Oracle Named Database of the Year, MongoDB Comes In Second (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Oracle's database management system has seen the biggest rise in terms of popularity in the past year. Oracle didn't only see a rise in the number of deployed instances, job offerings and mentions on LinkedIn profiles, but for the first time also became a popular topic on Twitter and a constant mention on StackOverflow, a popular Q&A support forum for developers. Second on DB-Engine's popularity list was MongoDB, which barely missed winning the DBMS of the Year award for the third time in a row.

Comments

Database of the year?

[Anonymous Coward]

So the biggest increase in popularity is the only factor? If someone makes a new DB that increases 10000% in users, does it win? Because you'd only need 100 users to accomplish that.

Re:Database of the year?

[phantomfive]

I was wondering that too, here is how it was measured:

General interest in the system (ie, Google trends)
Frequency of technical discussions about the system.(Stackoverflow + DBA Stack Exchange)
Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned (Job search engine Indeed and Simply Hired (I'd never heard of them))
Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. (LinkedIn)
Relevance in social networks (Twitter)

They use a 'carefully tuned algorithm' to combine all those results, and get a number for each database. It really makes me wonder who in the world is using Oracle, because they are very, very far away from any company I've ever worked with.

Re:Database of the year?

[arth1]

Frequency of technical discussions about the system.(Stackoverflow + DBA Stack Exchange)

That measures not so much popularity as unpopularity - people having problems. I'd give that one negative weighting.

Re:Database of the year?

[Nemyst]

So in essence it breaks often or is very obtuse, requiring lots of Google searches and questions on Stack sites, it's used as a buzzword by HR and they spam about it a lot.

Great, that's completely representative of actual usage.

Re:Database of the year?

[ADRA]

Not my history. They're damn expensive, but they're a great DB. Its hard to objectively deny either assertion. The only piece of Oracle which is complete and utter horse sh** is in tweaking and to a lesser extent management of environments. Last I worked with them, they really needed well trained DBA's with access to Oracle's support site in order to really make the DB sing. Any jack and Jill dev working with MySQL / PostgresSQL could tune it -well enough- for the DB's inherent capabilities to shine.

Re:Database of the year?

[phantomfive]

Who in the world is using Oracle?? I'm an IT consultant, I work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies,

BTW the Fortune 500 is not a good sample for database popularity.......even if every single one of them used Oracle (and most of them probably use more than one database in various places), it would still only be 500 installations. The Fortune 500 are looked at because they are big, not because they are representative of what most companies are doing.

Re:Database of the year?

[Kjella]

That measures not so much popularity as unpopularity - people having problems. I'd give that one negative weighting.

At any given time you have a *lot* of inexperienced developers and DBAs that are in way over their heads trying to use StackExchange and such as a substitute for competence, even for things that are pretty fucking obvious or in the documentation. At least problems show interest and usage, it's when the help requests stop you know it's really dead.

Methodology?

[mcrbids]

Sorry, but with silly results like this, I have to ask why such a small article so vapid of meaningful content was posted on Slashdot. Shouldn't paid shill articles be a different color or something?

No mention was given as to how this ranking was accomplished, and the list given at the bottom of the article doesn't even match the headline (where 2 and 3 are MySQL and MS SQL Server, and Microsoft Access beats Cassandra.

Any DB ranking that puts Access in as a top contender should definitely back up their claims - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence!

I don't know which I hate worse?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I really tried to love MongoDB but I realized that all the freedom they claimed was freedom to structure things exactly there way and only their way. I now hate MongoDB like it is leaking sewage pipe at an Ebola hospital.

I used oracle professionally for about 8 years until I realized that things like PL/SQL didn't exist to help me structure an N-Tier system better but to just lock me into their stupid database. Oracle as a database isn't terrible so much as their pricing, and even worse, their sales people are horror shows. Pretty much if I can't install my datastore using apt-get or yum then it isn't getting installed.

I would say the only thing worse than having to deal with either of the two above poxes upon humanity would be the people who evangelize these solutions. Someday they will realize the MongoDB isn't NoSQL but HUMONGOSql. Or that PL/SQL was just a huge joke designed to waste many billions of developer's hours while making them pay for the privilage.

Until then we will just continue to use our secret MariaDB and PostgreSQL handshakes and we will just smile as the Oracle and Mongo people keep struggling in the mire not knowing that there is a great jogging path a few feet away.

Larry Ellison

[slazzy]

Larry really needs to buy another Hawaiian island, so just in time.

Oracle is bleeding-edge

[lucm]

Oracle 12g now supports multiple databases on the same server instance! Amazing breakthrough in database science, coming just a few years after their latest innovation: case insensitive LIKE.

Of course multiple databases per server instance has been available in SQL Server since the time it was still Sybase and in MySQL since before Y2K. But those are not Enteprise Worthy Databases of course so it doesn't count, and the fact that on SQL Server there's no additional expensive license to enable this feature is all the evidence we need. ORACLE RULES!

Re:Oracle is bleeding-edge

[tommeke100]

Yes, but in that case you're running more than one "instance". The difference is that the "instance" is the set of processes that run and do the "database server" stuff ( handle memory, operate on the database, ...). A "database" is just a bunch of physical files containing the database data. You can have many such physical databases on your server, yet one "instance" can at most operate on one physical database. You can run more instances (thus having the "different databases" effect) on one server, but those are different processes running on the same server. So basically, you have two distinct instances running in that case which each have connection to a different physical database.
Anyway, you can create different schemas in one database, so that kind of gives the effect of having different "databases" in one "database" too. I guess it's just a matter of convention.

Re:Oracle is bleeding-edge

[lucm]

Wrong. To have more than one database you had to install multiple server instances. That's not the same thing at all.

Most RDBMS supports 4 levels before getting to the data: database, schema, table, column. Up until that new "multi-tenant" technology in Oracle 12g, there was only 1 database per instance (the database and instance names were basically the same thing) in Oracle, and as far as I know that's the last major RDBMS to get that "feature" (and it's obscenely priced, of course).

The multitenant architecture enables an Oracle database to function as a multitenant container database (CDB).
A CDB includes zero, one, or many customer-created pluggable databases (PDBs). A PDB is a portable collection of schemas, schema objects, and nonschema objects that appears to an Oracle Net client as a non-CDB. All Oracle databases before Oracle Database 12c were non-CDBs.

https://docs.oracle.com/databa...

Re:Bullshit

[arth1]

I'm not real sure what one idiot they polled to get these results, with the fanboys of nosql these days, I can see MongoDB ... but Oracle? Bullshit. You lose all credibility right there.

Just the other day, Slashdot told us that Oracle Java was the top programming language, so this is par for course.

I can only presume that Slashdot has been sponsored by an ophthalmologist chain, because this hard eye rolling will have repercussions.

Next week: Slashdot tells us that Oracle Linux is the leading OS.

who cares about popularity?

[Gravis Zero]

if popularity mattered, i would run Windows. what's popular is rarely good. how else do you explain beiber?

Re:I can never use Oracle.

[arth1]

So you're comparing Oracle to Sodom and Gomorrah? That's apt.

No, Oracle is rpm. It's Debian (or is it just Deb now?) that's apt.
And Sodom and Gomorrah produced salt, which has its uses...

Flawed beyond belief

[s.petry]

The link you give is to a counter for how many times someone searches Google / Bing for the Database, or uses a FREE service to talk about the product. This is so obviously flawed I don't know where to begin. Lets start with: Running MySQL, my mode of support is Google and my postings about my cool tools and handy hacks will be in Stack Overflow. Running Oracle, my mode of support is Oracle as I have no reason to search for help in Bing or Google. Further, my epeen waving will be on Oracle's forums, not stack overflow. That's enough to not bother with the other BS used to "measure" popularity. If you don't see immediately how the results from the site you posted are going to be grossly skewed, I can only suggest a good strong lobotomy.

I originally came here to ask "Is it sharded?" as a joke.. .thanks for wrecking that for me.

Re:Bad "news"

[ADRA]

"the metric doesn't measure deployed instances, or usage, or even active interest", Yes nobody publishes this, so why are you so shocked that this study doesn't? Wouldn't you be more shocked and tin foil if someone actually was measuring backoffice service usage universally?

Your second paragraph is rank with hyperbole without any quantifiable links for verification, so... At least the article source actually tells us their methodology instead of just spewing crap assumptions.

This is how you could have quantified results:
https://www.cvedetails.com/pro...
https://www.cvedetails.com/pro...
https://www.cvedetails.com/pro...
https://www.cvedetails.com/pro...
https://www.cvedetails.com/pro...

Re:I can never use Oracle.

[lucm]

There's a new provision for shared VM storage.

Let's say you have a SAN volume attached to 10 ESX boxes (basically a VMWare Datastore). Even if you only have 1 VM running Oracle and it's deployed only on one of the 10 ESX machines in a non-vMotion architecture, you have to license all the CPUs of all the machines that use that SAN volume. Even if you have non-hypervisors using that LUN you have to license them.

They essentially make it so expensive to use VMWare that you have to switch to OracleVM or get back to physical boxes. Or buy their fucking cloud license.

And the nightmare doesn't stop there. Let's say you give up and decide to dump your VMWare infrastructure and switch to AWS. Well, your existing ELA no longer works, you're back to square one, and the few rent-by-the-minute Oracle instances models available on AWS are obscenely expensive; even on AWS RDS it's a lot more expensive than SQL Server or Postgresql on similar VM models. They really want you to use the BYOL model, also known as the bend-over model.

Fuck Oracle.

Re: I can never use Oracle.

[lucm]

Look at this thread:
https://communities.vmware.com...

The good parts:

In this isolated environment, Oracle pretend to license every socket to any host connected to the V7000, regardless of the cluster that are connected the host.

and a reply:

yes I have heard this from several people and it was also the topic of a workshop on the annual german oracle uer group meeting. For your environment, oracle was even kind. As you can vMotion VMs even without shared storage since vSphere 5.1, they tend to say you have to license every host in your vCenter for their software, even if they are not connected to the same storage. When vMotion will be available across different vCenters I expect Oracle to even says you have to license every single ESXi host you have world wide in any datacenter

This is the same exact situation I've described.

We were in the process of reviewing the ELA and the Oracle reps gave us that info. They said it's even worse when it's iSCSI but as many people in the rooms were already shitting their pants or punching the walls we didn't discuss further the iSCSI part of the license (which didn't apply to us anyways).