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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.'
One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison
Silence is a state of mime.
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!
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.
MariaDB is only good if you need extremely fast. For a full ACID compliant DB, go for Postgres.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)