U.K. Government Seeking To End Reliance On Oracle

jfruh writes: The U.K. Cabinet Office has reportedly asked government departments and agencies to try to find ways to end their reliance on Oracle software, a move motivated by the truly shocking number of Oracle licenses currently being paid for by the British taxpayer. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs alone has paid £1.3 million (US$2 million) per year for some 2 million Oracle licenses, or about 200 licenses per staff member.

Comments

simple and cheap solution

[Anonymous Coward]

create Department of PostgreSQL.

Re:simple and cheap solution

[avandesande]

Conveniently located next to the Ministry of Silly Walks....

Re:simple and cheap solution

[MightyMartian]

I'm fairly certain that, if a major government like the UK were to go to PostgreSQL, the maintainers of the project would soon find themselves in court over some nebulous IP claim about how some obscure library uses the same call declarations as Oracle's code.

We're in the age where the big software companies have essentially become robber barons.

Re: simple and cheap solution

[ZeroWaiteState]

You would be amazed at the number of people who rip off int main(int argc, char **argv) and present it like its their own work. There ought to be a law. Don't even get me started about the whole stdio business.

Re:simple and cheap solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Postgres was started from The guy that received and ACM Turing awards for his works database :

Michael Stonebraker has made fundamental contributions to database systems, which are one of the critical applications of computers today and contain much of the world's important data. He is the inventor of many concepts that were crucial to making databases a reality and that are used in almost all modern database systems. His work on Ingres introduced the notion of query modification, used for integrity constraints and views. His later work on Postgres introduced the object-relational model, effectively merging databases with abstract data types while keeping the database separate from the programming language. Stonebraker's implementations of Ingres and Postgres demonstrated how to engineer database systems that support these concepts; he released these systems as open software, which allowed their widespread adoption and their code bases have been incorporated into many modern database systems. Since the pathbreaking work on Ingres and Postgres, Stonebraker has continued to be a thought leader in the database community and has had a number of other influential ideas including implementation techniques for column stores and scientific databases and for supporting on-line transaction processing and stream processing.

Re:simple and cheap solution

[sg_oneill]

I wont say which one it was, because the walls have ears, but I worked at an Australian govt department and we where doing just that, moving what we could over to Postgres

The big problem was Financials. There just isn't a replacement that'll suffice at a government level, so theres still a bit of stickyness in that area.

Mostly though we where doing a lot of our stuff in modern MVC stuff and phasing out a lot of crufty java and oracle stuff, and thats a pretty good time to start reducing the oracle crackpipe addiction

Re:simple and cheap solution

[bkmoore]

You mean the Ministry of Silly Databases...

Re:simple and cheap solution

[Doitroygsbre]

I read that as robot barons at first. Much funnier

Re:simple and cheap solution

[ConceptJunkie]

You mean the Ministry of Silly Databases...

Actually that's the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs...

Re: simple and cheap solution

[Anonymous Coward]

But they're the government using Oracle and the government using PostreSQL. Since there's no change in government, it getting more expensive or complicated can't be because it's government: that hasn't changed.

You see that? Same thing means it hasn't changed. That means staying the same. As in not changing. And if it doesn't change, then it doesn't change what it costs.

How small a word is needed to make this clear?

Government. Is. Still. Government.

If something changes, it can't be because it's changed to government doing it.

So it has to be the thing that changed that changes the something.

OK, so it isn't the same database system, but it IS the same institution doing it. So if it costs more or is more complicated, then it must be due to the database system changing.

If that has no evidence of being true, then your claim was bullshit, wasn't it.

Now go back to school and this time LISTEN TO THE FUCKING TEACHERS. STOP picking your nose and dreaming of playing with your doodle.

OK?

Re: simple and cheap solution

[Anonymous Coward]

What you say was true for pgsql 8, in 9 you can have hotstandby www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/hot-standby.html. Also some application delivery controller can analyze sql statement on the wire to enable replication.

Re:simple and cheap solution

[tehcyder]

The big problem was Financials.

Oracle Financials is merely bad in the way that Hitler was merely a bit racist.

It's the sort of software that makes people leave their jobs and sign up to fight ISIL as a more enjoyable option.

Incompetent contracting

[captaindomon]

200 licenses per year? If anything, that doesn't speak to technical concerns. It points towards incompetent legal / licensing / contracting. Who's negotiating those licenses with Oracle? Do they know what they are doing at all?

Re:Incompetent contracting

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh they know exactly what they're doing. They just don't care. It's the taxpayers' dime after all.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[gbjbaanb]

per-client licence is 1 per user usually, and then you have several applications, each of which need a licence.. and the number quickly rockets up.

Add to that old applications that people no longer use, but somewhere in the bowels of accounting are still being renewed and you can easily get 200 per user (well, easily if you're the kind of bureaucracy like a government organisation).

I imagine they'll rationalise these Oracle licences ... by buying 200 SQL Server licences per user.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[gstoddart]

The problem is in how Oracle defines the need for licenses.

Got 200 systems, and all of your users could in theory touch those systems ... whammo, they want full licensing for each instance for each user. Oracle makes it into a technical concern.

Want to add more cores? Give us more money. Want to make something accessible via the internet? Give us more money. Want another instance? Start from scratch on that instance, give us more money, then give us more money, and finally we'll tack a little more money on.

There really is no limit to the amount of money Oracle feels entitled to, and if you don't have one central entity handling all of your licenses, you're screwed. And, really, having one central entity doesn't guarantee you a damned thing.

As far as Oracle is concerned, it's # of cores x # of theoretical users x # of instances x how much they can get away with.

Oracle's price gouging is pretty much legendary. And most anybody who has it has gone through this has seen it.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[lucabrasi999]

In their defense, it is not just incompetence on the part of the customer. Software Vendors love to come up with intricate and convoluted licensing terms. They are experts at obfuscation. Of course, just using 'open source' as an answer isn't necessarily the right thing. It should be a combination of closely monitored procurement practices along with select open sourcing when it make sense.

Re: Incompetent contracting

[lucabrasi999]

I suspect that some of it is incompetence, and some of it is the fact that there isn't a single 'they' here. For small orgs, or super-regimented big ones, there is indeed a single Ministry Of Central Procurement through which all external commerce flows. When that isn't the case, purchasing is usually a patchwork of confused individuals with budgets tied to specific things buying stuff in scattered tiny lots.

Yep, and Software Vendors are experts at identifying who in that patchwork has purchasing authority and what their procurement limits are. They will craft their software sale to stay within certain limits in order to avoid the next level of procurement approval.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[jedidiah]

There's also enterprise licensing and site licensing.

On the other hand, if they are paying for something on an annual basis then it's more likely SUPPORT contracts rather than actual licenses.

Oracle is an expensive product and annual bills like that are not terribly unusual really. They may or may not be able to find a suitable cheaper option assuming that they don't just need to do better license accounting.

Other supported products don't tend to be cheap either.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[garyisabusyguy]

The thing is that it is not a Oracle == SQLServer, or Oracle == PostgresSQL equation

Oracle has expanded their offerings through acquisitions to sit on top of licensing for everything from operating systems, to middle ware, to user applications, all of which are well beyond the range of any competing database.

Not to mention that Oracle sales reps make zero attempt to lower the long term licensing costs when closing a deal. Your only real chance to modify your licensing agreements are during a true-up exercise, and very few people have the competency to understand and negotiate decent contracts.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[garyisabusyguy]

Yes, I am confused, in my experience 2 million Oracle licenses should cost between $2 and $20 BILLION dollars

Re:Incompetent contracting

[i.r.id10t]

And because of that, the business folks will often just buy extras if there is any question of being out of compliance. Especially if they've been visited by the BSA or have ties to someone who has...

Re:Incompetent contracting

[rossdee]

"There's also enterprise licensing"

This is the UK - they don't have Enterprise
They have Ark Royal and Invincible

Re:Incompetent contracting

[Salgak1]

. . . . and of course, after 20 years service, "retire" to an even LARGER paycheck (on top of the retirement) which, coincidentally, comes from ORACLE. . .

Re:Incompetent contracting

[Bacon Bits]

Er, the British Royal Navy has been sailing ships under the name Enterprise longer than the US Navy has existed.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the pile of legacy software that's on life-support. You still need a license for that crap they never bothered to replace.

In fact, to make extra money you can sell them a piece of software which has the sole responsibility of making sure two other pieces of crap will work together. We need to find a way to monetize the bugs...

Re:Incompetent contracting

[fluffernutter]

Oracle shouldn't be charging people for their right to have a warm standby server.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[mlts]

IBM POWER7 and POWER8 have a feature called Turbo Cores. This turns off half the cores on the CPU, but allowed the cores that are on to use the caches of the ones not in use. It also allows for a higher clock speed to be used.

The reason for this feature is exactly as mentioned above -- Oracle (and Sybase) licensing. Say you have a box with 128 cores in it. You have to pay not just for what cores are in use, but what cores can -possibly- be used for the database. Turn off Turbo Cores... double your licensing fees.

Intel and AMD chips have something similar, but those just switch off the cores... but don't allow the cores in use to use the resources of the ones that are offline.

Of course, MS is there in the wings, making a killing with their product that isn't cheap, but has a different license model.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[Penguinisto]

Oh they know exactly what they're doing. They just don't care. It's the taxpayers' dime after all.

Most likely reason has less to do with government waste than with Oracle's VM licensing scheme:

The department likely parked one small RAC cluster on a VM farm, and Oracle's licensing (at least used to) demand that, no matter how many vCPU you assign the VM, you must license every last socket on every last hypervisor box on the entire VM farm for *each* production VM running Oracle RDBS. ...and *that* is why the majority of production Oracle RAC clusters still reside on discrete physical hardware.

And yes, if Larry Ellison were to die painfully in a fire, half the tech world would cheer.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[garyisabusyguy]

I have been down that same pipe with leaders who come from HR and Accounting
They attend conferences where vendors show them all sorts of glittery toys and then get mad at the IT types who identify to them how the software that they own will not deliver all of the features that they were demoed.

Of course it is IT's fault in their minds and they go about yanking all authority away from IT because they figure that they can do it better themselves

Re:Incompetent contracting

[pjtp]

I'm confused by the units here. WTF is a dollar squared?

I think you'll find that Oracle licenses are paid in dollar's squared.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[mjwx]

Oh they know exactly what they're doing. They just don't care. It's the taxpayers' dime after all.

Most likely reason has less to do with government waste than with Oracle's VM licensing scheme:

The department likely parked one small RAC cluster on a VM farm, and Oracle's licensing (at least used to) demand that, no matter how many vCPU you assign the VM, you must license every last socket on every last hypervisor box on the entire VM farm for *each* production VM running Oracle RDBS. ...and *that* is why the majority of production Oracle RAC clusters still reside on discrete physical hardware.

And yes, if Larry Ellison were to die painfully in a fire, half the tech world would cheer.

Yep, Oracle licensing is still that bad.

So much so that most people still use physical boxes for Oracle where everything else runs fantastically on virtual boxes.

As a sysadmin I'd love to see nothing but hypervisors and storage in the server room, but Oracle is determined to prevent that.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[NicBenjamin]

What was interesting to me was that it's apparently only 65 pence per license (£1.3 million for 2 million licenses). At 200 per staff member that means each staff member has approximately £130 worth of Oracle installed on their machines, which is $200 US given the exchange rate in the summary. I've never bought commercial database software, but $200 per user does not seem like that much.

It's not nothing, but in a department with a £2 Billion+ budget £1.3 Million is a rounding error.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[Alioth]

And Oracle is fscking awful in this regard. Their licensing is so complex it's difficult to know what exactly you need.

We narrowly escaped having to use Oracle a while back - we were being dragged into a project with a dependency on Oracle. Oracle itself is very good - it's powerful, flexible and comprehensive, it scales well, there's lots of ways you can optimise the performance to your particular installation, but the licensing is something else. This was one of the reasons we canned the project (after a near miss - management had a huge hard-on for it).

Oracle will also sue its own customers. Normally, suing your customers is bad for business, but not for Oracle. A certain part of the public sector (not UK, but close) that we often have dealings with is a user of Oracle, and despite paying handsomely for their Oracle license, someone had screwed up somewhere so Oracle sued them. They can do this because once you've been running Oracle for a while and your developers have taken advantage of plenty of Oracle specific features, you experience a degree of lock-in to Oracle that Microsoft can only dream about. They had mis-interpreted what their license allowed, and Oracle disagreed with their usage, and turned around and sued them. With other companies, if they didn't negotiate politely and sued you, you can say "OK, we won't buy your product any more". But the degree of lock-in when you've designed a system around Oracle means you have to do what Oracle tell you, and you have no negotiating power. So if you try to negotiate better terms in these kind of situations, they'll just sue you knowing full well that you have no option but to continue spending money with Oracle anyway.

Re: Incompetent contracting

[LordWabbit2]

200 licenses per employee is not a false accusation. Why are you being so defensive? You wouldn't happen to work for the UK government would you? Perhaps you handle the Oracle licensing?

Re:Incompetent contracting

[jandersen]

Oracle is an expensive product and annual bills like that are not terribly unusual really. They may or may not be able to find a suitable cheaper option assuming that they don't just need to do better license accounting.

Yeah, it is expensive when you compare to cheaper products, although if I remember correctly, the OP said '$2M for 2M licenses" - ie. $1 per license, which isn't a lot of money. $2M isn't a lot either, if you compare to how much you would pay for developing and maintain your own SW. This isn't only for RDBMS - Oracle has an extensive suite of 'enterprise applications', whatever that means, all of which would have to be replaced as well, if one were to go for alternative products - which would then be less integrated. I suspect, if you compare Oracle to other enterprise systems, they don't stand out as being particularly expensive, but I haven't checked.

Another thing to bear in mind is that when we look at large systems in general, we have traditionally talked about mainframes - where the hardware is hugely expensive, and all applications comes with eye-watering pricetags; I seem to recall numbers like $20K per seat being typical. In that context, what Oracle demands may seem modest.

Re:Incompetent contracting

[Afty0r]

Who's negotiating those licenses with Oracle? Do they know what they are doing at all?

1] UK Government IT and procurement employees.
2] Given #1, definitely not.

Re: Incompetent contracting

[guruevi]

I know in the case of TekSystems contractors, the contractors get kickbacks from Oracle, PeopleSoft and Microsoft for recommending their 'solutions' to their customers.

Wow!!!

[waterford0069]

$1USD per Oracle licence! How do we do it? Volume!

I'm still walking funny from the last time we negotiated with Oracle.

If you really want to save money fire employees

[Anonymous Coward]

DEFRA is apparently paying $2M for 2M licenses, which if my math is correct, works out to $1/license. Sounds much less reasonable when you see it as 200 licenses per employee, but not that bad when you think of it as $200/year per employee in licensing fees. If this is completely unreasonable, then save money by firing employees who cost at least 2 orders of magnitude more than $200/annum and are not productive. At a minimum, if there really is no need for 200 licenses per employee, the first heads on the block should be the people who promoted/approved the contracts which got them 200 licenses per employee. Once again, it is still $200/employee each year, so what is the big deal?

Re:If you really want to save money fire employees

[radarskiy]

"and are not productive."

Fact not in evidence

Re:If you really want to save money fire employees

[Archangel Michael]

It is government, so I would think this is being as close to self evident as it can get.

Re:If you really want to save money fire employees

[rahvin112]

Are you deliberately failing to see the politics of this? There is a political reason to say 200 licenses per employee rather than saying $200 per employee. The first is inflammatory and seems to indicate significant "over-licensing" of product while the second would probably be considered reasonable by most people (about the cost of windows). By failing to talk about cost per employee they are politically directing the conversation towards an outcome they already want.

This isn't much different than the annual list of wasted money several republican senators come up with every year, the most famous of which was the $200 toilet seat and the $500 hammer, without any regard to how those items weren't run of the mill items and the costs of tooling of single low quantity orders have to be be born by the limited number of items. In reality both of those items made sense with the knowledge of the reason behind them, so the reasoning is left off and the bare price is used to condemn inefficient government as a political ploy to propagandize the public into supporting policies detrimental to the majority.

Incompetent metrics

[ranton]

Considering they are only paying $1 per license on average each year, framing the problem with a license per employee count is very misleading. The article should have focused on them spending $200 yearly on licenses per staff member. Or under $17 per month per staff member. Doesn't sound nearly as bad in this context, but then again the true point of the article was to get page views. This shows why I'm not in marketing.

Re:Incompetent metrics

[garyisabusyguy]

WHAT! Are you suggesting that /. readers would leap at a chance to rip into Oracle?

Re:Incompetent metrics

[ConceptJunkie]

I read it as $2 million per license * 2 million licenses. I can't imagine Oracle is charging anyone $1 per license. This is Oracle we are talking about.

They would charge 6 figures for a batch file written by an intern on Friday afternoon between foozball games 30 years ago.

Re:Incompetent metrics

[91degrees]

Naaah. This is Britain. We're content with some pretty low quality tea, and it's pretty cheap when you buy it by the ton.

Re:Incompetent metrics

[Richard_at_work]

I don't think the UK is paying Oracle £4Trillion for licensing...

Re: Incompetent metrics

[cyber-vandal]

A complete rewrite of a number of UK government systems. What could be simpler!

bananarama republic, in the original sense

[Thud457]

U.K. Government overthrown by Oracle

There, FTFY.

Re:Good

[alvinrod]

That sounds good and all, but they're still going to want to pay some company for support. Any government that's too incompetent to manage licensing properly should not be trusted with supporting their software.

I don't think the government needs to strictly use open source, but I do agree that anything they use should be an open standard as that allows for the most competition in terms of choice of support provider, contractor, etc. as well as ease of transitioning from one to another. Also, if they want to buy custom software, the code must be open sourced (or the government must be given a license to treat it as such from their perspective) so that they're not locked into a single company for ongoing support, bug fixes, or future enhancements.

Good luck with that project

[bad-badtz-maru]

Migrating away from Oracle is a horrific, expensive task. And, because they'll want the same level of support that they had under Oracle, they'll hand all of the software licensing savings over to a third party vendor to support a free software solution.

Re:Good luck with that project

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle the database is not so hard, worst case pay Enterprise DB and your done , but migrating from an oracle application that's where the pain is. In fact upgrading some Oracle (People soft) applications is just a little less painful that a full migration and some upgrade are full migration to a shit stack (everything that was not requiring Fusion Middleware that now does...)

Re:Good luck with that project

[bad-badtz-maru]

EnterpriseDB nearly costs as much per server as Oracle does.

Re:Good luck with that project

[Anonymous Coward]

but the reps are no where near aggressive, they don't impose you buy some software you do not need as a condition to renew your liscence, the real problems with oracle is not cost of the product you use, the problem is every other softwares or editions you do not use that they force you to buy : http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/07/12/007226/oracle-bullies-enterprise-clients-into-cloud-purchases-consultant-claims ..
In our industry consortium meetings, I learn about a company force to buy Oracle single sing on, anther one some web-logic licenses when they were a WebSphere shop....

Re:Good luck with that project

[bad-badtz-maru]

Good point, you're right and I've experienced this firsthand with Oracle.

Good Luck Leaving Oracle

[atrimtab]

Oracle products are specifically designed to make it very difficult and costly to leave the platform given all their proprietary extensions to SQL and supported programming language and development tools.

If your application was designed with Oracle development tools you are likely completely S**t Outta Luck. But if all you did was use Oracle as an RDMBS and avoided all their lock-in traps you should be able to port to PostgreSQL.

But in most situations, Oracle is the Hotel California of platforms: "you can check in anytime you want, but you can never leave.." at least not without significant costs in porting which will be more painful and risky than to simply keep paying.....

Because of this the best option is usually to specify and enforce that Oracle *NOT* be used on any new or replacement projects while the organization just keeps paying and paying and paying on the systems that require Oracle.

There are a number of very good reasons that few Internet startups run out and buy Oracle for infrastructure use.

Re:Good Luck Leaving Oracle

[jedidiah]

ALL of the RDBMS platforms have their little quirks and proprietary features. The more you swallow the kool-aid, the more difficult it is to migrate away.

Oracle is no better or no worse than anyone else in this respect.

Although chances are that this will end up being all about what the 3rd party app vendors will support.

Re:Good Luck Leaving Oracle

[Tablizer]

Oracle is no better or no worse than anyone else in this respect.

The others charge an arm and leg. Oracle takes your arm and leg and rents 'em back to you for the price of a whole body.

Replace it with MySQL

[hawguy]

They should replace it with a nice free, open source solution like MySQL Enterprise Edition to get paid support. Then they'll never have to pay Oracle another penny (Or pence or whatever they call it in the UK)

Re:Replace it with MySQL

[jedidiah]

...never mind the fact that it would be considered entirely inappropriate for production use by even a SQL Server DBA.

Re:Replace it with MySQL

[Virtucon]

Uh you mean MariaDB #FTFY

Re:Replace it with MySQL

[ClickOnThis]

Then they'll never have to pay Oracle another penny (Or pence or whatever they call it in the UK)

Penny is the singular. Pence is the plural.

Re:Replace it with MySQL

[Chris Mattern]

Differs from the US in that in, the US, the penny is a coin, not a monetary unit (the monetary unit is the cent--a pound is 100 pence, a penny is 1/100 of a pound, but a dollar is 100 cents and a cent is 1/100 of a dollar) and is pluralized as "pennies".

Re:Replace it with MySQL

[Alioth]

They call it a penny, that's it's actual name and it says "One penny" on the coin.

Re:Replace it with MySQL

[Richard_at_work]

Depends what it refers to here in the UK. 1p is a penny, 1/10 of £1 is ten pence, but 10 1p coins is ten pennies if referring to the coins, or ten pence if referring to the monetary amount.

Re:Good

[gstoddart]

That sounds good and all, but they're still going to want to pay some company for support. Any government that's too incompetent to manage licensing properly should not be trusted with supporting their software.

Have you ever dealt with Oracle licensing, or are you just spouting off?

Because I can guarantee you, Oracle fucks over corporations and governments about the same.

Oracle is legendary for this stuff.

I can also tell you for a lot of applications, the choice is Oracle, and SQL server. And no matter what Microsoft tells you (who is also trying to fuck you over on licensing), for many applications SQL server just can't do the same job.

The vendor of the software needing the DB won't support your open source platform, or anything else.

If you haven't heard about Oracle's licensing practices or think this is inept governments, then you really have no idea of what you're talking about.

Re:Replace it with MySQL... which Oracle owns!

[atrimtab]

You do realize that Oracle owns MySQL, right?

Re:Good

[jedidiah]

It doesn't have to be that hard or that bad. Some companies manage this much better than others do despite the fact that Ellison is the devil incarnate.

This situation likely represents a nearly complete state of neglect.

No one cares because it's not their money and it's a government agency where saving money will only get your budget cut next year.

NoSQL is the solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

I manage a team of database developers and database administrators. We live Big Data. We breathe Big Data. Big Data is everything to us. If the data isn't Big, we don't touch it.

We only use the best tools of the trade, and those are NoSQL tools. I know some people like to joke about NoSQL being "web scale", but it's no joke. In our experience, NoSQL is the only way to really work with Big Data.

A good rule of thumb is that if you're using SQL, you're working with Small Data. I was at a conference last year, and some schmuck started talking to me about his 2 peterbyte database. He said his team used Postgrass and SQL. It doesn't matter how big your database is! If you're using SQL then you aren't working with Big Data! 2 peterbytes of SQL data is way smaller than 2 peterbytes of NoSQL Big Data.

It makes no sense to me why anyone would use SQL databases. They are old tech. They aren't the latest and greatest, like NoSQL databases are. Like the CAP Theorem states, NoSQL databases are better because they're "Capable of handling Big Data", "Always the best choice for Big Data", and "Perfect for Big Data".

It's 2015 now. We have better tools available to us than we had in 1975. You don't need to use SQL databases any more. Use a NoSQL database, and get all of the benefits it gives you, including the CAP Theorem. Big Data is important, so you should only trust it to NoSQL databases.

Re:NoSQL is the solution.

[garyisabusyguy]

he said PETERbyte.... hehehehe

Re:NoSQL is the solution.

[thsths]

Am I missing the irony here?

Big data is great - based on the assumption that you have so much data that the individual record hardly matters. Ergo consistency is a probability rather than guarantee.

However, if you want to hand out driving licenses, individual records do matter. And it is not big data: it easily fits onto a PC.

Yes, Oracle is small data. But it works, while treating it as big data doesn't.

(And I just got a Big Analog Data T-shirt...)

Re:NoSQL is the solution.

[Penguinisto]

*whoosh*...

The only thing GP missed to make it perfectly funny was that he should have touted MongoDB instead of NoSQL... ;)

Re:NoSQL is the solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

I sure hope none of our architects read your post and think it's insightful!

Re: NoSQL is the solution.

[Twinbee]

Wow, I think we've found someone who breathes big data!

Re:NoSQL is the solution.

[SpankiMonki]

Big data is great - based on the assumption that you have so much data that the individual record hardly matters.

That's why the Next Big Thing (tm) in databases is the elimination of the individual record. It will revolutionize the way we do business.

Oracle has abused their customers

[Karmashock]

They over charge for things like crazy. Its abusive.

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Virtucon]

But.. But.. Larry has to buy his Hawaiian island.. He needs money bad.

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Karmashock]

Buy an island... just don't charge uncompetitive rates for your goods and services.

You can get stinking rich without fucking over your customer. I can cite a lot of very very very rich people that are feared by their COMPETITORS not their customers.

Oracle has been sucking people into their products and then nickle and diming for basic shit for ages. Its not competitive.

They need a pricing model that better reflects the market, better addresses their competitors products which are often radically cheaper, and yet still gives us the enterprise focus that has made Oracle the go to company for enterprise databases.

This is all doable, wouldn't cost oracle a lot of money, and they'd get new customers from smaller businesses.

One thing that is so surprising to me about Oracle is that they focus exclusively on enterprise clients despite the fact that they could offer per user pricing or something that made their software affordable for smaller businesses. And thus when smaller businesses get bigger... Oracle would have a lock on their business because they were being used from the beginning.

The other thing I've noticed a lot with Oracle is that it is pirated a lot. The Oracle training programs they offer... the certification programs... they give people copies of the software... and now you have some database programmer wandering around trying to get a job programming databases and he can only program enterprise databases... what happens when he gets a job for a smaller company? He installs Oracle anyway... fraudlently because no one at that level is paying the Oracle licensing fee.

I've seen this in a lot of medium sized businesses... they are running Oracle... but they're paying zero dollars. And before someone says "but what if they're sued for piracy!"... doesn't really happen in the real world. Yes... occasionally... one in a million will get busted. But really it isn't enough for anyone to care. I mean... some percentage of the population is going to get stuck by lightning every year... doesn't' stop you from going outside. Same with cars, planes, food poisoning. Risk below a certain threshold is ignored.

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Virtucon]

Buy an island... just don't charge uncompetitive rates for your goods and services.

You can get stinking rich without fucking over your customer. I can cite a lot of very very very rich people that are feared by their COMPETITORS not their customers.

Larry Says:

We're Oracle Corporation and I'm Larry Ellison and I'll charge whatever I want to charge. I've made a ton of cash in my lifetime, I've pissed off airports because I want to fly my jumbo jet in at all hours of the night and yet everybody goes "whaaaahhh" when I overcharge them. Nobody is twisting your arm, besides my island I've had to buy a big yacht and oh they tanker to refuel that yacht in mid-ocean but still I think you should pay as much as I charge. After all it's not like you can go and replace Oracle with DB2,

What would all my pseudo-minions do without their Oracle certifications, they rest on those as their credentials to get jobs not to mention all the pseudo-experts who produce tons of printed garbage you can get on Amazon all about secret tweaks and things you can do to improve Oracle. Pseudo-minions keep pushing on IT organizations to keep buying my shit and pseudo-experts keep writing about crap that doesn't amount to shit but it still drives people back to licensing Oracle. It's a win win situation because it always makes me money and that's the name of the game. Hell I even have a designer line of hardware to go with my overblown database and even though I charge more than comparable hardware it has my logo on it and therefore it's obviously better than anything you can get from HP or Dell, I win again!

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Karmashock]

Pretty much... Still Oracle does do some things very well. Their product is not bad... its just over priced.

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Virtucon]

Pretty much... Still Oracle does do some things very well. Their product is not bad... its just over priced.

Larry says:

So? Didn't I tell you that I'm Larry Ellison and I can charge whatever I want to charge? I need to fill up my tanker so I can sail my yachts around the ocean you insensitive clod. Now, give me your money!

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Karmashock]

the same can be said of any business model before it eats shit and dies... or even as it eats shit and dies.

The record industry was saying similar things. Your argument basically boils down to "we're okay now so what we're doing will continue to be okay."

Its not... we're seeing massive defections from their products, many cheaper competitors are entering the field with the SAME core features. I mean... Oracle has a lot of bells and whistles but no one actually needs most of them. What people want is a very fast and very scalable off the shelf database. The performance and not eating shit when it gets expanded to a trillion records is really what oracle is all about.

There are other products on the market that do that now. So... Oracle is having some problems. And if you think everything is just going to stay the same... okay. You go with that theory and see where that takes you.

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Locke2005]

You might be able to get stinking rich without screwing your customers.., but apparently to get rich enough to buy your own island, you need to force all your customers to take it all... without even any lube.

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Karmashock]

Everyone has their own experience. Mine is as a customer. I use Oracle software all the time. And I know that Oracle is in trouble because they're too expensive, restrictive on use, and there is really just a laundry list of problems with them.

Stock price? You're saying wallstreet has a clue? Those idiots know less than you do and you know nothing.

Re:Oracle has abused their customers

[Karmashock]

The stock market is not where business models are tested. Otherwise pets.com would be a going concern.

Re:Good

[garyisabusyguy]

In the case of the Oracle eBusiness Suite, you might get some chuckles if you tell people that you are going to run it on SQLServer, but it simply is not going to happen. Oracle eBS runs on Oracle database, and that is pretty much locked up

Good luck with that

[ErichTheRed]

I've had the fortune (or misfortune depending on your definiton) to work on a lot of companies' systems and have had a very "cross platform" career. Oracle's licesning, which has gotten worse in recent years, is just now starting to send most companies looking for other ways to do the same thing. The problem is that Oracle is still the de facto standard for "enterprisey" software projects. A lot of this is legacy -- for quite some time the only mainstream database systems were DB2 on AIX or pSeries/zSeries, and Oracle on Solaris. You might say that's ancient history and you're right -- SQL Server is good enough for most workloads that need a "fully supported" DB and Linux is a viable alternative to Solaris. But I can tell you that these applications don't just die -- they're alive and more functionality is being built on top of them. Most big enterprise applications (SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and so on) are either Oracle products or are integrated to run on Oracle middleware/databases. Most of the big outsourcing firms' "standard stacks" revolve around Oracle DB running on Linux or Solaris, and J2EE running WebLogic. This makes perfect sense; outsourcers can pick up CS grads who know Java for cheap, and J2EE's nature lets you parcel out and offshore pieces to whoever is cheapest that week.

Since most government IT is outsourced both in the UK and the US, I would say that it would be very difficult to replace Oracle without re-architecting whole applications. Some stuff is easy - you don't need a Solaris license to run Apache for example. Some is not -- just like SQL Server, Oracle makes it very easy to slip into "Oracle-only" development mode when interacting with databases and middleware. Once that dependency is in place, it either has to be identified and pulled out, or it just keeps chugging along. And since systems like this are not sexy (customs processing, DMV records, tax collection, etc.) they don't get seen by the public very much.

Re:Good luck with that

[ledow]

I just question who the guy who ultimately makes the decision is. Where there's a per-seat licence, okay fair enough? But 200 licences PER USER? That's just fucking insane. Someone knew that. Someone let that creep from one licence to two. From two to four. Each time adding MULTITUDES of Oracle licences to the deal for every single user all over again.

That's just ridiculous, stupid, bad planning. There should be fingers pointed, legacy or not. You just shouldn't not be paying more than per-seat for anything you use, and a big customer like a government I expect to be able to get "any number of seats, costed per full time employee" instead. That's how educational licensing works, I see no reason that a government department should be so special as to warrant HUNDREDS OF TIMES more licences for the same number of end-users.

And when you consider entire-government consolidation (i.e. let's do a deal for ALL government departments), it should be even less.

Some idiot took a backhander, and ever since a multitude of idiots have propagated the mistake over and over and over and over again. That's not accidental. You know what the licensing is going to cost way before you cost up a project fully. And for those kinds of licence costs you could, quite literally, write things over again on any database backend of your choice.

There's a reason I think that numbers like this should be more public. Quite how many Microsoft licences are the UK Government buying each year? How many seats, how many users, what's the cost? And then do apps. And then do databases and back-end licences. And then do silly things like cloud subscriptions and backup sofware.

Because, fuck, there is no way that is accidental. Each guy just dumped it on the next and didn't give a shit.

There's a reason that I want government to - by law - be able to cancel all contracts at a certain point each year and NEVER be obliged to continue more than a year in any single contract. Yes, costs would go up initially, but fuck - next year you negotiate with their competitor as well if they give you grief.

Getting locked in like that is just stupidity of the highest order.

Re:Good luck with that

[kimanaw]

While your analysis is very much spot on, you've missed the biggest barrier to moving off of Oracle. In many instances, those Oracle instances (and the various Oracle or Oracle-partnered apps running on them) are guarded and tended by Oracle consultants. And an Oracle consultant's primary job is to own and control the client's management.

In the distant past, I worked at a major aerospace firm that was trying to move away from Oracle (due to the inability to provide analytics on very large data volumes). Problem was, the managers were essentially owned by the Oracle consultants. Any technical question about the new implementation had to be vetted by the Oracle consultants - who, of course, went to great lengths to exaggerate any possible issues, and would even fabricate fictitious issues, to infect the management with FUD. Needless to say, the project was eventually scrapped (not replaced by Oracle, but completely scrapped).

I've seen and heard of similar situations at other large organizations. Sometimes, technology is the least of the challenges in such projects.

Re:Good luck with that

[EndlessNameless]

Even with their 200 licenses per user, they're still only paying $200 per seat. Compared to MS SQL, it's competitive.

The number of licenses isn't relevant for large organizations.

The total *price* is relevant, and at $2 million per year, the UK is either not using Oracle very much or getting a very good deal on it.

Seriously, $2,000,000 to license Oracle for 10,000 employees is way better (on a per-seat basis) than what my employer is paying. Maybe they can negotiate a little harder next year.

It's difficult but possible

[Virtucon]

Oracle is the king of vendor lock in and if they even have the slightest hint that revenue will diminish from say, license consolidation they'll increase the license renewal and maintenance fees on your remaining systems. If you've allowed your developers to build things in PL/SQL you're doubly screwed so you may as well think about a system replacement rather than just the database in that case. It's a horrible practice but there are alternatives and for most organizations migration will be almost as expensive as just continuing to pay Oracle.

Re:Numbers don't make sense

[Midnight Thunder]

$2 million for 2 million licenses? It means $1/yr for Oracle license? I have hard time believing it.

Indeed. If that is the real number, then I don't know where the complaint is? I suspect somewhere the numbers are wrong or what they represent has been miscommunicated?

Oracle

[bigfinger76]

More like Boracle. Amirite?!!

Re:Replace it with MySQL... which Oracle owns!

[hawguy]

You do realize that Oracle owns MySQL, right?

They should run it on Sun hardware to stay even farther away from Oracle.

Solution...

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Pretty soon they'll just be able to move all their databases and schemas and stuff to systemd. Problem solved!

Re: Good

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The devil is(as always) in the details; but what you would really want to shoot for is format and API level openness and standardization. Unless a state wishes to make OSS a political priority(I do; but I might not be able to make my taxpayers do so); it is perfectly acceptable to pay a proprietary vendor to solve a proble if they can present a suitably compelling offer; but unless you are insulated from them by as much API, protocol, and format standardization as possible, you run the risk of being either shaken down because the cost to replace them is high and they price to reflect that; or left high and dry if they fold/discontinue the product/get aquired/etc. OSS can be a good solution(or, at very least, a valuable hedge against vendors getting too optimistic in negotiations); but it isn't the only way to retain flexibility, which is what you really want.

U.K. government seeking to end reliance on Oracle

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

They've decided to forward their questions to Morpheus instead.

Re:Replace it with MySQL... which Oracle owns!

[Virtucon]

yeah you can even save more by putting it on VirtualBox too.

Re: Good

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Oracle is certainly legendarily evil; and quite good at it; but I have to imagine that the UK government has enough scattered and dysfunctional license purchases, and situations where people over-bought, that they at least have a very good chance of saving more money by re-negotiating from a position of better information than it will cost them to take a proper inventory of their licensing situation. I'm sceptical about any substantial number of Oracle products being swapped out, and more skeptical still about some sort of UK-funded OSS Oracle-killer project; but it is still a good idea to review your morass of licenses and contracts from time to time and attempt to get them restructured on the best terms you can. On a national level, this often involves an initial round of posturing about alternatives.

To use a car analogy ...

[Krishnoid]

I heard they were trying to find a solution provided by a UK-based company, but none of the vendors could figure out how to make a database engine that would leak oil.

(Adapted from a friend's joke)

totally called it

[Gravis Zero]

just as predicted! The End of Oracle: Unhappy Customers Jumping Ship In Droves

MongoDB

[Gunfighter]

Just switch it to MongoDB. I hear rumor it is "webscale." ;)

Does the UK recognise software patents?

[rsilvergun]

If they do then you're right. They're screwed. Otherwise I say go for it. As the saying goes, you can't fight city hall.

Re:Numbers don't make sense

[PPH]

It can't be wrong. We keep a comprehensive database of all of our licenses right here ...... somewhere ......

Hey! Anyone know why the license on this database has expired? Better call our Oracle sales rep and buy a bunch more.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It used to be worse.

[oneiros27]

About 10-15 years ago, the licensing model for enterprise was based on the hardware it was running on ... so if you had a 16 processor server, you had to pay for 16 licenses for that machine.

When the concept of 'cores' came around, you had to pay for each core per processor.

But the real kicker was if you had consolidated hardware to run VMs ... if you had a 32 processor machine w/ 2 cores per processor, running 8 VMs (and each one running an Oracle server, with 8 cores assigned to each VM) ... then the cost was *not* 64 (32 proc * 2 cores, or 8 cores * 8 VMs) ... it was 512 (8 OSes each running on a 64 core system).

If you had to pay per user per core per system ... well, you can see how the pricing really gets away from you. ... but when I worked for a university that was an Oracle shop about 15 years ago, $2M/year wouldn't have been that unreasonable. We were spending more than that and had managed to negotiate a site-license for $1.2M/year, but they couldn't get all of the departments to agree on how the site license was to be split up between them, so it never went through.

One Dollar. OK. No problem.

[FreeUser]

I'm confused by the units here. WTF is a dollar squared?

A dollar. /ducks

Why do they have 200 Oracle licenses per person?

[no1nose]

What licensing model are they using? 200 per staff member seems extraordinarily excessive.I am no fan of Oracle. I work with their Identity Management software all day. But it seems like the U.K. could benefit from auditing its actual license needs.

Re:Seems cheaps

[Tablizer]

maybe they need a DBA to manage the licensing

Build a licensing tracking database.....in Oracle.

Re:Numbers don't make sense

[ConceptJunkie]

I read it as $2,000,000 per license. This is Oracle we are talking about.

UK are all Oracle cows!

[Tablizer]

You are all Oracle cows, say mooo! They fenced you all in with sneaky licensing. Say moo, Oracle cow, mooo mooo.
  Larry Ellison milks you and your wallet, moo moo!

Re:UK are all Oracle cows!

[Locke2005]

Stop these udderly ridiculous posts, you bovine bastard!

Re:UK are all Oracle cows!

[Tablizer]

cow-ard!

Enjoying PostGreSQL myself ...

[niks42]

My healthcare IT supplier switched from using Oracle to PostGreSQL a few releases back, and since then it has been so much easier to work with them. Previously if we needed a test environment, or a migration environment, or a pre-prod or post-prod or whatever there was a significant cost for licences. Now they are using PostGres on Linux, we can spawn sandboxes to work data without thinking too hard. Or paying much.

Re:Good

[Hognoxious]

Any government that's too incompetent to manage licensing properly should not be trusted with supporting their software.

Well said. That's exactly why I would never have my car repaired by someone who wasn't at least a 2nd dan in karate or eat a meal cooked by someone who can't fly a helicopter.

Sovereign immunity

[Locke2005]

Wait... aren't the law against software copyright infringement in the UK enforced by the very same government that's getting screwed to the tune of 2 million a year? Here's an idea: just issue a proclamation stating all Oracle copyrights are invalid in the UK, and STOP PAYING! I also want somebody to explain how the heck they are paying for 200 licenses per employee...

Re:Oracle Is Managed By Racketeers

[Locke2005]

During the time I worked for Oracle, my manager pulled down $40,000 quarterly bonuses for meeting his numbers... by billing customers for work that wasn't actually being done. Then transferred to another department, leaving me to get in trouble for the work not being completed. Nobody thought to look at who actually billed all those hours before they blamed me for the project being behind.

Re:How about employing small companies?

[AHuxley]

Re "How about trying to employ small companies that build software the way software is supposed to be built in the first place"
The US has fixed that political loophole with trade deals. A US entity has to be considered and should be supported during all and any gov bidding.
If the US was shut of of the UK gov bids by expert domestic brands offering lower cost solutions, trade deals would fix that issue so cash would flow back to the US brand. US cloud commuting products faced the same issues with secure domestic data consideration in some nations. The US offered political talking points to ensure domestic data could flow to "secure" US cloud brands without needing to consider local privacy laws.

It's a default

[sad_]

Oracle DB is a default in many cases, sure there are some advanced features that are probably missing in the free alternatives like Postgres, but there are only a few times when you really need those. Most of the time people are just looking for a way to store some tables and then run sql querries against them. Hell, in a lot of cases even sqlite would suffice, but in a lot of cases devs are required to use oracle because company standard or other nonsense.

The portfolio of oracle is big, and contains other stuff besides DB, but you can find alternatives for most. And if those projects are not up to snuff, you can perhaps hire a few devs for a couple of months to contribute (in case of OSS project) and implement the features you need and still be cheaper off then paying the licenses for the rest of your life.

Re: Good

[cyber-vandal]

Except that most government departments in the UK have been told to find 22 billion in savings between them over the next 5 years so looking at the huge amounts being paid to IT companies are coming under scrutiny.

food

[foods ideas]

healthy food ideas - http://foodsideas.com/healthy-... | Quick food ideas - http://foodsideas.com/quick-fo...

Re:Numbers don't make sense

[guruevi]

I think the point is that 1 department requires 2 million licenses for all 10,000 government workers. That is a single department, there are probably several hundred departments.