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Oracle's Larry Ellison Pokes Amazon Again With New Cloud Pricing Plan (siliconangle.com)
Oracle went on the offensive again versus Amazon.com this week with a new cloud pricing plan that gives discounts to Oracle database customers who move their databases to the cloud. From a report: Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said during an event at its Redwood City, California headquarters that while Oracle has matched Amazon Web Services for base-level computing, storage and networking services known as infrastructure as a service, it's now moving to make higher-level cloud services such as databases and analytics cheaper than AWS's. Actually, Ellison claimed that Oracle's infrastructure runs faster and therefore ends up costing less, but it's clear that the company is focusing more on its traditional strengths one tier up from the infrastructure: so-called platform as a service offerings such as the Oracle Database. Oracle said it will allow customers to move their existing licenses for databases, middleware and analytics to Oracle's platform services, just as they've allowed them to bring licenses to its infrastructure before.
No way I'd ever deal with those incompetent & crooked bastards ever again.
Ever.
If you're planning a big move, take advantage of it to move away from Oracle.
Why anyone would willing move their data TO Oracle is beyond my ken. They have proven themselves to be unworthy partners over and over again.
Why doesn't the industry blackball this guy? How do people continue to give Oracle money?
Just get a lot of database licenses on the cloud, and then Oracle can raise the prices again. As Oracle is a master in the art of gouging the clients, they will design a complex update-upgrade-improve set of changes, new platforms and services, that will make very difficult to ever compare prices with what you were paying before (because now you are getting MOAH), or what other people are paying now.
It has the added advantage that Oracle can make arbitrarily difficult to return to your own metal if you are unsatisfied. I'm sure there is some subtle change in your license when you move to the cloud, or will be when some new "platform" is unveiled, that will hinder you when moving away. I'm also sure that the tools and support for moving to the cloud are far better than the tools and support for moving away from the cloud. If you thought that your organization was Oracle-dependent due to the quantity of code developed for the platform, just wait until you run on their servers. In due time, you won't be able to just get a full copy of all your data and metadata in a local computer.
Time to buy Oracle stock, I'd say.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
>> Oracle (will) make higher-level cloud services such as databases and analytics cheaper than AWS's.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I'm crying - can I have a glass of water? Is there really anyone left in IT who still believes that Oracle is good for their company's bottom line?
More seriously, it's not Oracle that Amazon needs to worry about - it's Google's cloud services. My company's already switching almost every currently Amazon-based app it can find to GCP. GCP tech is kind of AWS 2.0 (since they had the opportunity to learn from the "first mover" - think how Microsoft learned from Novell back in the day) and Google's currently trying to buy up the enterprise market with lowball pricing.
Dear Larry,
There are precisely zero people who use your product due to your business model. Your company has a decades-long history of costing customers huge amounts of money, either in licensing, legal fees, or both. Nobody looking to do a database migration is going to believe that the cost savings over AWS will last for any length of time; everybody, everywhere, ever sees right through the attempt to lock people in, yet again. Amazon, Microsoft, and OSS databases are your competition, and "We're not Oracle" is a selling point they will always possess. Even if by some miracle "Oracle is cheaper" was an argument anybody believed would remain true for any length of time, odds are good that most potential customers would be so wary of your business practices that paying more for Amazon is a better business decision.
The ability to continue increasing the cost for your current clients basically-indefinitely is the only reason your company is still in existence. Your decline will be slow, and will likely remain wealthy for the rest of your life, but when Oracle eventually goes under, your legacy will be such that there will be cheers and celebration for your demise.
Warm Regards,
Me
I can't imagine Oracle appealing to many people based on a small cost advantage. I can get a large house in Detroit for $10,000 but I'm not going to do it. Cost isn't the only consideration.
It's kind of a perceived strong choice in the corporate world and identifiable on a powerpoint slide as a bullet in the strength of the company being able to afford an Oracle solution. Had a friend who does HR talk about integrations for a couple companies tell me his Oracle horror stories and it sounds like absolute martyrdom for something that is terrible. I've never heard of Oracle having an "it just works" solution and usually the people who are good with Oracle in these companies are mediocre at best in terms of talent, but no one like to empty port-o-pots but they don't empty themselves.
Yes, sir... may I please have another?
Any company that takes this deal has even less control over their data. And you can bet prices will go up up up after Larry has got most of his cows (um... customers?) corralled into the new reinforced pen.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
With absolutely zero response, these companies have the worst user interface I have ever seen. Their designs look like they haven't been upgraded since the early 90s. Anything coming out of either of them is a huge waste of time.
I've got my own complaints with Oracle and their licensing BS. It's a capable database no doubt, but when they make it difficult for me to spend my money I sometimes wonder.
Any who, I found a start up that enables the Oracle database to store unstructured data within the database and is able to transform, stream it, and manipulate it at speeds that rival traditional object storage.
Disclaimer: I am a DBA for a mid sized manufacturing firm, no affiliation with this start up.
I called to inquire more and found that the use cases for this are staggering. One such case was being able to utilize the database as a stand in for Apache to deliver web pages, videos, and other content over the internet (apparently working to implement that for their own website). Another project they've been building in house for a customer is a simplified CMS system for managing business documents automatically within an Oracle database and mapping keywords to specific structured data already stored within the DB.
Nifty tools and i'm looking forward to the demo they're going to provide me for my own experimentation.
They're going to be showcasing the tools at Oracle Open World in a few weeks. Might be useful for a few of you out there www.asteriondb.com
Shame a start up can't fix Oracle's licensing antics!
I'm curious if anyone has had any experience using the Oracle compatability pack on Postgres? It's supposed to let you drop an oracle schema into postgres and have it work unmodified, PL/SQL and all.
Hehehehe...I once had a conversation with a professor on the West Coast who's wife had company back in 70's when Oracle wasn't called Oracle and were small fry in a large ocean. Uncle Larry screwed her out of payment for services rendered. He's always been pond scum.
They run it because they have to. Didn't always used to be that way, but I've not seen significant technical innovation out of Oracle in a very, very long time. And given their other disasters with managed services, if I were running Oracle, I certainly wouldn't entrust it to their cloud service.
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There is a large number of incredibly good Oracle skilled people. You have to be to get a lot of it to work. There are also a huge amount of poorly trained and usually inexperienced Oracle people - mostly on visas.
Oracle is bought because they do great sales presentations to the executives then employees and consultants make bank implementing and running it.
That all being said... Oracle software quality has been falling fast the last 15 years with no end in site. The problem is that you face lock in as well as open source simply not "there" when it comes to the database workload. Show me an open source database that offers ALL SQL/PLSQL functions and can process 100 tb through several billion transactions per hour - on a single node, not distributed.
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I worked with Oracle 7 in the mid-1990's, and since then PostgreSQL, MySql, and SQL Server. In the 90's, SQL Server was making inroads into my company (Alcan Aluminum), but us 'old dogs' were fighting back, saying it wasn't ready for prime time. But since then, it has grown up and now I view them as pretty much interchangeable for straight-forward apps.
Back then, SQL Server's advantage was price. Oracle was $8k/cpu(on a small/mid Alpha-OpenVMS box), and SQL Server was much cheaper, but Windows-only. These days, OpenVMS has pretty much relegated itself to a niche, and SQL Server is about as expensive as Oracle for equivalent performance. So my vote, these days, goes to PostgreSQL, the only open-source database that is pretty much feature complete (for the day), and has been around for decades.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Theres also a MASSIVE lock-in factor with Oracle, and often not where you think it'd come from.
Last Govt job I had, us folks in IT really really wanted to get Oracle out of our datacenter, because just dealing with the company itself was so damn expensive. On a team of 6 of us, one of the guys pretty much spent half his time dealing with oracle lawyers and all their bullshit auditing and compliance. But we just couldn't break the chain. Turns out the department was dependent on Oracle accounting software that had existed in the organization through 2-3 government restructures. Getting a massive history of accounting off that software into something else would have cost tens of millions of dollars in labor alone, not including actual software costs, lawyering up when the "auditors" kick the door in demanding full access to sensitive government data and on and on and on. Outside of that single piece of software, we systematically rewrote ANYTHING that touched the database to use Postgres/PostGIS (We worked in sciences doing a lot of work with climate and soil data) but there was just stuff we couldnt port.
Worst part is, a lot of the stuff we couldnt port forced users to rely on IE6 despite its heinious security profile because there was just no goddamn way we could convince the bureacrats upstairs to pay oracle to upgrade, when frankly all our advice regarding oracle was usually "BURN IT WITH THE FIRE".
Oracle sucks so badly, and those who havent dealt with it really dont know just how bad it can get.
Worst part is , if you took the stupid company out of the picture, the database itself is actually a pretty neat piece of software. Then again, so was SCO Unix, once upon a time, before satan unleashed his lawyers all over the place.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
We started to move to Google Cloud because you're right, it has some really slick features and does feel like AWS 2.0. However, we noticed a disturbing trend with several of their services. Google seems to follow their general philosophy of "here, beta test our stuff for us" which would seemingly be fine since they almost always have a "LTS" and "General" version of their APIs. However, it seems they also have the same ADD based philosophy of ignoring/abandoning their LTS version when they have their new shiny version to play with. e.g. Google Batch services. Version 2.x canned their 1.x API in favor of Apache Beam which while very promising a) is still not fully baked and b) is different enough to require a rewrite of existing code. That sh*t may work when you're Google and have the resources to redo everything every year but it's going to piss a lot of customers off. We ended up canceling the migration because AWS just works (well, except when the US-East datacenter shits the bed).
Worst part is , if you took the stupid company out of the picture, the database itself is actually a pretty neat piece of software. Then again, so was SCO Unix, once upon a time, before satan unleashed his lawyers all over the place.
Exactly. I work with an Oracle system for 17 years now, started with Oracle 7 and it's up to Oracle 11 now. The Database is great. We had exactly *two* major unplanned downtimes in that 17 years, (which were both related to the OS layer. And we got rid of most problems there when we switched from AIX to Linux)
As long as you can handle the database yourself with the on-line support resources, it's great. But God help you if you have to deal with someone *from* Oracle. (and I'm *so* grateful, that we have a legal department which handles all the licensing bullshit)
Why the requirement of a single node? Why are you baking in a MASSIVE anti-pattern into your DB requirements from the get-go? One that artificially makes scaling difficult and expensive, one that makes HA far less A? All with zero upside for anyone save the hardware vendors balance sheets?
And PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL is a close and highly effective match for Oracle's PL/SQL.
Honestly, the only legitimate reason for swallowing Oracle's BS is if you're running Oracle's applications. For absolutely anything else you could possibly do, you should be fired as grossly incompetent for selecting to hobble your company with Oracle.
My
And I really can't imagine having my database in the cloud, it just sounds hideous.
A great many databases are in the cloud these days. Equifax, OPM, Ashley Madison, Friend Finder, RockYou, TJ Maxx, Heartland, Sony Pictures, Card Systems, Target, Yahoo, and many more.
Having your database in the cloud makes sense if your app servers are also in the cloud - that's where the heavy traffic comes from. Having the DB in the cloud just to say you do while all consumers of the data are not is just horrible design.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
PL/PgSQL may work as well, but it's not even remotely compatible with Oracle's flavor, so you'd have to do a complete manual port of all DB-layer code.
I've worked with Oracle ever since I started in IT, but I have to say: they're not just crooks when it comes to licenses, they're also lagging behind on the database. As far as I can tell they're in the cashcow phase.
Microsoft SQL Server is still playing catchup in some cases (I have a list of 5 items I'd *REALLY* want to have in SQL Server,such as their default isolation, separation between data and metadata for case sensitivity, autonomous transactions etc.), but the (mostly) hasslefree experience, great integration with good tooling and the pretty hardcore bugtesting they do (they first run the db on azure) compensate for that.
At first I'd thought it would be unpleasant to get used to SQL Server, but it really isn't and you get used to it very fast. Just try to map a number of architectural layers into your database. With Oracle it's pretty much over after the schema. Add another database, if you're lucky and your DBA likes you. After that it's all naming conventions. But database/database connections in SQL Server are painless, the schema's are actual namespaces and not logins, and if you really need naming conventions you have a very long name to use for that. That's just one little thing that helps a lot.
And it is much more consistent in its plans than Oracle ever was, in my experience. With SQL Server 2016, even more so.
I was pretty much convinced that Oracle was the best DB there was. But even SQL Server 2012 is better IMO than Oracle, in a lot of areas. With SQL 2016 and its pinnable plans, Polybase, virtual tables on Azure and R integration, the gap just widens.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Every experience I've ever had in working with Oracle was painful. If you need to hire a "license manager" to make sure you don't get shafted by Oracle later on, things really start to suck. A co-worker at a different company tried to switch to a cheaper option: The Oracle salesmanager just said that yes, there was that option but in their case they got a "very special price, my friend" that made the cheaper option exactly the same price as their old contract.
It's practices like that, that people consider them a bunch of crooks.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
The reason we run Oracle is not because we like it - its because its a vendor requirement for our ERP (and the switch from a pick system to Oracle happened in the 90s for this particular product).
And of course - we are looking to switch vendors, but for systems that have been in place since the 70s it's a rather complicated project.
But yeah - Oracle is BY FAR the single biggest software licensing expense we have.
I have a huge posting history that shows that I don't do a whole lot of hating. I can't even say that I hate Larry Ellison, but I can say that I hate his company. Hate isn't even too strong a word. Oracle can suck my unwashed left nut, metaphorically.
I have dealt with incompetence, dishonesty, and malicious and only Oracle managed to exceed expectations in all three categories. I am truly bothered by the fact that they still exist. I can't even think of a nice thing to say about them, and I can usually find something nice to say about anyone. Hell, I can even find something nice to say about Nazis.
After they cost us a bunch of money, productivity, and morale, I refused to pay them. They literally failed every aspect of the contract. They met not one goal and even got extensions to meet their goals. They failed in every way possible, so I kicked them out and didn't pay them.
They took me to court. Yes, they sued me - even though I had a copy of the contract and they'd not met even one single part of that contract. In six months, they literally got not one thing running effectively. Not one... From installers to consultants, they sent them all to us. They were more incompetent than even I, and I hate databases and don't know much about them.
And they sued... Then they delayed everything in court, up to, and including, failing to send the appropriate people and being granted an extension.
When it finally got to the point where we were all in front of a judge, we largely presented a bunch of documents - including the contract. They presented the idea that we should pay anyhow. It was a quick decision by the judge and our legal expenses were, partially, covered by them. They did nothing to cover our many, many other expenses.
Either way, that's the short version. The case took a couple of years to conclude.
At the end, their representative said they hoped we would have a better outcome the next time they worked with us. I was flabbergasted by the temerity. Indeed, they would even send salesmen and call, trying to work for us again.
What I find amazing is that a company that touts their databases somehow was unable to out together past results and still felt it would be beneficial to contact us in the future. Somewhere, in their database, they should have an option for, "Already fucked over, don't try again." I don't think they do.
Seriously, fuck Oracle.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Scroll up. I shared some of my experiences with Oracle.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Which everybody knows about. The Oracle audit resulting in millions of additional fees are stories of legendary hubris. Turn those jerks (mini-Larries) loose on their nascent cloud service will kill it in its tracks. Hopefully.
Other than Jarvis, does anyone actually use the Oracle Cloud?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Honestly, I don't know why it took Oracle so long to really push their own cloud solution (after all, it's a chance to lock customers down even more), but it's really a bit too late. AWS and Azure have been doing this for years. SQL Server is going on Linux, Aurora is getting better and better. Postgres is a great option, there's the whole NoSQL option if you want. Personally, if they get taken down quite a few notches, so much the better.
Okay, so they want me to consider a vendor that charges for everything, saves money where it can, and has lockin. And they want me to choose Oracle over that vendor? They're nuts!
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes