One of the projects I'm working on is suffering from many of the ills that come with using Oracle on a project. At first we built the entire stack using PostgreSQL (like most sane projects should), but when it came time to deliver to the customer, they had not yet chosen to allow it as an approved software component and suggested we move to Oracle -- that was over a year ago.
We've fought every kind of licensing issue you can imagine, shitty support, broken tools. A simple migration of a few hundred rows in a very simple table turned into a month long exercise that required 200 billable hours to Oracle consultants because all of the import/export tools that Oracle provides are broken in subtle, different and incompatible ways. At one point we saved time by copying and pasting data from one table into another through the management GUI rather than fight all the bullshit Oracle puts in your way.
The customer, now irate that we've been in standstill for a year, doesn't understand and hasn't made any progress in getting Postgres signed off on by their security idiots and now they're out an extra million dollars or so.
From initial install to development to deployment it's been a nightmare and the only conclusion anybody can reasonable come up with is that it's because Oracle purposely breaks their software in subtle ways so that the only paths of execution require deep Oracle lore that only somebody who dedicates their job to being an Oracle DBA could possibly know.
Oracle can't die fast enough as a company. They're an enormous drag on the entire technology industry and I'm convinced a force for evil.
Companies these days chose Oracle for one reason. They're scared of being sued. Several operations I've been involved with chose it as insurance policy. They want the ability to defer litigation to Oracle should it occur. Oracle touts its support and aggressive legal defense as a selling point. Engineers don't recommend Oracle, C titles and Sr. Management do. Sorry to hear about your issues, I'm sure the product worked amazingly on Postgres.
Not to be a dick, but what kind of issues did you have with their import/export tools?
As someone who has worked with Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases for many years, you sound like someone who has never worked with their database. Oracle databases might be expensive but you can move data between instances and schemas using SQLLDR or DataPump with ease.
This has effectively allowed the consulting company and oracle to fleece the business and hold them at Randsom putting the company under tremendous risk.
We have been called in to untangle the mess.
To give you an idea millions have been spent to build an ecommerce portal with sales in the 1000's. The ROI will probably take years To be realized.
Some of the challenges dealing with the mess of a complete oracle stack:
- typical people who specialize in oracle solutions are just that. Specialist in the solution not developers.
- Unless you are using one of the more popular products. Finding information is practically impossible compare the google search for magneto vs oracle atg
- you cannot easily transition a competent developer to oracle tools due to the complexity
- some of the tools are complex for reasons I fail to understand simple things take a long time to achieve. Maybe hard things are easier but I have yet to see this
- they encourage bad practices, everything goes in the db including HTML templates the works.
I agree... it's a nightmare. Look at the Oracle Identity suite. It's a mess, crazy disjointed collection of SOA apps to spin up user accounts for god sakes.
Some friends are working on a project with these tools... they are a couple of years in and don't have password reset fully implemented yet, and cannot come up with a date for implementation.
With a commercial product like Microsoft ILM/FIM, a team of 3-4 people could meet 90% of project objectives in 90 days with 90% less spend. The other 10% would require some product evals or tool building.
How much longer do you all think Oracle will be around as a company? They burned all bridges with engineers long ago, and they're not going to be able to keep selling their blatant and expensive lock-in strategy to management.
Maybe when they finally do go under Google will be able to buy Java and MySQL...
I don't think you realize how the enterprise ecosystem works. There are legacy Cobol systems scattered all around the place. Corporations stick with their platforms for decades. This isn't the web development front where we change platform every couple of years. In corporations change is slow because there are significant sums of money invested in people and procedures. You just don't change that for the next flashy thing. And thus the future for Oracle is much more promising than it is for Google or Apple.
Oracle will be around for many, many decades to come. Especially since in the enterprise world nobody could care less what engineers thought. Managers determine budgets and capabilities. Architects determine what to purchase and how it fits together. Engineers implement. Pecking order that's been around as long as Oracle has.
The biggest obstacle to Oracle's future success isn't price or other databases. It's the analytics space i.e. Hadoop/Spark which is relegating big iron SQL databases to being dumb CRUD boxes. It's why both Oracle and Teradata moved into the space but have struggled to get any traction against Hortonworks or Cloudera.
But those engineers retire, new ones without memory of Oracle's past take their place, and all will be forgotten.
Remember how Microsoft was the company many engineers hated when the Halloween Documents [1] came out? Yet, they have managed to patch up that relationship since 1998.
I've had two jobs in the past that have been in Oracle shops and from my experience those companies were so fully invested in a lot of the Oracle suite (think WebLogic, ESB, the database etc) it would be like turning a huge oil tanker around to pivot away from it.
And don't forget the reams of PL/SQL that often sits at the core of a lot of business logic
I agree with the sentiment, but they do make fantastic acquisitions though. of course Sun with Java, MySQL, and VirtualBox, also Dyn, Ravello, Addthis, Crosswire just to name a few
I think that a key explanation of Oracle success is that the complexity of their database administration has created a generation of full time jobs: DBA. These people are like salesman working for Oracle to defend the future of their job. They are well paid, but this cost nothing to Oracle. At the opposite, Oracle can sell training.
Most of these jobs are offshored now, so it's not as relevant a factor as you think. What is relevant is the amount of business applications and solutions built on the database, that took years to develop and would cost a fortune to replace.
The Exa* pitch complicates that, though. I've dealt with Oracle DBAs who were rabid to get their hands on Exa* units so they could "get rid of the sysadmins." They cooled their jets when they heard a big part of the Exa* pitch is reducing reliance on DBAs, as well.
Oracle's in an awkward place. They want to get to the new world of cloud and appliance without burning down the old world, while preserving their profitability, and that's quite hard.
Oracle is worth every penny that they charge. Unless you've worked with it, you won't understand the love / hate relationship toward it.
Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL, while admirable, remains in a lower class.
I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the open source cars of tomorrow; you can't compare them to the pedigree of a Porsche.
I was always a Sybase and DB/2 guy myself, but Oracle could do things. Things Sybase couldn't be tuned for. You don't put Wordpress on Oracle. You do crazy insane shit on it that will break MySQL.
Years ago Oracle would have been in a quite nice position to put up interesting cloud offering. Something like Java platform as a service, bundled with the message queues, database etc. Not targeted just to enterprises, but similar to AWS and Azure in the sense that you can get started small. They had quite much interesting related technology from Sun and BEA (and of course from themselves).
And maybe this would still make sense. Java is still relevant. JavaEE provides the packaging for the applications. Maybe the basis for a nice serverless offering (you have for example the message driven beans).
5 years back it would be very interesting proposition. But today a lot of modern cloud infrastructure is getting written in Go. IBM/SAP/Apple betting on Swift for server side applications. So in past it could have been Swift app + Java backend now it is more likely Swift app + Swift backend.
I also think with Rust taken up by programing enthusiasts which otherwise would have prefered Scala on JVM is also going to put pressure on Java/JVM.
But hyper threading doesn't really double the performance of the CPU, I understood it's a marginal improvement. It seems odd to double the cost of the license if hyper threading is switched on.
It's a thin fig leave for "we don't care, but do it anyway". Their grandiose cloud plans tanked hard, they screwed up all products they bought, now with their backs against the wall the only thing left is milking existing customers at any cost. It's obviously a last resort short-term strategy.
HT performance grew from generation to generation. In many cases a HT "core" has 80% of the performance of a "normal" core. A current 2-core+HT i3 CPU is almost on par with a 4-core i5 (the i3 has faster cores but less L3 cache).
This is a plain attack on Amazon, which Oracle now sees as a competitor, that will hit customers in the crossfire. I guess Oracle expects customers will simply move to Azure, since retooling ops might be easier than rebuilding solutions on other databases.
It will yet again hurt their image though; they've been hated by geeks for ages, but they are increasingly unpopular even among executives. How long can you do business with people who openly despise you?
I would guess that Oracle isn't expecting their customers to love from AWS to Azure. They are expecting they move to Oracle Cloud. I didn't see any mention of that in the original article but I wouldn't doubt those rules either didn't apply or could be bypassed by your friendly Oracle sales person if you wanted to get a taste of the Oracle Cloud.
Azure has always been charged at "1 core = 1 Oracle Processor" so this new scheme only harmonizes licensing on Azure and AWS. It's still double of on-premise pricing.
A huge lock-in for Oracle is packages. Packages make it easy to organize functions/procedures into groups (one package per group, within the same schema).
Oracle is the only db that supports packages. Packages make migrating away very difficult. However...I don't think companies will want to migrate without package support anyhow...
The alternative to packages are schemas. One schema for every group of objects. Personally, no thanks. I cannot live without packages.
Oracle now owns a huge chunk of the enteprise space. They already had a significant base with their database and ERP and CRM apps. Apart from that the large multi-billion dollar acqusitions of BEA, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Netsuite and a near endless multitude of others have left them with tens of millions of high paying and locked in customers in the enteprise space.
[+] [-] bane|9 years ago|reply
We've fought every kind of licensing issue you can imagine, shitty support, broken tools. A simple migration of a few hundred rows in a very simple table turned into a month long exercise that required 200 billable hours to Oracle consultants because all of the import/export tools that Oracle provides are broken in subtle, different and incompatible ways. At one point we saved time by copying and pasting data from one table into another through the management GUI rather than fight all the bullshit Oracle puts in your way.
The customer, now irate that we've been in standstill for a year, doesn't understand and hasn't made any progress in getting Postgres signed off on by their security idiots and now they're out an extra million dollars or so.
From initial install to development to deployment it's been a nightmare and the only conclusion anybody can reasonable come up with is that it's because Oracle purposely breaks their software in subtle ways so that the only paths of execution require deep Oracle lore that only somebody who dedicates their job to being an Oracle DBA could possibly know.
Oracle can't die fast enough as a company. They're an enormous drag on the entire technology industry and I'm convinced a force for evil.
[+] [-] bastardoperator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craigvn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitrogen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aNoob7000|9 years ago|reply
As someone who has worked with Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases for many years, you sound like someone who has never worked with their database. Oracle databases might be expensive but you can move data between instances and schemas using SQLLDR or DataPump with ease.
[+] [-] Bombthecat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 65827|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway-2013|9 years ago|reply
CIO at a company we consult for was recently fired. Or rather made to resign.
In the last few years the cio changed almost the entire businesses enterprise systems to oracle covering.
HR, performance management, reporting, data warehousing, sales, ecommerce, repairs, document management
This has effectively allowed the consulting company and oracle to fleece the business and hold them at Randsom putting the company under tremendous risk.
We have been called in to untangle the mess.
To give you an idea millions have been spent to build an ecommerce portal with sales in the 1000's. The ROI will probably take years To be realized.
Some of the challenges dealing with the mess of a complete oracle stack:
- typical people who specialize in oracle solutions are just that. Specialist in the solution not developers.
- Unless you are using one of the more popular products. Finding information is practically impossible compare the google search for magneto vs oracle atg
- you cannot easily transition a competent developer to oracle tools due to the complexity
- some of the tools are complex for reasons I fail to understand simple things take a long time to achieve. Maybe hard things are easier but I have yet to see this
- they encourage bad practices, everything goes in the db including HTML templates the works.
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
Some friends are working on a project with these tools... they are a couple of years in and don't have password reset fully implemented yet, and cannot come up with a date for implementation.
With a commercial product like Microsoft ILM/FIM, a team of 3-4 people could meet 90% of project objectives in 90 days with 90% less spend. The other 10% would require some product evals or tool building.
[+] [-] echelon|9 years ago|reply
Maybe when they finally do go under Google will be able to buy Java and MySQL...
[+] [-] elorant|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|9 years ago|reply
The biggest obstacle to Oracle's future success isn't price or other databases. It's the analytics space i.e. Hadoop/Spark which is relegating big iron SQL databases to being dumb CRUD boxes. It's why both Oracle and Teradata moved into the space but have struggled to get any traction against Hortonworks or Cloudera.
[+] [-] mavelikara|9 years ago|reply
But those engineers retire, new ones without memory of Oracle's past take their place, and all will be forgotten.
Remember how Microsoft was the company many engineers hated when the Halloween Documents [1] came out? Yet, they have managed to patch up that relationship since 1998.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
[+] [-] masklinn|9 years ago|reply
Forever and a day. Oracle sells to managers and executives and are very, very good at it.
Your opinion of the company as a developer or engineer has literally no relevance.
[+] [-] altano|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djhworld|9 years ago|reply
I've had two jobs in the past that have been in Oracle shops and from my experience those companies were so fully invested in a lot of the Oracle suite (think WebLogic, ESB, the database etc) it would be like turning a huge oil tanker around to pivot away from it.
And don't forget the reams of PL/SQL that often sits at the core of a lot of business logic
[+] [-] ww520|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itaysk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
A long time. They are making tons of money.
Devs may not like them, but most devs don't care.
Devs are usually not the one's footing the bill.
Oracle makes a decent product, they will force big-corp ABC to pay for it.
I don't like them, but I don't think this is going to hurt their business.
[+] [-] webreac|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimnotgym|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|9 years ago|reply
Oracle's in an awkward place. They want to get to the new world of cloud and appliance without burning down the old world, while preserving their profitability, and that's quite hard.
[+] [-] Joeri|9 years ago|reply
https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-...
Raising prices for hosting with the competitor makes perfect sense when viewed from that angle.
[+] [-] giis|9 years ago|reply
Now I wonder BTRFS is not getting enough attention, because its started by Oracle and their history with open-source?
[+] [-] WhiteSource1|9 years ago|reply
How many Oracle ERP users have made the move to the cloud? Very few.
[+] [-] e2e4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mailslot|9 years ago|reply
Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL, while admirable, remains in a lower class.
I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the open source cars of tomorrow; you can't compare them to the pedigree of a Porsche.
I was always a Sybase and DB/2 guy myself, but Oracle could do things. Things Sybase couldn't be tuned for. You don't put Wordpress on Oracle. You do crazy insane shit on it that will break MySQL.
[+] [-] jpalomaki|9 years ago|reply
And maybe this would still make sense. Java is still relevant. JavaEE provides the packaging for the applications. Maybe the basis for a nice serverless offering (you have for example the message driven beans).
[+] [-] geodel|9 years ago|reply
I also think with Rust taken up by programing enthusiasts which otherwise would have prefered Scala on JVM is also going to put pressure on Java/JVM.
[+] [-] brad0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endymi0n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miahi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benchaney|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhiteSource1|9 years ago|reply
They might be able to stick around for a while because their legacy system is everywhere. But....
[+] [-] toyg|9 years ago|reply
It will yet again hurt their image though; they've been hated by geeks for ages, but they are increasingly unpopular even among executives. How long can you do business with people who openly despise you?
[+] [-] coleca|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rj0049|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StreamBright|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] racecar789|9 years ago|reply
Oracle is the only db that supports packages. Packages make migrating away very difficult. However...I don't think companies will want to migrate without package support anyhow...
The alternative to packages are schemas. One schema for every group of objects. Personally, no thanks. I cannot live without packages.
[+] [-] throw2016|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] benchaney|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] chenster|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unixhero|9 years ago|reply