are
"SAP has offered to pay $40 million for the damage it caused and an additional $120 million to cover Oracle's legal bill."
But who pays the salary of the judge and other court personnel? The courthouse building isn't free and neither are its utilities. This can't be cheap.
Ellison? I don't know him and never met him. But it has been published that he's a womanizer, likes his jet fighters, race cars, yachts, etc... which seems to support your premise.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
I'm guessing you fit into their corporate culture pretty well...
Why?
Because you are working with a company that would not hesitate to fuck you over the moment it was convenient or the moment you stopped paying up.
You are entitled to your masochism, but to most here working with oracle now would be akin to being a partner with microsoft of the 90's, sure, on paper you're working together.. expect to get fucked over (except with oracle they wouldn't do it technically, just 4-6 digit licensing fees you weren't expecting).
On /., asking how to find info (http://slashdot.org/help) on a website; "Brillant" [sic]. Their current user docs list mysql, but it's dated 2000.
Oh, and while I'm at it, that jerk who posted a complete ripoff of a BOFH http://www.theregister.co.uk/ article on with no attribution ought to be strung up by his earbeads (in comments on "Toy Robots Can Guard Your Home"; I was moderating so couldn't complain inthread).
Sigh, fsck. Carry on you shallow posters.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I strongly suspect you have left yourself crippled. Anyone who claims to be a long-time anything has failed to move forwards, has failed to adapt to the changing IT market. Nothing lasts forever and those who fail to keep up-to-date last no longer than the product they are fixed to. Oracle has moved forward. They support grid computing and clustered computing. These require a radically different mindset than those who grew up on monolithic client-server systems. Oracle will doubtless move forward again, exploiting cloud computing techniques. What use will they have for you then?
Consider this also - companies respect loyalty, but they rarely respect blind loyalty. Spying?! For chrissakes, this isn't the Cold War! Besides, why would these "spies" trust what Oracle said, when a debugger and Wireshark would yield far more? Besides, who would want to spy on Oracle? Their RAC database is impressive in that there are no other major databases that support Infiniband, but other than that their software is ancient, slow, archaic and uncompetitive. Oracle is a has-been. They were a decent company once. Twenty years ago. Today, they're losing ground. Their acquisition of Sun was expensive and has generated few returns.
As for a lot of information, Oracle doesn't know the meaning of the phrase. Their support site is frankly pathetic. Ingres is of the same era and used to hold many of the same attitudes, but they have matured and adapted to a new environment. Oracle have not. In evolution, those who adapt survive, those who do not die. Size is immaterial. Prime were big. Cray were big. SGI were big. Sun were big. Dinosaurs. And dinosaurs die.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I would recommend Ingres (which is GPL) for the Data Warehouse environments, PostgreSQL for the mid-sized relational databases and Drizzle for the small-scale systems. (DO NOT support MySql as it is now an Oracle product -- support one of the official forks.)
Likewise, I would recommend using Libre Office (as soon as it hits a major release) over and above Oracle's OpenOffice.
For Java, I would recommend using IBM's JVM where possible (it's largely Oracle's but getting it from IBM will still kick dirt in Oracle's eyes). Where you're running a standalone Java application that can be compiled using GCJ, eliminate the JVM entirely and go native.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
All HP has to do is focus on their knitting. Make great products and take great care of your customers. You don't need lots of sound-and-fury drama to be a great company
Hot water, good dentistry, and soft lavatory paper.
Larry Ellison is becoming more of a software terrorist every day.
I was a DBA forever, and while I loved the 10 or so years I spent supporting Oracle I noted that consultants (for what its worth) seemed to uniformly hate the place (a note, I supported Peoplesoft Installations for awhile and we saw a lot of consultants come through from Oracle among other places..).
It's really a shame, but when 9 came out and Oracle co-opted java for the first time, they screwed it up and it hasn't really gotten any better since. I think a big reason for this is that the office culture of the place is a reflection of Ellison's arrogance, which is somewhat demotivating (even if only privately) to the people who work there, and their products suffer. So here we are with Oracle now owning java and, surprise surprise, Ellison is out to monetize it. Folks, that's what he does. There's a reason he's one of the richest men alive, he finds choke points in the software market and either buys or kills (and replaces) them.
He reminds me of the Wall Street people who see no moral issues with destroying everything in their path to turn a profit. It's sick, it's wrong, and this is America where for better or worse its legal. Ultimately, these super-arrogant folks will be the death of software as an industry because they simply have no concept of 'enough'. One guy told us (unconfirmed personally, but I have no reason to doubt it) that at Oracle, if you weren't in a position to replace your boss after the first year, your career there was basically over. Ellison calls this 'samurai management' or some such nonsense, but I call it bad business. It's this kind of crap that leads to workplace incivility, and this grudge-holding shit Emperor Larry is famous for is plain old simple hubris. It's ok though, he's getting too old to do it for much longer, and Oracle is rapidly becoming a product worth 1k$ instead of 100k$ per installation. Not that he'll ever be poor, but boy wouldn't it be fun to watch him be humbled.
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
America and capitalism are providing you choices: buy something or from someone else.
I find this lawsuit particulary funny simply because their offices in Burlington, MA, are next to each other on the same street, Van De Graaff Drive, which is basically just the driveway for those buildings. You easily hit a golfball from one to the other. I wonder if they make dirty faces at each other? (Sun's up a different road, at least a half-dozen par 5's away.)
Michael J.
Root, God, what is difference?
Ah, an excellent riposte, sir. So, you only ripped them off for half of their article, and couldn't be bothered to educate the unwashed masses as to where you stole it from. I stand corrected.
I'm saying you're just freaking lazy, and ought to do better in the future. You're not damned for all time. Just get it right. Constructive criticsm?
Nice work with the A-word there. I think you've got that down.
Idiot.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I really need to run a new version of postgresql to figure out if you are jerking my chain or not. I ran postgres databases for years in production and they always sucked. Twice or three times the babysitting of any mysql database. I remember all to well having to take them offline once a week to run vacuum on them to keep them from falling over. Great database with great capability but the maintenance was painful.
Got Code?
As I've seen elsewhere on /. :
Move over Darth Gates, it's time for Darth Ellison
ORACLE = One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Their RAC database is impressive in that there are no other major databases that support Infiniband, but other than that their software is ancient, slow, archaic and uncompetitive.
You don't seem to be particularly familiar with the merits of the Oracle database server, which is still at least a decade ahead of all of its competitors. I like PostgreSQL, but in most respects it is just starting to achieve the level of flexibility that Oracle had with the release of Oracle 7 some seventeen years ago.
The special thing about RAC is not Infiniband, it is that RAC is one of the only symmetric multi-node relational databases available. The IBM equivalent was until recently only available on mainframes. I am not aware if there are any others.
If that were not the case, given the cost, there would be no new major applications designed around Oracle at all. Or DB2 for that matter.
I like PostgreSQL, but in most respects it is just starting to achieve the level of flexibility that Oracle had with the release of Oracle 7 some seventeen years ago.
Can you elaborate? I have never really found a good explanation of how well PostgreSQL compares to the high end proprietary RDBMSs, or even of how well they compare to each other.
I disagree with the AC that you are a retard. But I have to comment on this:
Because I work with closed source software from a vendor that gives me access to Technical Reference Manuals, complete descriptions of all fields and behaviors of the tables? Is it because I enjoy having full access to the pl/sql code in triggers, stored procedures, workflows, forms and reports, which I can then modify to my own purposes and business objectives of my company?
A lot of companies/people seem to think that's one of the benefits of closed source software, you get to pay for the privilege of accessing some "Knowledgebase" (with "Technical Reference Manuals", FAQs, HOWTOs, whitepapers etc) and get "Support" etc.
When the fact is with stuff like Postgresql, you often don't need all that because you get to
1) See the technical details and similar stuff for free
2) Post a question on a mailing list, to which the developers reply without any marketing/PR bullshit involved.
I've dealt with OSS and closed source stuff. And there've been many times with the latter that they ask $$$ for access to find out something that would be found by Google if it was OSS.
Except for those of us that actually make money based on applications that the database drives.
Are you trying to say MySQL or Postgresql are equal to Oracle in performance, reliability, or documentation? While Oracle does suck as a company their database core business is rock solid for a lot of good reasons. Of course if you venture outside the one thing Oracle does well heaven help you.
While I agree with you on principle, Oracle documentation is second to none and that's better than having to post to some mailing list and then having to send configs along with version dependencies. I would so there are lots of pros and cons of both sides of this. Google is not a great way to get documentation on something specific. Just yesterday I was searching for the cause to one-way communication between an Asterisk 1.4 and an Asterisk 1.6 box that had been upgraded from 1.4 and was using the same config. It took a very long time. Contrast that with virtually any Oracle issue which can be resolved within ten minutes on Metalink or if things really get hairy, within two hours via a support request.
Often times you do get what you pay for even if you have to pay too much to get it. I'll agree most of that should be free and in the interest of adoption of product lines that would actually probably be a smart move from a business standpoint. I look at all the people running away from Sun servers because everything is hidden away now by Oracle so its easy to see that hiding the documentation just makes people look for something more open.
Oracle is in serious trouble these days despite their spending spree, they lack focus and it shows in their product line. I think most people would agree that you only use Oracle for the database, all of their other apps are simply a joke with open source alternatives being very attractive for reporting and collaboration. ERP options still appear to be lacking but the concept as a whole seems to going away anyway. That's probably why Oracle wanted Sun, to have a complete platform for their database completely supported from head to toe the way Apple does it.
What I really don't understand is if you're running a a database company, do you really want to trumpet how lousy your internal security is in federal court?
I see Taco is keeping his usual high editorial standards.
After all these years he still can't spellcheck? Christ, in my browser it's underlined in red.
And nobody gave it to Mr. Ellison. He did what he felt he had to do and still does. I doubt if any other way would have yielded better results.
Shiz! What a write up. I'm quivering in my jump boots. Too bad Halloween already passed. Michael Myers versus Lawrence Ellison, a blockbuster in the making.
I don't have any experience with Oracle support.
:) ).
:). So unless it starts hurting the vendors, it's a viable business strategy. Good also are training and certification schemes - which can be more expensive when technical info about your product is so restricted.
Can you give an example of an Oracle issue that you solved with Metalink in 10 minutes, that a similar scale problem with Postgresql wouldn't be solved with a Google search? Or for the hairy things, wouldn't be solved by an email to the postgresql mailing list? The postgresql developers seem very responsive to me (assuming your email is reasonable and descriptive - and even so I've seen useful replies to pretty crappy emails
That said, from the Vendor's perspective, artificial scarcity is a good thing for them. Tons of companies are still willing to pay to access stuff that the vendor intentionally keeps from them. Customers even think it's a feature
Unfortunately, many of these things are only learned through hard experience, working on multiple database platforms and then trying to port what works on one to an alternative.
The biggest difference I already mentioned - symmetric multi-node scalability for a single database. So called "shared nothing" database clusters (different nodes host different tables or table partitions) have been common in proprietary databases for many years. I believe there are variants of PostgreSQL out there that can do that.
Oracle pioneered symmetric "shared everything" relational database clusters with Oracle Parallel Server in the late 80s. I understand IBM did the same thing on mainframes with DB2 on Parallel Sysplex a few years later. PostgreSQL doesn't do symmetric clustering yet, but I imagine it will a few years down the road.
On paper, DB2 (for example) is the rough equivalent of Oracle. In practice, developers and DBAs run into enough obstacles doing simple things like alter table operations that Oracle is much easier to administer once it is set up properly. In addition, in Oracle you can do all sorts of database administration operations online without interrupting running applications. More recent versions can rebuild an index while there are active transactions against a table, for example.
My PostgreSQL experience is a little old. The most annoying problem I had was that numeric types needed to match in queries for the optimizer to work properly. I would join a SMALLINT column to an INTEGER column or literal and the index would be ignored. That may be fixed, I don't know. Oracle by contrast uses a uniform NUMBER type comparable to DECIMAL in most databases for everything, which is very convenient. You can increase the numeric precision or scale of any column in constant time, for example. DB2 traditionally required a table export and reload to do this.
If you store integers in 16 bit fields, it is usually tricky to change them all to 32 bit fields without at least stopping all transactions and rewriting every row (which is what PostgreSQL does). Oracle uses variable precision BCD number storage for everything to avoid that problem. I don't know if active transactions can run against a PostgreSQL table while a column type is being altered or not. In any case, you get the idea.
Oracle has an outstanding cost based query optimizer, that can handle views that are built on top of several other layers of views without much of a problem. I haven't tested that in PostgreSQL lately, but what I could really use with the latter are updateable views that filter on session variables. Oracle has PL/SQL "packages" that can store session specific state. Views can refer to package variables such that they limit the rows delivered to a user in that session, which is extremely handy for making virtual private databases.
There are just lots of these kind of things which have been added to Oracle simply due to a very high end client base willing to pay very high rates for the latest and greatest "enterprise edition" stuff. If you don't need the EE stuff, and don't need lots of cores, Oracle is just about as expensive as any other proprietary database, including relatively weak databases like MySQL (now that Oracle owns it) or commercially supported/tweaked versions of PostgreSQL like EnterpriseDB.
Are you trying to say MySQL or Postgresql are equal to Oracle in performance, reliability, or documentation?
I'm saying that oracle is becoming more and more irrelevant, as some high scale deployments of other software shows.
Some licensing schemes with oracle can wind up costing companies almost a million dollars per year. That equates to quite a few extra full time employed database administrators.. which would more than be able to make up for any perceived lack of documentation etc.
There really are very few scenarios left where you actually need oracle for your database.
Bullshit.
The majority of Open Source projects have shitty, old or no documentation at all.
Sure, you can download the code and look at it, but it is time consuming and stupid.
Sure you can post a question to a forum or mailing list... nevertheless the majority of times I have done that (dokeos/chamilo, Ogre3D, codeigniter, firefox, openoffice, etc), I haven't got an answer.
Compare that to say MSDN, which is a great reference library for a closed source technology.
That is mainly because the company behind it PAYS someone to maintain such documentation.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I think they can cost almost that much to administer. I once got involved in trying to work out how much the hell we owed them and it was huge PITA to just extract the stuff out of our sales system. This was partly our fault (we hadn't captured some of the relevant info before) but mainly theirs because we hadn't needed to under the simpler old method.
In fact it was mainly our management's fault. One, for agreeing to the change (though perhaps they didn't have much choice) and two, because they only informed IT 6 months later when they expected a spreadsheet full of the magic lovely numbers to miraculously fall from heaven.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
made. That is a side effect of creating a great business. All three created. Better yet, they created something that other people wanted. They influence millions through their work and some of them through their charity (see Gates, not so much the other two). To say they did not have influence in your life is absurd. Granted it is not on the level of your parents but all three influenced industry. All three pushed forward this business many of us work in.
I would be that many of their problems are not as bad as many make it out to be. It is common for people to tear down others, assign them issues, all to justify our position in life relative to theirs. somehow it make us feel better than people in higher positions somehow are defective or bear burdens we can claim to not want. Frankly, I would be happy to have created something even 1% of the people they influenced liked. People like the three you mention didn't get there without sacrifice, the difference between them and many of you/us is that they realized that getting there isn't done with 40 hour a week jobs and bitching on message boards.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I thought Acorn did rather well.
They developed a CPU for their Archimedes PC and then licensed the design to everyone who wanted it.
Even Intel license Acorns CPU design they did that well.
Your iPod as a little tiny Acorn CPU inside it.
ARM - originally stood for Acorn Risc Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture
would say: "Wow, Larry Ellison is a real a-hole".
This is one of, if not the most, informative posts that I've read on the subject. I burned up my mod points yesterday, unfortunately. :(
Contrast that with virtually any Oracle issue which can be resolved within ten minutes on Metalink or if things really get hairy, within two hours via a support request.
In our experience it's "Oh, it's not a priority 1 issue (meaning we're suffering downtime in a production site)? We'll get to it when we feel like it".
For me that's the killer of closed source. For open source rare problems are often unfixed but well documented in blog posts that contain long strings of profanity typically ending in "I can't believe that X works like this". Closed source tends to have shaky uncertain explanations on how people think things function. Since only a hand full of people in the whole world have the access to reverse engineer the problem correctly no one really knows what is going on.
I'm ignoring the power to read the code your self because while I have needed to resort to that in the past
1) most people don't have time to
2) jumping in to another code base is typically a lengthy process and people typically don't have the time to do it for a minor bug.
Having said that. It's the ultimate "oh god I need to fix this no matter what and time is not a issue" documentation.
They did brilliantly for a while - but at some point they stagnated and abandoned ARM, followed by the Acorn PC (which was never finished).
RiscOS was infinitely superior to any other GUI of the time, but failed to keep pace. For whatever reason, Acorn became too insular.
When they did finally abandon their entire IT division, a breakaway group tried to continue to develop the Acorn PC. I don't know what happened there, but suspect Acorn got stubborn, given the press releases of the time from them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I agree. My guess is that in his eyes he won the game. He made more money then anyone else in the world. There was other option then to start playing a different game, "Save the world". Thank god it was not "Rule the world". He has a shit-ton of money, he could have made some real damage before he would have gotten stopped.
>The majority of Open Source projects have shitty, old or no documentation at all.
PostgreSQL is not in this set.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
And, in fairness, some of us have tried looking for something related to OSS only to find that the closest thing is a 6 year old question on a forum that nobody answered or some snot-nosed little git saying "RTFM".
Sometimes, chasing down the docs for OSS stuff is either impossible, or way more work than it should be. I can definitely see that for some organizations the paid access to the good documentation is more valuable than the free access to non-existent/crappy documentation.
Not defending Oracle, but having seen both sides of this coin, sometimes the paid support model works well too. Open Source is not a magic bullet -- sometimes, either the doc or the product isn't really usable.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I worked at Peoplesoft during the hostile takeover. It was brutal and devastating. For me, Peoplesoft was the best job I ever had. There was excellent compensation and more importantly esprit d corps. It was the happiest place I have ever been. I truly enjoyed going to work every day. I did the best work of my career there. The group I worked with had their stuff together, we were incredibly productive. The internal BBS, was a great resource for all things from tech support to Giants tickets. Yesterday I was travelling from SF through Pleasanton on 580. I passed HQG and was overcome by sadness. I fucking hate Oracle and Larry Ellison.
The problem with your statement is that the reason it's news for Skype is because nobody has done it before. I have always considered Postgresql the best of the open source options out there but it has always been behind commercial options like Oracle and DB/2. Only recently has MS SQL caught up with enough features to start making them attractive but Postgresql is almost always a better choice in that tier.
It is routine for Oracle to handle large datasets. Everyone else that has done it with things like MySQL had to put a lot of time into development and experienced lots of crushing downtime in the process of scale out.
Of course at the rate Postgresql has been advancing I wouldn't be surprised if in another five years they can match Oracle for 90% of functionality. Oracle should have been more concerned with that rather than mysql which is horribly pale in comparison.
I didn't say anything couldn't be solved with a Google search, I merely said that it would take a lot longer. I've spent an hour on Google looking for Postgresql bits for installation, configuration, and maintanence, things that are all in a central location on Metalink for Oracle.
I'm constantly irritated that patches are hidden away as I see that as a giant negative against the company. If you sold me a defective product and you've done the work of fixing the defect you should distribute it to the rest of the community to make sure that the public image of your product is as something of high quality.
Oracle installers are well known to be a pain in the ass, through Metalink I can find step by step directions on how to get it running on Ubuntu or CentOS containing all the necessary links to packages that the Oracle installer will want complete with specific versions so as to certify the installation. Of course I wouldn't do anything like that for a production environment, but certainly for development.
I had the misfortune of having to do an install without Metalink access for a while and had to Google around, you were talking days before kernel parameters and package requirements were fully met. I created an installation guide so that I wouldn't have to go through that pain again but a lot of time was wasted.
There are valid paths to get the information for other products but no other database software is as well documented as Oracle. Mailing lists and Google searches have a wealth of information in them, they are just scattered and not always to the put. Like my Asterisk problem I found it in a random forum. The answer could also have been obtained through any number of other mailing lists but why would I want to go through the trouble when I have a purpose built environment for it with Oracle?
I'm glad Postgresql has made such progress in the last few years, they are a viable alternative to most setups these days and that will eventually put pressure on Oracle to be more reasonable, and if not, I've got a perfectly good alternative.
Sure, let's say that there is some customization that I developed and it starts throwing ORA-6000 errors after an upgrade or patch, some optimized query starts runnin reeeeeeaaaaaaallllllyyyyy slow, or some basic functionality, well ceases to function.
First thing, I hit the alert log, or at least write down the full text of the original error message
I can do a few things at this point... search google, talk to my co-workers, maybe just get a cup of coffee and dig around in guts for a while.
What I have learned in past decade and a half, is to go to Metalink, do a quick search on the exact text of the error message and open a support ticket if I fail to get a hit on it.
Basic breakdown, at least half of my searches on error messages get a hit on a known bug, the appropriate patch and a fairly detailed breakdown of what all the patch touches and what else it may break.
Of the half that end up getting a support ticket; I manage to figure out a fair number by searching or figuring out on my own, some get caught by the first line of support (although some reps try and blame it on the end user, more on that later) and every now and then some get all the way back to development and we are given some sort of work around until there is a patch created.
Rarely, only two or three times for myself, an actual, never-before-seen, bug is found and we get to kid each other for a few days about killing the gary-bug or some such thing.
So, yeah I would say that half of the problems that I have to go to metalink for get resolved fairly quickly via a patch of a known bug. Call it ten minutes if you want, it is usually a hell of a lot faster than searching google and any number of developer blogs to find anything even remotely as suitable as a one-off patch that corrects the situation.
That said, metalink is not without problems. We had to learn not to open support tickets during a certain portion of the day because the tech who picked them up would invariably attempt to put the blame on us and claim that Oracle support could not help us. That would lead to angry call to the duty manager, and finally waiting until Australia was picking up our calls to get a tech who would really figure out the problem.
Then there is the prioritization that Oracle sets on each call. Basically, you had better have a downed production server to get level one support (24x7 with your issue being pushed from tech to tech as timezones shift around the globe) where things usually get resolved in short order. If that isn't fast enough for you, there is also an escalated level 1, do not plan on sleeping while it is open, they expect you to answer your phone at any time of day, and will even lower the assigned level if you are not willing to work it along with them.
So... what's the down side?
Cash, simple as that... it costs a lot of money to get that sort of support, and as a 24x7 company that provides an essential product that is literally a 'life or death' issue for hundreds of thousands of Americans a year, we are willing to make that sort of investment. Honestly, if you step into the Oracle arena and do NOT think that you are going to spend a few hundred thousand bucks a year on support and upgrades, then you are just a fucking fool
As far as being a dinosaur goes, I got my dba and developer training and certs in 1997, kept them current when appropriate, or learned new tech as needed. At this point half the customizations we do are pretty much vanilla pl/sql concurrent programs or (old style) reports. There has been a fair amount of workflow (pl/sql behind a gui) and XML work to support the new web interface, and some extension of the Oracle APIs via pl/sql packages to .NET via EDO (or whatever flavor MS is pushing today). I have to admit that I am not one tenth as good in C# or Java as I am in pl/sql, but at least I can represent for Oracle while my other team members rip up the roads with C# and Java. It is entirely possible that I can wade through the rest of my career doing Oracle work (20 odd years to go), or a just rest in the shallows of management wasting the youngster's time with my back-in-the-day stories...
zzzz! Hey, you damn kids get offa my lawn!
Wherever You Go, There You Are