Oracle Bullies Enterprise Clients Into Cloud Purchases, Consultant Claims

An anonymous reader writes: A consultant claims that Oracle has adopted the widespread use of 'breach notices' this year to force existing enterprise customers to adopt its newly-bolstered range of cloud services, or else be told to stop using all Oracle software within thirty days. Speaking to Business Insider, the unnamed source described the tactic as a 'nuclear option' which is now practically the default when the need to add services or users to an existing contract triggers an 'audit' by Oracle. An ex-Oracle contract negotiator who now works in the ever-expanding business niche of 'Oracle contract negotiation' commented 'Internally, the water cooler gossip there is that they've never seen this kind of aggression before. Oracle has really dialed it up. Customers are buying cloud services to make the Oracle issue go away, not because they have any intention of using cloud services.'

Comments

Cloud for Pineapples

[Anonymous Coward]

Got to pay for Lanai some how.

How much you got?

[pigiron]

After dealing with Oracle for over thirty years I've learned that the answer to the question "how much does Oracle cost?" is "how much money do you have?"

Re:How much you got?

[Dutch Gun]

Seems like a desperation move for a company with under-target earnings, if they're willing to poison long-term relationships with their customers like that. You're going to see businesses deciding that they don't like having a gun held to their head. They'll pay the ransom for now, but some of them will probably start investigating other options in the background.

Re: How much you got?

[sanf780]

I do not know much about enterprise DBs like what Oracle offers. I wonder if there are viable alternatives.
The world of software I know shows three major software vendors, with loads and loads of tools in each bundle. From the statistics I have seen, there is no easy way to ditch a given software suite because it probably is the best tool from the whole range of options. Even if it is buggy as hell.

Re: How much you got?

[drolli]

The point in real life is not about being buggy, but about providing workarounds, solutions and prompt support for bugs. In the meantime i actually like companies who focus on the most important bugs and leave the rest alone.

(e.g. i am a heavy matlab user for 15 years, and my best times with ML were the ones where they only focused on the things which made it crash; my worst times with ML were the ones where they "fixed a fundamental problem".

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is not particularly buggy. It's a stable and mature piece of software. However, it's extremely limited, always has been. Like Cobol, everything is limited so it puts real constraints on the solutions you build with it.

Choosing Oracle is not really about support or quality though, it's about CYA. See, the people who makes the decisions don't really know what they're doing, but nobody was fired for choosing IBM^H^H^HOracle, so it must be a good fit for your system, right?

Wrong. There are many alternatives and better tools for various problems: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=oracle+alternatives
Even some who provide enterprise support.

Anyways, SQL is really really old now, and is only chosen because people generally don't like to think for themselves and open themselves up for risk. Well, then you're also becoming a dinosaur who uses IT as a cost center instead of advancing your business with evolution of technology. As soon as top management openly admits that, everything is good, because then they're finally being honest at least. It won't help the business though until they become expert at managing IT services, which today is part of every fucking company.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are alternatives to all the relational databases that use SQL and provide the whole ACID package? I don't particularly care about SQL as a language or relational data models as long as I know my data is guaranteed to be safe and up to date.

Re:How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just what happened at my previous job. The ever increasing cost and pure hostility against customers made the company start switching from Oracle to other alternatives.

Re: How much you got?

[cyber-vandal]

MongoDB is webscale!

Re: How much you got?

[__aajwxe560]

I'll go a step further - a few years ago, was looking to add SSO to web product for our customers, and as an existing Oracle customer, they had a package offering for SSO from acquisitions. After agreeing to pay for some base consulting to get preview going, quickly realized what a pile of overcomplicated shit it was at the time (the consultants flown in from all over the place couldn't get the base "hello world" even working, and they all claimed to do this all day long and not unusual challenge). I saw if they couldn't get going, didn't want the ongoing support nightmare, pulled the plug and went with something much simpler. Oracle sales guy laughed, said he already added the skus to our upcoming databse support renewal, and magically, if I tried to take them off, we would loose "bundle" pricing and costs would go way up for just our existing db licensing (ignoring the fact that they were effectively charging us 30% more regardless for no new actual software). One example of many. Oracle is the one company that can fuck off harder than Microsoft for their shitty biz tactics. They shoot themselves in the foot in big picture - any new companies u am at, I steer to anything but Oracle.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

this is just the latest morph in tactics, but this has been Oracle's strategy for over 20 years. way back then I made the conclusion that only in the most dire of circumstances would I recommend using Oracle's products. they are pure extortionists, and Lawrence is their king...

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

virtually the same story here. go get them, brother!

Re:How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia Calling
I believe the Whole of Government, renewed with Oracle because they promised they would fulfill existing support options and NOT push to cloud based anything. Sounds like things have changed. Remains to be seen if this trend comes to Australia, who has sacked 12% of seats, so the local salesman here, is not going to see revenue grow at all - in theory.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle doesn't make its money selling databases (which actually are solid and reliable). They make their money selling their business process software which *is* buggy as hell.

Re: How much you got?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I ahd virtually the same experience with Computer Associates back in the mid-to-late 90s. They were another "buy a user base and extort 'em, then discontinue the product and [force] re-sell 'em the replacement" kind of company.

It's just like Microsoft. Most people assume they're a computer company, but they're really a marketing company. Google is advertising, not search. Meanwhile, Oracle (and CA) aren't really technology companies, but sales organizations.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

On what fucking planet is Microsoft a marketing company?

Re: How much you got?

[Cassini2]

MariaDB. Google switched from MySQL to Oracle to MySQL to Google F1 for it's AdWords technology. See the wiki page on Adwords. Since then, many companies, including Google have switched their smaller MySQL databases to MariaDB.

There is an interesting account of the Google Oracle migration at the wayback machine.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think gmail would have become the most popular email service if it would have used ACID? ACID is *not* the only option. It's the *old* option. It's the expensive and slow option.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to know how Oracle sales work to fully make sense of what just happened. Oracle pushes its sales force to position products that are strategic to its earnings report and not the product that could best solve the problem at hand... In past few years, it was the era of Engineered Systems (Exadata).. What customer needed was just a bunch of cheap x86 servers and some Oracle DB licenses, but more often than not, the overall cost offered by the Oracle sales person would be the same with or without Exadata! And if you decided to not buy Exadata even then (because of 100 reasons, one of the common one being, its just won't integrate in your existing data center), the account manager could threaten you with a LMS (License Management System) audit.

I have myself seen customers holding multiple Exadata units in their docking area, and never even open the package, although on paper, each unit costed several hundred thousand dollars!

You may ask why? Well, if you are an Oracle account manager and do not sell a minimum stipulated numbers of Exadata, you won't quality for nice things like accelerated commissions!

Yesterday it was Engineered Systems, today it is Cloud... You will be surprised how much you can get done in the field by adopting a certain compensation plan for your sales force.

Mind you, Oracle as a company doesn't threaten the customers; its the sales folks who use this as a tactics to force customers into buying products or product mix that would earn them maximum commission!

Re: How much you got?

[Ambassador Kosh]

He was making fun of MongoDB.

It is a classic video.

Re:How much you got?

[Greyfox]

Funny thing is I've never seen a client that actually needed the power Oracle or DB2 brings to the table. Most of them don't need anything more complex than glorified key/value storage and some standards on where files shall be located. If you're a bank and need to store tens of millions of actually organized data, yeah, go for the big database. If you're a small business and need to store the company's shopping list for the next couple months, something as powerful as Postgres is probably overkill for you.

In other words, try spending as much on actually understanding your data and how it needs to be organized as you do on the thing you plan to store that data in.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a terrible suggestion.

MySQL (MariaDB is essentially MySQL) is very limited in it's SQL language support and query capabilities. If you're looking to switch from Oracle, the go to database is PostgreSQL. The syntax is nearly the same, the query engine is powerful.

People who use Oracle or Postgres use it because it has a powerful SQL engine. People who use MySQL or MariaDB use it as a glorified table store, because frankly, it's pretty much useless for anything more advanced than that.

Re: How much you got?

[tomhath]

Postgresql and Mongo are eating Oracle's lunch. The only thing stopping customers from switching these days is inertia.

Re:How much you got?

[gweihir]

Businesses have already decided to drop Oracle if possible. I know of some very large companies that plan a migration to Linux in the infrastructure mainly to get rid of Solaris and thereby of Oracle because of under-performance and overpricing.

Re: How much you got?

[gweihir]

MariaDB is only good if you need extremely fast. For a full ACID compliant DB, go for Postgres.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget how Business Objects raped all their customers who were using Crystal Reports. They released an upgrade of a popular product which formerly had a freely distributable run time library (built in to Visual Basic no less). About a year after the release they went after everyone who had upgraded because a well hidden clause in the new release license made that run time no longer free to distribute. Everyone using it had to pay the ransom and everyone I know who had been using it dropped it as soon as they could find an alternative.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

On what fucking planet is Microsoft a marketing company?

On earth. What planet are you on?

Re: How much you got?

[mabhatter654]

But support. If you are a medium business you need support... Because your IT department is no where near big enough for super detailed debugging when production is stopped and bills aren't being mailed out. My $200k support contract buys me a person on the line that will stay till the problem is fixed most of the time. The smaller players just can't do that reliably.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't MariaDB just MySql w/o Oracle? I mean, MySQL was always shit if you didn't want to randomly lose data. And with the only good tables for MySQL being owned by Oracle, what point does Maria have? Just use Postgres. It started out as correct, but slow, and has gotten faster everytime they update it, without losing "correct". MySQL started out as shit and fast and, well, you can't fix "shit".

Re: How much you got?

[pigiron]

Moronic. You better believe that transactional integrity is important. Care for an account from a bank whose systems didn't enforce it?

Re: How much you got?

[jedidiah]

MySQL variants are only acceptable if you are willing to tolerate data loss. It is not comparable to any of the payware RDBMS products at all. It hasn't even caught up to the robustness of Oracle from the 90s. Even other libre projects are not as dire in this respect.

Re: How much you got?

[jedidiah]

Yes. I had forgotten about MySQL's rudimentary support for SQL syntax. That is certainly annoying. Although I would find it's built in backup and recovery features much more troublesome from a production support perspective.

Re: How much you got?

[Z00L00K]

For the majority of cases MariaDB is sufficient, it's only when you need to do specialized stuff that it may not be sufficient, but that's the same with every database - you end up into the realm of vendor specific details.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

For $200k, you could *probably* find someone willing to debug postgres for you as well.

Re: How much you got?

[EmperorOfCanada]

Nearly every OS database has support options from either the very people who built them or other excellent companies. Plus if you run into a "support" issue you have probably run into a bug. Oracle isn't going to patch a bug for some chain of corner stores. They are also not going to hire "best of breed" developers who can fix things. They are going to have IT people who probably hate their jobs.

Re:How much you got?

[jedidiah]

Migrating to Linux does not address the Oracle issue.

Linux is the reference platform for Oracle.

It's an entirely orthogonal issue: OS vs RDBMS.

Re:How much you got?

[pigiron]

"In other words, try spending as much on actually understanding your data and how it needs to be organized as you do on the thing you plan to store that data in."

Yes and entity-relationaship modeling and a fully normalized logical data model are the tools used to do it in a rigorous fashion.

Re: How much you got?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I really really really really hate Oracle. I have used and hate MongoDB way worse. They have created this tool that on the surface gives the developer unlimited freedom; as long as they do things the MongoDB way. I hope that all the MongoDB people realize just how crappy and destructive a product they have created and entirely quit the technology world and go back to be being snobby baristas at some third rate coffee shop.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are alternatives to all the relational databases that use SQL and provide the whole ACID package?

The true answer to your question is on wikipedia.

However, since your question isn't quite relevant to Oracle, I'll join everyone else in answering the slightly different question "how can my data be reasonably safe even if I don't use Oracle". For the majority of applications where SQL is used ACID isn't honestly needed for safe data. Just keep adding it to a DBM and back it up regularly. Even where it is the promises of SQLite will be fine. Even better, if you every magically got to the stage where you needed Oracle later in your project and for some magic reason Postgres isn't a better fit for your needs (being simpler and normally perfectly performant) then the great thing about SQLite is that, if you can just read a bit, it uses the same SQL language so you can just change over to Oracle later.

N.B. I did not say "for the majority of data". I said for "the majority of applications". 90% of Oracle applications seem to hold a small table of users and a tiny bit of data that could just as well be listed in a file and read into memory. The corporate standard says "Oracle" so in it goes.

Re: How much you got?

[Khyber]

DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

That's the language of a software marketing company if ever there were any.

Re:How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

GP was referring to the company Oracle and it's software, not specifically to Oracle's database. Solaris is a Oracle OS, and GP describes businesses moving from Solaris to Linux to get away from Oracle-the-company.

Re: How much you got?

[Nkwe]

Do you think gmail would have become the most popular email service if it would have used ACID? ACID is *not* the only option. It's the *old* option. It's the expensive and slow option.

Maybe ACID doesn't mean what you think it means. It is not a technology that is "old" or "new", it is a way to think about the requirements of your system. Each of the four letters in ACID stands for a particular property of a database system and these properties (in various combinations) may or may not be needed by the system being built.

If your system is processing something where the integrity of the data is important (like financial systems), you are very likely going to need all four properties. If you are moving money from one place to another, you want to guarantee that that the the money is completely moved or not. You don't want the money partially moved, you don't want money to be lost, and you don't want money to be created out of thin air. ACID (as a concept) guarantees this.

If your solution requires ACID, you don't have to use a database that supports all of the properties of ACID, you could instead implement ACID in your application layer. However if you do this, you have to guarantee that that your application layer implements it properly and that there is no possible way to get to the underlying data store without going through the application layer. You also have to guarantee that no changes, updates, upgrades, or bugs in your application layer every break the ACID guarantee at any time. Making all of these guarantees in your application layer is VERY HARD, which is why people use ACID complaint databases instead to solve this particular problem set.

If your requirements don't need the properties described by ACID, than there isn't anything wrong with using a non ACID database. If may be acceptable for your data to "eventually" become consistent, to be inconsistent, or maybe even lost.

In the gmail example, you don't really need all the ACID properties, so you don't need to use that sort of database to hold the information. Email is not transactional end to end; when you send an email you are not guaranteed that it will get there. Email is also not order guaranteed; if you send multiple emails there is not a guarantee (or need) for them to arrive in the destination mailbox in order. If you are bulk moving messages from one mailbox to another, and only some of them get moved, it is okay and you can just move the remaining messages later.

As always, it is important to chose the right technology to solve the problem you need to solve. ACID compliant databases solve a lot of important problems (usually involving money), and if you have one of those problems, there is nothing "old" about ACID.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a good start as any really. ACID is really nice and not something you should trade off, if the data is worth anything.

Neo4j / property graph databases is worth a dozen looks. It might not be a replacement for everything, but it's probably the most generic datastructure ever invented.

IMHO, you should start with a generic solution and then choose a special one (key-value, column, document, RDBMS/SQL, any aggregate DB,...) when there is real need for that. That's the agile way at least. Neo4j is ACID compliant. It's distributed. It doesn't have Toad or all the tooling yet, but it'll come. It's a step further in evolution, so will require some work to create the right UI for it. Cypher, the language "replacing" SQL in that space, is what SQL claimed to be from the start (and more) and builds on syntax similar to SQL and the graphs themselves. Of course, there's a programmatic API and you can make engine extensions yourself as well.

You should challenge yourself though: If all you need is "select * from schema.table", then maybe a simpler database may be a better fit. However, a property graph database can grow with your solution with minimal amount of refactoring, so is even a good fit to start off a really simple solution with. Neo4j is tuned for transactional data, not for global graph functions, but can perform them. Highly connected data may in some cases be hard to shard, and if performance is required, some sharding may be required to cache optimally. The difference is that Neo4j can model all other databases, but they cannot natively model Neo4j / graph property DBs. Oh yeah, they've got an Enterprise version.

I'm beginning to think Go + Neo4j might be a very good direction to "go" (pun intended):
1) Neo4j for massively connected data and high performance
2) Go for massively concurrency, minimization of nasty surprises and optimal software service cycle

Of course, such things will require some technical competency, in which companies should invest.
See some videos by Jim Webber on Neo4j and some videos by the makers of Go. I think there's more real stuff vs hype there than all the other "NoSQL" and language-variants combined. Stuff that'll help both in enterprise and for "easily doing more for less" in hobby projects.

Parent poster, not affiliated with Neo4j

Captcha: compel

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

PostgreSQL has been getting faster with each release the last 15 years, and by so much that I haven't seen any compelling evidence that MariaDB has been faster in any meaningful manner for several years.

Re:How much you got?

[simcop2387]

That's exactly what was happening at my last company. Between all the locations/departments etc. they had a total contract with Oracle on the order of ~$4m. They recently finished the migration from what I've heard to completely shutting out Oracle entirely.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

We use Oracle at my place-of-employment.. We frequently find bugs in Oracle software and since we're paying customers, they do fix them. Regardless of how much Oracle may be a bully at the sales table, there is a point in which people would just drop them. Buggy software that doesn't get fixed would be one of the motivations to switch to something else.

Re: How much you got?

[St.Creed]

For the majority of cases where MariaDB is sufficient, you'd probably get away with using MSAccess in the background.

Re: How much you got?

[St.Creed]

Actually, the last time this was debated here I brought up a similar point, and someone else pointed out that banks don't use ACID but mostly use eventual consistency for their transaction systems. That does cause them to lose (a lot of) money sometimes, but they write it off against the expenses of real-time ACID compliance.

Re:How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Some"? I suspect "Most" will, unless they themselves are financially under-target themselves and can't afford it. But that opens up the door for a new dev company willing to make switches/transitions a snap with a new product.

Re: How much you got?

[St.Creed]

It's not just buggy as hell, it's also slow as molasses due to their insistence on using Java everywhere, and not particularly well-written Java at that. Add to that a really weird method of using the database and you have a horrible experience.

I like Apex and Oracle SQL Developer though. Still somewhat buggy, but at least they're free.

Re: How much you got?

[St.Creed]

MongoDB is a document database. If I wanted a document database to story the company data I would have switched to Lotus Domino a long time ago.

Re: How much you got?

[St.Creed]

I have myself seen customers holding multiple Exadata units in their docking area, and never even open the package, although on paper, each unit costed several hundred thousand dollars!

Dang! Any chance you could get me a nice offer on those?

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

The limitations of mysql, are significant, but they are there for a reason. MariaDB excels in situations where response time is more important than strict data integrity. As usual in software, people get in trouble when they try to use it for the wrong things.

Re: How much you got?

[phantomfive]

And even then, MariaDB seems to only be faster on simple queries. On complex queries, Postgres does better.

Re: How much you got?

[Z00L00K]

If you can make MSAccess work on Linux.

Re:How much you got?

[FranTaylor]

Linux is the reference platform for Oracle.

Not true at all. Solaris is the reference platform for Oracle. They own the whole thing, hardware and software. When you buy Oracle on Solaris you are getting the ultimate "reference" platform for all things Oracle.

Linux CANNOT be a "reference" platform for Oracle, because they don't control it, they can't mold it to fit their needs. However they can do whatever they want with Solaris, to make it into their "reference" platform.

Re: How much you got?

[FranTaylor]

on the planet where they run television ads for hardware made by other companies

Re: How much you got?

[jgriffith325]

I've been there. They don't stay on the line. They transfer you to someone new every 4 hours. And they usually helped not one bit, and certainly not enough to justify the costs. It was almost always our in house experts that solved our problems. Or Redhat. For 200k, you can definitely find someone better than the Oracle support line to help.

Re: How much you got?

[Greyfox]

I hear the support argument a lot. Again, in my experience the amount of support anyone ever actually needs is significantly less than the price they pay to get that support. And sure, there is some risk in going with an unsupported product. That risk can typically be mitigated, too. Really, if your company needs constant hand-holding from a supplier for one of their products, that would be a red flag to me about the quality of that product or the quality of your employees. Or maybe both.

Re:How much you got?

[Gavagai80]

Oracle's own linux distro is the reference platform. Solaris is dead and Oracle knows it.

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously because..

Oracle tried selling Exawhatever appliances to us. The cost was three times the price of the competition - who won our business.

They've slashed prices since, but they're still threatening to unleash LMS on us. I'm not terribly scared - last time I had to go head to head with them I pointed out that their proposed licensing model would cause a $2bn license fee for us, and even they agreed that probably wasn't reasonable.

Oracle do hold the threat of an audit as a clear negotiating tactic. Our SAM team know their job, so our exposure is minimal, but there is a sizeable cost to an audit. I'm recommending that we ditch Oracle as a preferred supplier, and start using our strong relationships with IBM, CA, et al.

The issue isn't the database technology, it's the applications. Oracle keep buying the top business application providers, so even if you don't buy anything from Oracle any sizeable company ends up as their customer. Their apps are good too, there's a lot of value there.

Just not enough to justify trying to work with such a sociopathic fucked up business.

Re:How much you got?

[Frobnicator]

This is just what happened at my previous job. The ever increasing cost and pure hostility against customers made the company start switching from Oracle to other alternatives.

Ditto. Our edict last year was "get off Oracle by the end of the fiscal year". The priority from the CEO was published and restated every month: #1, keep the existing service running, #2, get off Oracle.

Every sprint planning meeting at every team began by restating that goal. Do only minimum bug fixes necessary to keep the system running, all other tasks must be toward getting us off Oracle before the end of the fiscal year. Existing features could be reduced if that helped get us off Oracle quicker or more safely. When one team was finished they were assigned to help other teams with their transitions.

I'm not privy to all the details, but I know the organization spent a few million each year for an all encompassing unlimited license and we could create databases and fire up servers all we wanted. But then something happened a year ago, we were warned that Oracle's contract prices would be radically shifting, and everywhere within the organization we were to devote all development efforts across all platforms to getting off Oracle. It annoyed some customers, but when we told the bigger contracts that our organization was getting off Oracle, they immediately claimed to understand and would wait until that was complete before demanding new features.

Re: How much you got?

[JDG1980]

I do not know much about enterprise DBs like what Oracle offers. I wonder if there are viable alternatives.

Probably 95%-99% of organizations currently on Oracle would be better off on MS SQL Server instead. It's a far superior product.

Re: How much you got?

[arth1]

Does MariaDB (MySQL forked by the author of MySQL) now support ACID, raw devices and live guaranteed viable backups?
If so, that's welcome news.

PostgreSQL (pgsql) has been the main alternative for a while, but in my experience, despite automatic vacuumdb and similar, busy / complex databases still need to be dumped and restored periodically, or else they become terribly sluggish over time.
For 24/7/365, pg is not always the best alternative. It may be for 24/7/90, but in my experience, it is one of the databases that require the most scheduled downtime.

Re: How much you got?

[arth1]

MongoDB is a document database. If I wanted a document database to story the company data I would have switched to Lotus Domino a long time ago.

Speaking of blobcentric databases, whatever happened to Informix? It was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread for documents, and would render file systems obsolete, if I remember their marketing correctly...

Re:How much you got?

[gweihir]

Rather obviously, I was not referring to Oracle DB, but Oracle Solaris. And, again rather obviously, the migration is _not_ to Oracle Linux.

Re:How much you got?

[gweihir]

Indeed. I see what I said was clear enough for an intelligent person to understand.

Re:How much you got?

[gweihir]

As can be seen by the lack of updates and development effort to fix, e.g., the parts of the network stack that are still abysmally slow (e.g. local sockets).

Re: How much you got?

[gweihir]

Quite possibly so. In that case, there is no reason left to use MariaDB.

Re: How much you got?

[gweihir]

That does not surprise me at all.

Re: How much you got?

[AlexSasha]

That's because none of their non-db software was actually written by Oracle. It is practically 100% result of some acquisition.

Re: How much you got?

[pigiron]

Informix was bought by IBM in 2001 and is still under active development. Latest release was 3 weeks ago.

Re: How much you got?

[ranton]

For the majority of applications where SQL is used ACID isn't honestly needed for safe data. Just keep adding it to a DBM and back it up regularly.

This comment made me cringe. ACID has almost nothing to do with regular backups. Backing up a non-ACID database regular does not make it even close to ACID compliant. This is one of the reasons why ACID is unfortunately so important; because almost no software developers even know what it is.

Re: How much you got?

[Proudrooster]

It's not so much hand holding as the rare bug that deadlocks a business critical database that needs 99.999% (5 nines) uptime. Even with clustering and replication, Oracle support has had to produce kernel patches to fix semaphore freakouts and/or spinning on lock waits. Software was created by humans and there are bugs and flaws (like race conditions on locks for atomic resources) which were not foreseen in testing (or foreseen but not handled). When this happens you need the almighty Oracle to bail you out so that this problem never happens again and you can sleep at night.

The question is, "Is Oracle worth the money?" and the answer depends on your needs: scalability, reliability, and of course uptime.

Oracle has been playing the licensing game for years. First it was the network license (how many connections), then the running process license, then the CPU license, then the virtualized environment license, and now the cloud license. Oh, and if an Oracle salesdroid asks if they can come onsite and analyze your systems so they can help save you money on licensing, repeat after me, "NO!"

Re: How much you got?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mssql
Sap sybase
Sap maxdb
Sap hana

Re: How much you got?

[TheRealLifeboy]

Enterprise DB (Postgresql) is the alternative. Ask Sony. They moved to EDB.

Re: How much you got?

[St.Creed]

I keep seeing Informix pop up now and then, but I never meet anyone who actually uses it. The marketing blurb looks interesting though, but given that it's IBM, the pricetag is probably of the kind that "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".

Can't appreciate ...

[MxMatrix]

... the company ever since they started pushing buggy updates back in 2003. Calling them Horracle.

Re:Can't appreciate ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the canonical term is 'Orrible.

Re:Can't appreciate ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I thought most people called them:

One
Raving
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison

Headline from the future:

[Gravis Zero]

The End of Oracle: Unhappy Customers Jumping Ship In Droves

You can only be pushy for as long as you are irreplaceable.

Irreplaceable? Pretty much forever for Oracle

[mimino]

You cannot create a competitive product and grow big enough without being sued to oblivion.

Re:Irreplaceable? Pretty much forever for Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

That is an interesting statement. Are you insinuating that Oracle uses its dominant position in a market to kill off competition in a way that not necessarily complies with monopoly laws?

Re: Irreplaceable? Pretty much forever for Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US we call that 'free market capitalism' and people who want to do something about it 'job killers'.

Just another of many free market fails.

Re: Irreplaceable? Pretty much forever for Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

Intellectual property is very much against the free market in the laissez faire sense that you seem to despise.

Re:Irreplaceable? Pretty much forever for Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

If you just need the database and not the other things they sell around it, I guess DB2 or even MSSQL are worth a look. Not that IBM or Microsoft are happy fun companies out to save you money, but at least they're not Oracle.

Re:Irreplaceable? Pretty much forever for Oracle

[ColdWetDog]

I'm sure IBM is worried.

We're ditching Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company which develops online charging solutions currently in production on several telcos worldwide and although this is news for us, since last year we have been replacing all Oracle products with open-source software.
The non-Oracle version is already running in the lab with at least the same performance level of the old one and we won't go back.

Re: We're ditching Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

Well of course you can't go back from "tested in lab" after you already did.

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[jellomizer]

Oracle is only good for huge implementations. I see a lot of organizations that use Oracle but at a level were it isn't nessary.
And many of the other product open source and closed commercial are actually quite good, and not like in the 1990's
Where you had Oracle and crap systems that peaked at around 500,000 rows.
oddly enough just as long as you don't have dumb ass vendors switching to an other database system isn't as hard as it seems. Just as long as you don't make the mistake and become a "vendor" shop.

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[Shados]

And this is where things are getting dicey for Oracle. Even an open source DB can deal with billions of rows. And when you go beyond that, people start using multiple interconnected specialized systems instead: a big mismatch of a relational db, hadoop, redshift, dynamo, vertica, spark, etc.

If you need a trillion records in one table, there's better commercial options than Oracle. If you can need specialized tool to handle different data sets of various size, you'll be using a soup of tools, most of which are open source.

There's no reason to use Oracle stuff anymore, aside for legacy compatibility, or if you use their ERP (which for large Retail, is probably the best one, unfortunately)

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason smaller companies choose Oracle is they are planning on getting huge and want to be already ready when they do.

Of course as the sibling says, there is no need for Oracle nowadays even for huge. Postgresql scales quite well to very large size and for insane size there are better specialized options than oracle.

There are still likely some use cases where Oracle is the best option, but for me at least, it would simply never be worth putting up with their bullshit.

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[FranTaylor]

Even an open source DB can deal with billions of rows.

bzzzt wrong, you clearly haven't set up enterprise databases on 64 core systems with hundreds of gigs of RAM and big disk farms. All of the "free" databases will treat this like an 8 core system at best, a terrible waste of money. Try running really big benchmarks against databases like DB2 and you can watch the "free" databases will end up costing more.

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[Shados]

You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.

disclaimer: the company I work for runs a little over a trillion (a trillion as in a thousand billion) records in _ONE_ table, which is also our most used one. That doesn't count the hundreds of other tables.

Yes, the primary source of that data is a commercial database (vertica). Its also not an RDBMS (doing the kind of stuff we do even on an Oracle DB would be absurd). But we do use open postgresql and other open source non-relational dbs for the datamarts, and they'll easily take a few billion records.

Sure, you could dump the trillion records in an RDBMS with "hundreds of gigs of ram". But that is downright retarded for anything but the most specialized scenarios. Even big finance no longer do that shit.

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[FranTaylor]

You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.

you do if you have 10,000 concurrent users

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[FranTaylor]

You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.

modern databases have parallelization, well-indexed queries can utilize hundreds of cores

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[Shados]

10000 isn't even that much. My previous employer ran 100~ billion record tables on a 100 million user a year, about 20-30k concurrent at all time, thousand transactions a minute, on freagin MSSQL on 16 core machines.

The only thing that happens is you have to be really careful with your database design, partitioning, etc. My wife works for freagin Amazon, and they don't have that much trouble getting their e-commerce site working. I never asked, but I'd be very surprised if they ran their backend on Oracle =P

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, pretty please tell me your NISC???

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

Even an open source DB can deal with billions of rows.

bzzzt wrong, you clearly haven't set up enterprise databases on 64 core systems with hundreds of gigs of RAM and big disk farms. All of the "free" databases will treat this like an 8 core system at best, a terrible waste of money. Try running really big benchmarks against databases like DB2 and you can watch the "free" databases will end up costing more.

bzzzzt wrong yourself. Your automatic assumption that the only way to scale is to have one DB on one box is wrong.

Almost always there are multiple ways to scale effectively and almost always open source is way more cost effective if you put even a few minutes thought into it.

Yes, if you want high capacity, high reliability, high uptime, high throughput etc. naive open source solutions won't be good enough but the same applies equally to proprietary solutions and they cost a whole lot more. Far more cost effective to use your brain.

Re:We're ditching Oracle

[tigersha]

Forgive me but I have to ask. WHAT exactly uses a table with a trillion rows in it??!!

Business Continuity

[Anonymous Coward]

*Adds using Oracle software to the risk model, in the external threats to business continuity section.* Hackers, Oracles, Terrorists, what else..

Re:Business Continuity

[St.Creed]

I hadn't considered that, but it actually makes a lot of sense.

ORACLE is

[wbr1]

One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison

Re:ORACLE is

[Anonymous Coward]

There are anti-bullying laws, please use them.

Re:ORACLE is

[Anonymous Coward]

One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison

One does not become a billionaire by being a nice fair guy.

Re:ORACLE is

[Anonymous Coward]

One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison

One does not become a billionaire by being a nice fair guy.

No, you become a billionaire by giving yourself hundreds of millions of shares of stock. Worked for Bill Gates.

Re:ORACLE is

[tom229]

Our society has really become so thin skinned and weak? It's a sad time.

Re:ORACLE is

[khallow]

No, you become a billionaire by giving yourself hundreds of millions of shares of stock.

No, it's not that easy. Someone has to be willing to buy those shares from you at a few dollars each. Else you're just dealing in imaginary play money.

Re:ORACLE is

[pigiron]

One does not become a billionaire by being a nice fair guy.

No you do it by criminally mis-stating your corporate earnings in order to goose up the quarterly numbers which rug-merchant Larry did twice!

Re:ORACLE is

[Anonymous Coward]

>imaginary play money

Like Wall Street's dark pools and derivitives fantasy? A bucket shop is a bucket shop...

Re:ORACLE is

[khallow]

Like ... derivitives fantasy?

Someone is willing to give you money for that. That makes it a cut above imaginary money. And dark pools are markets not securities.

Re:ORACLE is

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the difference with Amazon is that Jeff Bezos bullies his own employees, not his customers (yet).

Re:ORACLE is

[FranTaylor]

No you do it by criminally mis-stating your corporate earnings in order to goose up the quarterly numbers which rug-merchant Larry did twice!

yeah, investors really do believe these reports

in some weird fantasy...

Re:ORACLE is

[pigiron]

He got caught twice. Lord knows how many goosed up quarterly reports went through un-noticed.

Danegeld

[MikeRT]

This is nothing more than corporate Danegeld. It will probably end about as well for most of their customers. They'll be just shocked when Oracle comes back in a few years and launches another attack on them.

Virtually every database I've ever seen is a bit bucket. There's precisely zero reasons for them to be on Oracle because the data set is well into the size where PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server could easily provide a more cost-effective alternative. If you use Oracle for that, you get what you deserve.

Oracle is just doing this crap because they've realized that nobody really wants them for big data. They know that their future is mainly limited to the sort of customers that are willing to buy and build SQL databases for their data. There's plenty of legitimate room for that sort of data and they'll do fine. They just can't accept that they're on the infrastructure side of cloud computing and big data that corresponds to where Microsoft is in mobile.

Heck, Microsoft at this point should black knight them by releasing a trojan that infects company networks and all it does is audit their Oracle stack and send Oracle sales an email telling what it finds on the company network.

Re:Danegeld

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle sells and even makes more software than just their database product.
That's like thinking Microsoft sells nothing but Windows 7 and 8.

So take my situation, our company has used JD Edwards ERP for over 15 years.
On Microsoft SQL Server no less.
Oracle purchased JD Edwards some time ago however, so now also falls under "Oracle Enterprise Products".

Your advice is to switch to a SQL server we are already using, and avoid using Oracle's SQL which we are not (and to my knowledge never have, or if so it was longer than 10 years ago before I was with the company)

As you weren't aware Oracle sells other software, I can safely assume you never used, migrated, or switched between different ERP software solutions.
It is only second next to migrating off a custom in-house solution and shoehorning your data into some other pre-made software package that wasn't written for you or your needs specifically.

Until the cost of migrating is lower than the cost of a new ERP system plus a time period of migration paying licensing on both products, plus the downtime for the testing, bug and non feature parity fixes and workarounds, plus full test suites to be created from scratch and verified... You simply don't do it.

Given our own situation the known cost would be around $25 million, plus the cost of a new ERP package.

That is a huge cost, and effectively translates directly to the amount of abuse Oracle can send our way where both they and we know it isn't cost effective to switch away from them.

That's a lot of abuse worth to my eye.

Re:Danegeld

[lucm]

Virtually every database I've ever seen is a bit bucket. There's precisely zero reasons for them to be on Oracle because the data set is well into the size where PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server could easily provide a more cost-effective alternative.

That's fine for in-house stuff. The problem is when the organization buys an ERP or accounting package that requires Oracle. Maybe it could technically run on MySQL, but the vendor doesn't support that.

Usually the only other supported database is SQL Server, but this means having Windows servers, and for an organization that has made a substantial investment in big AIX or HPUX, it's a show stopper.

Red Hat has done a terrific job of making Linux enterprise-friendly. It's common nowadays to have organizations run RHEL on their old PowerPC or Itanium monsters. Now if Microsoft could release a version of SQL Server that runs on Linux we could all forget Oracle.

Re:Danegeld

[phantomfive]

Oracle does much more than databases. They make software businesses use, and when a competitor gets too strong, they buy them, hostilely if necessary. Oracle is good at making sure there are no alternatives too their software.

Re:Danegeld

[Anonymous Coward]

If that were true, it would be trivial to sue them claiming monopolistic abusive business practices.

Re:Danegeld

[phantomfive]

it would be trivial to sue them claiming monopolistic abusive business practices.

Suing someone for monopolistic practices is never a trivial thing to do. Remember than Microsoft was convicted of being a monopolist, and still got away with basically zero punishment.

News at 11

[ThePhilips]

Oracle is being Oracle, claim people who can't do anything without Oracle.

Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, so its bad enough now getting data out of an Oracle database locally, but instead we're supposed to put all this critical business data into cloud services?

How much would you pay to get access to your critical business data that your MBAs were do stupid as to 'cloudify'!

Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[Chris Mattern]

Meh, while I'm sure Oracle would love the idea of holding your data hostage in the cloud, at the moment they're not insisting on it. As I understand the news article, customers are having to pay them for cloud services but don't actually have to use it.

Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not actually using the cloud service, they're just buying cloud licenses because that's the cheapest option to avoid triggering penalties from an adverse finding in an audit regarding the number of users they have in their environment.

Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is simply boiling the frog at this point, starting off on low heat. If you think their ulterior motive is anything but total customer data lock-in to secure future licensing revenue...I've got some land on Mars to sell you.

Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[drinkypoo]

Oracle is going to boil itself. The rise of MS SQL Server happened because databases were slow on Windows. SQL Server, last I checked, was faster than all the competition at light loads... but scaled worst. That was a long time ago though. When Oracle's licensing tactics make Microsoft look good, there is opportunity.

Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of extreme moron would buy database software based on client licensing?

Per server licensing, I get that, some folks are dumb, even though PostgreSQL is actually a better database today than Oracle or DB2 and doesn't cost a dime.

But my god do you have to have your asshole stretched over a special spire of stupidity to think licensing a database with per user licensing in any way makes sense.

Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

No no, we're talking about Oracle's business software, not their database software. Yeah, they still sell Oracle DB as a standalone product, which is priced by sockets/cores as far as I know, but their real profit comes from their business process software. Oracle sells software that does everything from HR, accounting, supply chain, and a bunch of other things and it is THOSE things that sold on a per-seat basis.

Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[St.Creed]

I'm using SQL Server 2012 now (first time I ever used SQL Server for serious data loads) and I have to say it performs pretty good as a data warehouse for a moderate size organisation. We're loading 500 million lines and it seems to hold up well on a single mid-range server. Querying the whole set is not a pleasant experience if you do a full scan, but if the index is selective enough we get okay performance out of that as well.

Over the last decade most of my deployments were on Oracle but I think that for almost any business I know, SQL Server is a pretty good alternative. I'm not so impressed with the query performance but update/insert performance is much better that I know of Oracle.

However... if you need decent materialized views, or analytical functions, or really low-level control over the database, Oracle is still the first contender. Statistics are easier to manage on SQL Server, though.

However... the SQL Server pricing is not as low as it once was, and climbing steadily into Oracle territory. So unless Microsoft can keep the price down, it may not offer much of an alternative.

Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud

[drinkypoo]

However... if you need decent materialized views, or analytical functions, or really low-level control over the database, Oracle is still the first contender.

Sure, but there were lots of things Sybase X didn't do when Microsoft got their mitts on it, and started turning it into SQL Server. It can do more.

However... the SQL Server pricing is not as low as it once was, and climbing steadily into Oracle territory. So unless Microsoft can keep the price down, it may not offer much of an alternative.

Right, but we now live in a bizarro-world where Microsoft's selling point can be that they are less evil than Oracle.

Get what you deserve

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been well known for decades that Oracle is a scummy company. Anyone who does business with them deserves to get fleeced.

Re:Get what you deserve

[Cederic]

I did business with BEA. Oh.
I did business with Sun. Oh.
I did business with Eloqua, BigMachines, GoldenGate, Hyperion, PeopleSoft and Siebel.

I might be able to replace WLS and the Sparc hardware but switching out a CRM, a HR system, a Finance system, a Marketing system.. that costs a fuck of a lot of money.

I have many issues with Oracle but I seem to be doing business with them nonetheless.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

"Oracle Photoshop"

[Applehu Akbar]

Adobe is also pushing users toward their vision of the cloud. I have an IT client who needed to use InDesign for a publishing project. It seems like a ripoff to have to subscribe by the month for cloud software, but it was a cost she was willing to bear and at least there's a lessened degree of platform dependence, right? So she signed up, only to discover that the cloud version will not run on Windows Vista. Adobe still sells the direct-install Version 6, but Vista was supported only up through 5.5 . Adobe no longer sells 5.5, and will not allow anyone else to sell it. Torrent time!

Re:"Oracle Photoshop"

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that very few if any torrents of popular Windows Apps are free of malware right? Then again... you consider Downloading and installing warez onto your client's network the preferable option to migrating a couple machines to a newer Windows version -- so I suspect not. Personally, I don't think you have any business being an IT Consultant for anyone and suggest you stop before someone discovers what a fucktard you are and sues you.

Re:"Oracle Photoshop"

[ColdWetDog]

While hardly an Adobe apologist, you have a client that is running an OS that the OS vendor barely supports and you want an application vendor to tailor it's policies to your edge case? For software that there are other alternatives for?

Be reasonable. And, if your client is a 'real' business, suggesting that they torrent something is pretty dodgy. It could well end up costing them much more than an upgrade to a newer OS.

Re:"Oracle Photoshop"

[Applehu Akbar]

"you want an application vendor to tailor it's policies to your edge case?"

Exactly. I'm not asking Adobe to invest manpower into keeping an old version updated, but just to continue selling a version it has already developed. At the very least, allow third parties to sell it. Pure profit, and they are passing it up.

Re:"Oracle Photoshop"

[Anonymous Coward]

Monthly fees are so much more useful in financial shenanigans than a one time purchase of a license.

Re:"Oracle Photoshop"

[Anonymous Coward]

Supporting Vista along with 7 isn't really that hard. They are basically the same kernel.

claim is misleading

[Anonymous Coward]

Drop the word "cloud" and it will be more accurate ;-)

Alternative to Oracle Database

[BBCWatcher]

IBM's DB2 is the most prominent, most direct, most capable alternative. DB2 ranges from the zero license charge DB2 Express-C all the way up to the true continuous business service, mission critical DB2 for z/OS (that even Larry Ellison says nice things about). There's even a DB2 database cum tightly coupled operating system (IBM i). IBM publishes an Oracle to DB2 Conversion Guide and associated migration tools, and IBM has done a lot of work to implement technologies (e.g. PL/SQL) that make it easier to move to DB2. I don't know of any other realistic options because they have various shortcomings such as poor cross-platform support (notably Microsoft SQL Server), questionable SQL and/or ACID attributes, poor application support, and/or questionable enterprise support. In some cases you might be able to get away with MariaDB, for example, but you're probably going to need at least some DB2 to clear out Oracle completely -- and that's what you really need to do if you've got an abusive relationship. You'll also have to clear out some Oracle applications and middleware, but IBM is an obvious competitor there, too.

Re: Alternative to Oracle Database

[binarylarry]

How can you not mention postgres?

Re: Alternative to Oracle Database

[jedidiah]

Where do you get the same kind of support contract for postgres that you would for Oracle? These companies that are being bullied probably want that part of the package.

Re: Alternative to Oracle Database

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, apart from the teeth pulling and ass-rape, RedHat will support you fine. Unfortunately I understand that those are the dominant things from Oracle, so I really proably can't help you with your problem. Sorry.

Re: Alternative to Oracle Database

[Anonymous Coward]

Seen this over and over again. Real world tests on my workplace showed that, even though PostgreSQL is extremely good for its price (free), on real world workloads it didn't cut it.

Imagine it like this: For 10 concurrent accesses, oracle would average 100ms and postres 30ms. For 100, oracle would do 105 and postgres 70. For 500 they were even around 110. For 1000, the postgres database would take seconds and oracle would do 150ms.

True, you might be able to do some juju to tune your postgres and have better performance, but it's not the same as Oracle, like most of the internet seems to think.

The real true world alternative to Oracle right now would be DB2, but transaction management in DB2 can be a nightmare.

Re: Alternative to Oracle Database

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.enterprisedb.com/ Its Postgres with enterprise support.With Postgres 9.4 you can even do NoSQL with ACID compliance.

Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

You ( and so many others ) forget oracle is NOT just a database company. They also sell enterprise apps, and dev tools that lock you into their DB since that is the ONLY thing the final app will work with ( Apex for example ).. Once you get on the train it's really hard to get off, especially financially. ( actual hard cost of the change, then the soft cost of starting over ... )

Are there alternatives to everything? Sure, but it's not just a simple 'lets move our data somewhere else' and you have to address the entire ecosystem.

Oh, and remember they still 'own' java too, so a lot of us are potentially screwed if they find a way to stick it to us....

Re: Irreplaceable? Pretty much forever for Oracl

[Anonymous Coward]

A good point, though what I actually despise is the deception that people call a free market today. The people who promote such things on a corporate and government level certainly don't have a problem with intellectual property and yet they call what they promote free market capitalism.

Also, the free market isn't the magic solution for everything, though in software it should be totally fine, even ideal, were it not for intellectual property as you already pointed out.

Get In Fucking Line!

[Anonymous Coward]

Partial list of companies bullying customers into buying cloud services:

Microsoft
Symantec
Trend Micro
Adobe
Apple
Google ...

These are companies that have working stand alone product that they are deactivating and discontinuing and replacing with cloud products. It seems that all companies are forcing cloud services. More specifically, they're all forcing subscription model purchases.

Thank God for Open Source Software! But watch out because even OSS darling, Ubuntu, is trying the same cloudy subscription bullshit!

Re: Get In Fucking Line!

[Anonymous Coward]

Govnmnt pressuring them to get thier users data into the cloud so they can 'analyze' it, for threats ofc.

Re: Get In Fucking Line!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been up Apple's ass since 2000. I write and sell apps for their platform. Please give me one example of an app they're forcing into a cloud / subscription model. Just one.

I call bullshit on your list since at least part of it is bullshit.

Re: Get In Fucking Line!

[Anonymous Coward]

iPhone
iPad
iTunes

You're welcome. Now STFU!

Why does anyone use Oracle?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I ask the question why does anyone use oracle in this day and age? I am not asking for a whitepaper or some PR generated sales points but a real answer from real technical people who have a broad experience with multiple databases. I think that it is mighty telling that none of the mega data companies use Oracle; the facebooks, the googles, the reddits, the slashdots. Basically if their data needs are met by the likes of MySQL, redis, postgres, etc then what company or organization can claim that they need something more "Enterprise class"?

The companies that I have seen using Oracle often could literally have used access for their data needs and had been wildly overserved by having an Oracle database. Something like my personal favourite MariaDB running on a single halfway decent computer could easily handle the needs of a fair sized power company. Put that on a nice cluster of fairly run of the mill servers and it would be solid as a rock.

I have no idea what koolaid the Oracle salespeople are serving up but I would love if someone wrote a guidebook on how to sell like that as at least people might figure out a way to resist.

So I can't see any customer of any size from the very smallest to the very largest needing Oracle. It strikes me as a variation of the old saying, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Sun followed in those footsteps in the 90s but things like Linux put paid to Sun's dominance. Why haven't the excellent OpenSource databases put paid to Oracle?

Re:Why does anyone use Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very seldom the database itself people buy now; Oracle's main business is selling ERP stuff that just happens to use an Oracle DB in the background. Going by some other comments, they even sell products (from companies they have bought) that will work with other SQL servers ... as long as they get their money, it's not the DB that's important.

Re:Why does anyone use Oracle?

[jedidiah]

Anyone that actually cares about their data uses Oracle or something like it. Droning on about raw speed that's probably achieved with a dubious configuration really isn't relevant to people that have serious work to do that can't be interrupted.

If you think that MySQL is a drop in replacement for any Oracle database then you're probably missing the point entirely.

Re:Why does anyone use Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that actually cares about their data uses Oracle or something like it.

Bullshit. Only a fucking noob would choose Oracle.

You sound like an Oracle sales who doesn't know jack shit about the progress of Mysql/MariaDB.

Huge break throughs and improvements have been made on Mysql/MariaDB over the past few years, there have been numerous codes/patches/features offered from big clusters such as Facebook as well as talented individuals.

XtraDB, GTID, Semi Sync Replication, and the progress of ZFS, just look at their change logs.

Your data is much safer running XtraDB/InnoDB on ZFS, than running on Oracle.

And the newest Galera Cluster is bulletproof, it'll soon be merged into MariaDB code base. Every data you write is guranteed to be on atleast one slave before the write is even acknowledged, and every transaction are now individually IDed so replication/recovery can be multi threaded with zero conflicts.

These features are all miles ahead of Oracle, and they are free.

Mysql/MariaDB is powerful enough for most businesses, and when you're as big as Google/Facebook, Oracle can't handle the load.

Fuck Oracle. It's just a bunch of sales teams talking bullshit to managers who doesn't know shit about technology, locking companies in with licenses, that's how they make money, not with technology, but with marketing bullshit.

Get it? Now fuck off.

Re:Why does anyone use Oracle?

[iggymanz]

You lie, mysql/maria will corrupt and lose data. I've seen it again and again. Those are toys used by developers that don't know any better and so stick with the simple things they know, then businesses get stuck with that juvenile level of decision making.

Postgresql however is robust enough for mission critical data, though high performance clusters such as can be built with Oracle are not possible. No DBMS is a drop in replacement for Oracle, re-coding would be necessary.

Re:Why does anyone use Oracle?

[Cederic]

So I could invest a fuck of a lot of money into staff that know how to use MySQL, and writing the software to use it.

Or I could invest a fuckload less money into an Oracle database, buy the fucking application that already connects to it, and draw on a wide range of cheap competent capable DBAs and developers across the planet.

You appear to have no concept of business. It's all politics and people, technology is the easy bit..

Re:Why does anyone use Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, while Google and to a lesser extent Facebook are moderately large, they are also VERY specialised and easily parrallisable setups.
Reddit, Slashdot etc may be large web sites, but datawise they are at best medium size.
(External) web sites are simply not where the heavy action is.

One of the things Oracle used to do better than anyone was large systems with heavy transactional loads and real time free form reporting (instant datawarehousing), because readers NEVER block writers - EVER (with the proper setup up, of course).
A few years ago trying to do similar stuff on MsSql left it gasping for air like a fat man trying to run the stairs of the Empire State Building (things may have change since)

That said Oracle's license & marketing policies deserve to be classified as economic warcrimes

What does Oracle do well?

[brxndxn]

I am curious here.. What does Oracle do well? Like.. where is the Oracle software better than all the alternatives? All of my experiences with Oracle seem to be that they have old legacy software with a user base too scared to move to something modern. Oracle's business model: 1. identify software with entrenched user base 2. buy said software 3. continue to 'support' software with new versions that consist of mostly a new splash screen on startup 4. raise prices

Re:What does Oracle do well?

[pigiron]

High volume ACID transactions and stored procedures.

Re:What does Oracle do well?

[radarskiy]

What does Oracle do well?

Sales and Marketing.

Re:What does Oracle do well?

[Shados]

Oracle's enterprise stack is pretty strong in certain fields. Their ERP is top notch in brick and mortar retail for example (better than SAP). And once you go down that road, its Oracle stack the whole way.

Beyond that, if you're trying to scale an old school relational database to crazy scales, Oracle leaves everything else in the dust. For horizontal scaling, nothing else comes close.

The thing is, if you're trying to do that, you're very likely doing it wrong. For insane amount of data, other commercial solutions do data warehousing better (Vertica) or cheaper (Redshift), if you want to make a lot of smaller, more efficient datamarts you're better off with postgresql clusters, for big data processing, stuff like Hadoop/Spark are the norm. If you just want service for fire and forget, Aurora is better. If you just want speed, something like Dynamo or Redis may be better bets.

A giant transnational system is pretty niche now. You're almost always better having a smaller one that that pushes data to a datawarehouse, or having a queue or stream collecting data and processing it into a lot of specialized distributed systems on the fly. And if you're too small for that, Postgresql is where its at.

Re:What does Oracle do well?

[FranTaylor]

Beyond that, if you're trying to scale an old school relational database to crazy scales, Oracle leaves everything else in the dust. For horizontal scaling, nothing else comes close.

Sorry, I don't believe you, DB2 scales out even better than Oracle.

Re:What does Oracle do well?

[FranTaylor]

What does Oracle do well?

Sales and Marketing.

Really? They have TERRIBLE marketing. Just about every article you read about them (like this one) is negative. Marketing is about creating a positive attitude in the mind your customers. Oracle does this worse than just about any other company, they're up there with Verizon and Comcast.

What you don't seem to understand is, just like Verizon and Comcast, that they have something nobody else has, they know it, their customers know it, and the customers pay. Bullies, one and all, with none to push back.

Re:What does Oracle do well?

[Shados]

My experience with DB2 was mainly in large finance (Goldman and Morgan Stanley), and while they have very large datasets compared to most of the industry, they don't push these things as nearly as far as others. That said, I mainly saw DB2 scaling well for data warehousing purpose, not raw transnational loads. There's a significant difference between the two. DB2 did really well when you just dumped loads of data on it and then did reporting. But constant transactions like you would in a retail/brick and mortar + e-commerce thing (so constant insert and read of that data with complex queries in real time), not really.

Its not an optimal way of using an RDBMS, but Oracle excels at it.

Re:What does Oracle do well?

[radarskiy]

" they have something nobody else has, they know it, their customers know it, and the customers pay. Bullies, one and all, with none to push back."

And you said they were terrible at marketing. ;-)

Marketing is not about creating a positive attitude, it is about creating a positive incentive. That can be a positive attitude, or it can be the edge of a cliff.

Re:Oracle and the decision makers

[pigiron]

The tried and true IBM sales strategy. Play golf with the client CEO & CFO. Get IT personnel fired if they don't get on board.

Workday learned their lesson...

[erp_consultant]

All of the Workday executives are former PeopleSoft executives. PeopleSoft (now owned by Oracle after a nasty takeover battle) is a great product but it has a fatal flaw - nearly all of the critical components are controlled by someone else. Database (either Oracle, SQLServer or DB2) is owned by someone else. Middleware (WebLogic) is owned by someone else. Reporting (SQR and Crystal Reports) is owned by someone else. Hardware is owned by someone else. Operating systems are owned by someone else.

Workday, starting with a clean slate, decided that they wanted to control everything. So they used an object oriented open source database. They own and control every layer of the software stack. They, since it is cloud based, control the hardware.

This gives Workday a big advantage when it comes to supporting the software. There is only one configuration to support. Oracle and SAP and others have hundreds of combinations of database, hardware, operating system, etc. to support.

Oracle has typically been able to use its stranglehold on the database platform to force customers do this or that. But they can't do this to Workday or its customers. And this has Oracle scared shitless.

Oracle is rushing to get cloud based products to the market. I don't know that Oracle is trying to strong arm their customers into using those new products but it is not without precedent.

What I do know is that internally they have this philosophy known as TOTO (Turn Off The Oxygen). That is how they destroy their competition. Their hope is to TOTO on Workday until they run out of money and fold. They know that Workday is operating at a loss and that their stock is trading at insane P/E levels (2650 as of Fridays close). Oracle will give away their cloud offerings if they have to. It's a waiting game and Oracle has the cash to wait it out.

Re:Workday learned their lesson...

[phantomfive]

I support Workday and hope they give strong competition to Oracle, but

Workday, starting with a clean slate, decided that they wanted to control everything. So they used an object oriented open source database.

Switching to an "object oriented database" doesn't seem like the right direction to go for......anything.

Re:Workday learned their lesson...

[Anonymous Coward]

They know that Workday is operating at a loss and that their stock is trading at insane P/E levels (2650 as of Fridays close).

BTW, that P/E ratio is wrong, because earnings are negative (so the P/E ratio should be negative, too). You can't use a negative P/E ratio to evaluate the value of the stock in that case, you have to look at the Price/Revenue ratio.

Currently revenue is ~$1billion, and the market cap is at $15billion, so that gives you an idea.

Re:Workday learned their lesson...

[erp_consultant]

Well, I believe the reasons were two fold. One was to escape the clutches of Oracle (and IBM and Microsoft for that matter). The second reason was to create a system that was highly configurable. Workday does not come with any native capability to customize the application. This is in contrast to Oracle and SAP, which do allow you to add your own bolt on customizations to the delivered code line.

I believe there are now ways to customize Workday via third party extensions but not directly. Workday believes that the high degree of configurability lessens the need to inject your own code. Personally, I believe that it is a limitation. But their customers don't seem to mind.

All cloud products come with their own sets of limitations and compromises. Each customer just has to weigh them and come to their own conclusions.

Re:Workday learned their lesson...

[FranTaylor]

SQL queries on well indexed tables will have much better performance than any kind of object database in the vast majority of circumstances.

If you have a large busy site with performance requirements, you will probably have a tough time meeting your requirements with an object database.

Re:Workday learned their lesson...

[erp_consultant]

I agree with you but have you seen Workday? It's pretty slick. From the demos I have seen speed is not an issue. I believe much of what they do is in memory so I'm sure that speeds things up.

Full disclosure - I work on one of those "on premise" systems. We use SQL for everything. I'm not trying to sell anyone on Workday. It's a nice product but it certainly has its limitations.

The point of the original post was to point out that Oracle has screwed over its own customers (not to mention partners and competitors) many times over the years. Ellison is a greasy, slimy sociopath. Bill Gates isn't much better...but I digress.

Re:Workday learned their lesson...

[erp_consultant]

I stand corrected. What I quoted was the Forward P/E (from Yahoo Finance). 2,650,67. Compare that with, say, Apple at a Forward P/E of 12.66 and it gives you a good idea of how overvalued Workday stock is right now.

Re:Workday learned their lesson...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey man, I work for Oracle/PeopleSoft and have for years. As of right now, PeopleSoft can be run on various versions of Oracle (eg. 11.2.0.4.0, 12.1.0.1.0, 12.1.0.2.0), DB2 (mainframe and LUW), mssql, Sybase, and Informix (though we rarely see sybase or informix anymore), and all of these are supported in various clustering modes too. The server components can be run on various versions of Windows, Linux (several distros), AIX, HPUX, IBM z/OS, and Solaris ... of these platforms, RedHat and Windows are the most common, but we see everything in the field. The web tier can be run on either Weblogic (which Oracle owns) or WebSphere from IBM. Keep in mind that Oracle owns several of these platforms (Solaris, OEL, Oracle DB, WLS) and the hardware too (since we bought Sun). PeopleSoft also certifies a rather extensive list of reporting tools, and we either own SQR or have a source-code license so we can fix it internally should a bug arise. We also certify all sorts of middleware ranging from LDAP servers to COBOL compilers ...

This isn't a weakness, and Oracle spends an enormous amount of time, money, and headache making sure PeopleSoft runs as expected across all of the platforms that it supports, and we do this be OUR CUSTOMERS run all of these platforms. If you're an AIX/DB2 shop with existing SQR reporting experience, you don't want your HR systems running on RedHat/Postgress ... it's an absolute deal breaker and would required them to hire several new people to support these new components.

"This gives Workday a big advantage when it comes to supporting the software. There is only one configuration to support"

Our customers feel the same way ... they only want one platform to support. And if all of their other software runs on HPUX/Sybase, they want their HR system to run on that too. You can do that with PeopleSoft. Oracle offers PeopleSoft in a Software As A Service (SaaS) model too, and in that case we only support one platform too (Oracle DB on Oracle Enterprise Linux with Weblogic).

"Oracle is rushing to get cloud based products to the market. I don't know that Oracle is trying to strong arm their customers into using those new products but it is not without precedent."

We've had application hosting for YEARS ... I know a good number of folks that work over there and I don't envy their positions. Oracle latest ERP incantation, Fusion Applications, is almost entirely SaaS, though it can be installed on-site if the customer wants.

"What I do know is that internally they have this philosophy known as TOTO (Turn Off The Oxygen). That is how they destroy their competition. Their hope is to TOTO on Workday until they run out of money and fold. They know that Workday is operating at a loss and that their stock is trading at insane P/E levels (2650 as of Fridays close). Oracle will give away their cloud offerings if they have to. It's a waiting game and Oracle has the cash to wait it out."

I've been here for over 15 years and I've never fucking herd TOTO even once ... course, I'm on the tech side and I only work with former PeopleSoft'ers so who knows. In any case, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, because I can very much guarantee you that Oracle isn't giving away anything ... ever ... and if they do it's because they're going to fuck you hard later. WD is operating at a loss for quite a few reasons, and one of them is that there's really not that many companies that want their Fin/HR/CRM data stored off site and hosted, and WD is SaaS only. In other words, you can't install WD on your platform and manage it internally, and if WD ever decided to offer on-site install, they'd have to start supporting all the various platforms their customers want to run.

"PeopleSoft ... is a great product" ... compared to it competitors, it's a fucking dream. Sure, it's got some warts, but it's the best option in its class that I've ever come across.

Oracle has another scam going too besides cloud on

[iggymanz]

Another scam Oracle pulling on enterprise level customers is forcing virtualized customers to buy its hardware platform, claiming that virtualization as done by the major players means all physical hardware in the cluster could potentially run Oracle so must be licensed.

Re:Oracle has another scam going too besides cloud

[Cederic]

I think Oracle's virtualisation policy is driving customers away, and instead of fixing their stupid policy they're trying to push cloud instead.

Larry might like playing with his boats in the bath, but on this one I think his ego is costing him.

Oracle claims no such thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Another scam Oracle pulling on enterprise level customers is forcing virtualized customers to buy its hardware platform, claiming that virtualization as done by the major players means all physical hardware in the cluster could potentially run Oracle so must be licensed.

Oracle explicitly claims in http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf that specific virtualizations provided by IBM AIX provide "approved" hardware partitioning.

Please stop spreading FUD. There are plenty of valid reasons to bash Oracle's licensing practices and lies to invent new reasons are not needed.

Re:Oracle claims no such thing

[iggymanz]

News for you, not everyone has an AIX infrastructure. Stop spreading lies and FUD. Is that you Larry?, read my other comment below

Re:Oracle has another scam going too besides cloud

[iggymanz]

Larry should consider what threatening to sue long time customers, intimidating long time customers, being disrespectful to long time customers, will get him.

problem is... there is no *REAL* alternative !!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just what happened at my previous job. The ever increasing cost and pure hostility against customers made the company start switching from Oracle to other alternatives...

In a perfect world what you say takes place and a large number of Oracle's clients ditch Oracle and choose the alternatives

Sadly, in the real world which we live in, over 98% of Oracle's clients still stick with it because ... there is no *REAL* alternative which has compatible features, equally powerful, and cost less

Oracle knows their game well - they know that companies which rely on their database simply can't switch without suffering huge hiccups in their business operations - that is why they do what they are doing