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

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?

[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]

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?

[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?

[gweihir]

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

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?

[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?

[phantomfive]

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

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?

[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.

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.

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

[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)

ORACLE is

[wbr1]

One Raging Asshole Called Larry Ellison

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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.

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:"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:What does Oracle do well?

[pigiron]

High volume ACID transactions and stored procedures.

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: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.