11 ms·

Wow. Really? This single blog post is strong evidence for why you should never, ever buy an Oracle product, and if you are running anything written by them, wh

by kabdib 11y ago

Wow. Really? This single blog post is strong evidence for why you should never, ever buy an Oracle product, and if you are running anything written by them, why you should plan to migrate away. Now, the culture of consultants in the Oracle sphere of influence is pretty toxic and money-grubbing. I can imagine companies being badgered into paying security weasels big bucks to analyze software with tools that cough up a zillion false positives, whereupon the weasel looks like a hero and is paid a bunch of cash, the customer panics and demands that Oracle fix a pile of non-existent vulns, and some department buried inside Oracle doesn't know how to deal. Whereupon the weasel skates off to another company to run the same scam: rinse, repeat, and this blog post. In which case Oracle should simply call it out: "Please don't send us crappy automated scanning tool reports from the shitty security weasel consultant you hired because those reports are useless, and the same weasels have been sending identical ones in, monthly, for years, and you are being ripped off." But Oracle never passes up the opportunity to express contempt for its customers, nor can it admit to being wrong. Better to avoid that whole ecosystem.

bmir-alum-007 11y ago
Stanford was taken to the cleaners to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD in the deployment of Oracle Financials and related products via endless "consultant implementation" charges that didn't really deliver much value, were rarely on schedule or on budget. Oracle's enterprise calendaring program was totally inadequate and had UX that made most point-of-sale systems look effortless by contrast. Also, the assets managing app, Sunflower, was another dud. The only thing Oracle Database had going for it was no crippling license activation (license scofflaws are/were sued or fined into oblivion worse than M$FT), which one could say was equivalent to MS SQL. Unlike MS MSQL, Oracle DBMS has/had bazillions of support patches to apply to run a real production box, analogous to the previously separate Sun's Solaris patchsets. Btw: For smaller enterprisey shops, either MS SQL or Postgres are the way to go. Often multiple similar components are needed because different apps have firm requirements that only support one or another; but generally try to avoid this because supporting too many heterogenous components is expensive (laborious)... hence the prevalence of local "standards." Deploying everything with cfengine3 or puppet can help reduce the manualness and nudge vendors into repeatable, idempotent deployments rather than clicking on inane GUI installers like an animal. ProTip: Don't let consultants "provide" oversight / free-reign for their own projects, budgets, etc., that's like the wolf guarding the henhouse. The client must hire their own project managers, have clear accountability/authority paths to their management and know exactly what they need (avoid endless upselling). Or lots of money will be transferred from idiots to crooks (enterprise caveat emptor). Edit: fixed grammar
- damcedami 11y ago
  The place where I work, regret a decision to use Oracle, our application build with Oracle Form Builder, which is awfully hard to use, broken easily. But I must admit, their pre-sales really good at describing their product, my boss really hooked up by them. "Oh, for that problem we have this, it will cost this much, but for now, you can just use it for free" then some wild invoice came to our office.
  - bmir-alum-007 11y ago
    The dept I used to work at was mostly ex-B4 people and I later did enterprise consulting later: What happens is that sales people talk to people high enough up on the food chain that they get the run of the place, and so it's nearly impossible to kick them out or refuse their requests without a substantial political cost/justification. It's called "building a beachhead" and involves the engagement team worming their way up to a client's CTO or even CEO, if possible. I've been deployed as a client-facing "technical"# consultant, and I got really good at it (if I do say so myself): creating additional staff roles, developing opportunities and frenimizing other consulting shops... without inventing things that didn't need doing or creating bullsh!t jobs. # My mind was more on how to grow the business while simultaneously helping the client fix their deployments. Seriously, the sales guy was dead weight and dumb as a bag of broken rocks but looked good in suit and could talk in nonstop sports metaphors and bizease clichés. The measure of how a software company values its customers is in the post-sales support... just asking some users how it's going is better than hiding out or DKing them. (About '03/'04, Dell took us out to see the server factory in Round Rock, but went radio silent after a significant purchase.)
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      I was in a situation where they were selling something to a business leader that my side of the org wasn't in favor of buying (5x cost difference). I drew the short straw and got to meet with them and the business leadership people. In the meeting, I literally had this dude and his presales guys in $5000 suits sitting across the table from me, berating our position and demanding (quote was "You have no fucking business saying no until you provide us with <our numbers> so we can do your ROI") all sort of crap from us. Ended up prodding the salesbot and let him run his mouth for awhile until he said something really stupid that ostracized the business folks on our side.
waihtis 11y ago
I've recently read "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" and while it was published over 10 years ago, this sounds exactly like a lot of things that happened in the book. The Oracle corporate culture seems to basically be reflection of Larry Ellison's megalomania. Their will to rack sales is just insatiable.
- Flenser 11y ago
  You might enjoy this talk by Bryan Cantrill, where he describes the Oracle acquisition of Sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m7s > "what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle" > "this company is about one man and his alter ego and what he wants to inflict upon humanity" Edit: And how could I forget this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m > "and then, the Nazis invaded" > "for a while I tried to not go to Nazi allegory when talking about Oracle but I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table"
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    You forgot the bit about "The Larry Ellison Institute for the Prolonging of Life: <stage pause> namely his"
  - twoodfin 11y ago
    Hadn't seen the second talk, which is (no surprise) technically interesting as well as highly entertaining. Thanks!
    - Flenser 11y ago
      YouTube should suggest some of his other talks too. There's more oracle stuff in the illumous day and Surge talks, and he also has very humorous segments in the Surge 2013 and 2014 Lighting talks.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
I went to a prominent tech school that adopted an Oracle platform for student course management in my last few years. I won't mince words: it was a piece of shit, and my school's administrators ate shit by agreeing to a contract that forbid them from making any changes to Oracle's broken system. Now I work in college administration and we have to deal with the very same pile of junk. Someone once told me that Larry Ellison is the biggest asshole in Silicon Valley, and also the richest, so he must be doing something right. The same could be said for John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Is the world we have the world we want?
- mgr86 11y ago
  ok you are a hair away from my favorite oracle acronym. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
- cmiles74 11y ago
  UMass Amherst was this side of non-functional for the first three days of the school year in 2005 because of a botched Peoplesoft (at that time recently purchased by Oracle) rollout. http://www.cio.com/article/2439102/enterprise-resource-planning/university-erp--big-mess-on-campus.html http://www.cio.com/article/2439102/enterprise-resource-plann...
  - Decade 11y ago
    Hah! The guys at SFSU somehow forgot that. They just implemented a Peoplesoft last year, now a part of Oracle since forever, so no excuses for how badly it works.
- greggyb 11y ago
  You might want to fact check yourself on Rockefeller: Founded 1870, antitrust 1911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil Crude prices in that time frame (and beyond): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Prices_Since_1861.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Prices_Since_186... Production in that time frame (having trouble finding a nice long time-series chart): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_industry#Modern_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_indus... If we want to make a strong claim of harmful monopoly[0], we should not expect to see a massive surge in production combined with an impressive decrease in price. [0]Here I use the term "harmful monopoly" to refer to a firm that has both market power (can influence prices by controlling supply) and uses it to increase its own profits. What we see instead is a time period where we do indeed have a dominant firm, but one behaving as if it were in a competitive market. The important characteristics of a competitive market here are low barriers to entry/exit, and a commodity product. There were incredibly low barriers to entry/exit, and oil has, for nearly its entire existence as a product in the modern age, been a commodity.
logicallee 11y ago
but it's not a zero-sum game. Oracle's services could really be "you suck at business, we can write ten lines of code that improve your process 100x, we just call it database management because no way you would pay us to show you how incompetent you are at thinking about and running your own business, that we don't know anything about." Most companies that use oracle's services could likely literally, no shit, do it on a single mac mini using sqlite. Most companies just don't have that much data, and even if they do single servers are giant, massive affairs today where for the price of one month of consulting services (I mean $10K-$70K) you can configure a server with 1TB RAM that will handle your data for the next five years. There's just not that much data. Laptops can handle it. The reason you pay for an oracle DBA instead of running sqlite on your macbook, is not because oracle is that much better. It's because that way you don't have to admit how much you suck.
kabdib 11y ago
Turns out to be Oracle's chief security officer. Read the other blog posts. Holy cow crackers.
Natsu 11y ago
This is hardly a first. Oracle stuffs a bad, misspelled little poem in their DB protocols, not for any technical reason, but purely to attempt to extend copyright protection by forcing people to violate their copyrights to be compatible with Oracle. You can find a copy of it here: http://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html http://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html Note the copyright statement on the mispelled, 3-line poem with no literary merit whatsoever (which happens to be longer than the poem itself): "The preceding key is copyrighted by Oracle Corporation. Dupl@ication of this key is not allowed without permission from Oracl1e Corporation. Copyright 2003 Oracle Corporation." The purpose of this is to abuse the copyright on the above "poem" in order to prevent people from implementing the Oracle DB protocols. I guess they hope that everyone is ignorant of Sega v. Accolade? Even that trick of theirs is copied from elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade EDIT: Reading that deliberate misspelling makes me wonder if I could start "Oracl1e Corporation" and give people permission to violate this? Sure, it'd be a ridiculous cheat, but so is the sham copyright on their worthless poem.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  I was going to post Sega v. Accolade after seeing the first three paragraphs of your post. Yeah. Copyright isn't functional, duplicating the poem to achieve functionality wouldn't violate copyright.
- username3 11y ago
  Isn't the blogpost violating copyright by posting the whole poem?
  - Natsu 11y ago
    That depends on how the fair use argument goes. The downside of such arguments is that you generally have to argue that in court. I tend to believe that Oracle would prefer to leave this untested, as they'd probably benefit more from leaving it uncertain than to spend a ton of money litigating it with a chance of blowing up the whole scheme. I mean, given that this is a trivial work with no discernible literary merit, a full quotation is arguably a reasonable step in order to fully demonstrate the triviality of the work. The sole purpose of this poem, given that it's hidden away deep in the plumbing of the system where almost nobody ever sees it, is to dissuade people from making something that is interoperable with Oracle's DBs, after all. One normally displays art that they're proud of where people can appreciate it, rather than making it a technical requirement for a machine to recite bad poetry to a database before the database will deign to respond. It could be worse, though. Just imagine if this was Vogon poetry...
joshstrange 11y ago
My company is still dealing with a (thankfully) failed move to oracle. Some hotshot (who is long gone now) sold them on the idea and our DB tables/columns names are still all over the place b/c of oracles limits on name lengths. All new (and really old) tables are full length but around when we thought we were going to move all the table/column names are nearly unreadable... We also have a couple hundred thousand dollar boat anchors (read: oracle servers) because apparently they aren't worth shit if you don't run oracle on then and stripping them for parts is almost a zero-sum game. Also Oracle told us they will try to sell them for us (because they won't just buy them bacl) but they have ZERO incentive to do so when they can swindle some other corporation out of more money by selling new servers. We are now in the middle of switching over to MariaDB and I can't wait to leave Oracle behind.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Look up the story of the State of Oregon's failed healthcare exchange. Set up by Oracle. Last new I'm aware was Oregon sued Oracle for $200 million. "Oregon sues Oracle over failed Obamacare website" http://fortune.com/2014/08/22/oregon-oracle-spat-200-million-lawsuit/ http://fortune.com/2014/08/22/oregon-oracle-spat-200-million... Oregon’s suit, filed Friday in state court, alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, made falsely convinced officials to buy “hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised.” It is seeking $200 million in damages.

by kabdib 11y ago

bmir-alum-007 11y ago

Stanford was taken to the cleaners to the tune of $1.5 x 10^8 USD in the deployment of Oracle Financials and related products via endless "consultant implementation" charges that didn't really deliver much value, were rarely on schedule or on budget. Oracle's enterprise calendaring program was totally inadequate and had UX that made most point-of-sale systems look effortless by contrast. Also, the assets managing app, Sunflower, was another dud. The only thing Oracle Database had going for it was no crippling license activation (license scofflaws are/were sued or fined into oblivion worse than M$FT), which one could say was equivalent to MS SQL. Unlike MS MSQL, Oracle DBMS has/had bazillions of support patches to apply to run a real production box, analogous to the previously separate Sun's Solaris patchsets. Btw: For smaller enterprisey shops, either MS SQL or Postgres are the way to go. Often multiple similar components are needed because different apps have firm requirements that only support one or another; but generally try to avoid this because supporting too many heterogenous components is expensive (laborious)... hence the prevalence of local "standards." Deploying everything with cfengine3 or puppet can help reduce the manualness and nudge vendors into repeatable, idempotent deployments rather than clicking on inane GUI installers like an animal. ProTip: Don't let consultants "provide" oversight / free-reign for their own projects, budgets, etc., that's like the wolf guarding the henhouse. The client must hire their own project managers, have clear accountability/authority paths to their management and know exactly what they need (avoid endless upselling). Or lots of money will be transferred from idiots to crooks (enterprise caveat emptor). Edit: fixed grammar

damcedami 11y ago
The place where I work, regret a decision to use Oracle, our application build with Oracle Form Builder, which is awfully hard to use, broken easily. But I must admit, their pre-sales really good at describing their product, my boss really hooked up by them. "Oh, for that problem we have this, it will cost this much, but for now, you can just use it for free" then some wild invoice came to our office.
- bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  The dept I used to work at was mostly ex-B4 people and I later did enterprise consulting later: What happens is that sales people talk to people high enough up on the food chain that they get the run of the place, and so it's nearly impossible to kick them out or refuse their requests without a substantial political cost/justification. It's called "building a beachhead" and involves the engagement team worming their way up to a client's CTO or even CEO, if possible. I've been deployed as a client-facing "technical"# consultant, and I got really good at it (if I do say so myself): creating additional staff roles, developing opportunities and frenimizing other consulting shops... without inventing things that didn't need doing or creating bullsh!t jobs. # My mind was more on how to grow the business while simultaneously helping the client fix their deployments. Seriously, the sales guy was dead weight and dumb as a bag of broken rocks but looked good in suit and could talk in nonstop sports metaphors and bizease clichés. The measure of how a software company values its customers is in the post-sales support... just asking some users how it's going is better than hiding out or DKing them. (About '03/'04, Dell took us out to see the server factory in Round Rock, but went radio silent after a significant purchase.)
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    I was in a situation where they were selling something to a business leader that my side of the org wasn't in favor of buying (5x cost difference). I drew the short straw and got to meet with them and the business leadership people. In the meeting, I literally had this dude and his presales guys in $5000 suits sitting across the table from me, berating our position and demanding (quote was "You have no fucking business saying no until you provide us with <our numbers> so we can do your ROI") all sort of crap from us. Ended up prodding the salesbot and let him run his mouth for awhile until he said something really stupid that ostracized the business folks on our side.

waihtis 11y ago

I've recently read "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" and while it was published over 10 years ago, this sounds exactly like a lot of things that happened in the book. The Oracle corporate culture seems to basically be reflection of Larry Ellison's megalomania. Their will to rack sales is just insatiable.

Flenser 11y ago
You might enjoy this talk by Bryan Cantrill, where he describes the Oracle acquisition of Sun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m7s > "what you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle" > "this company is about one man and his alter ego and what he wants to inflict upon humanity" Edit: And how could I forget this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m > "and then, the Nazis invaded" > "for a while I tried to not go to Nazi allegory when talking about Oracle but I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table"
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  You forgot the bit about "The Larry Ellison Institute for the Prolonging of Life: <stage pause> namely his"
- twoodfin 11y ago
  Hadn't seen the second talk, which is (no surprise) technically interesting as well as highly entertaining. Thanks!
  - Flenser 11y ago
    YouTube should suggest some of his other talks too. There's more oracle stuff in the illumous day and Surge talks, and he also has very humorous segments in the Surge 2013 and 2014 Lighting talks.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

I went to a prominent tech school that adopted an Oracle platform for student course management in my last few years. I won't mince words: it was a piece of shit, and my school's administrators ate shit by agreeing to a contract that forbid them from making any changes to Oracle's broken system. Now I work in college administration and we have to deal with the very same pile of junk. Someone once told me that Larry Ellison is the biggest asshole in Silicon Valley, and also the richest, so he must be doing something right. The same could be said for John D Rockefeller and Standard Oil. Is the world we have the world we want?

mgr86 11y ago
ok you are a hair away from my favorite oracle acronym. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
cmiles74 11y ago
UMass Amherst was this side of non-functional for the first three days of the school year in 2005 because of a botched Peoplesoft (at that time recently purchased by Oracle) rollout. http://www.cio.com/article/2439102/enterprise-resource-planning/university-erp--big-mess-on-campus.html http://www.cio.com/article/2439102/enterprise-resource-plann...
- Decade 11y ago
  Hah! The guys at SFSU somehow forgot that. They just implemented a Peoplesoft last year, now a part of Oracle since forever, so no excuses for how badly it works.
greggyb 11y ago
You might want to fact check yourself on Rockefeller: Founded 1870, antitrust 1911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil Crude prices in that time frame (and beyond): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Prices_Since_1861.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Prices_Since_186... Production in that time frame (having trouble finding a nice long time-series chart): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_industry#Modern_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_indus... If we want to make a strong claim of harmful monopoly[0], we should not expect to see a massive surge in production combined with an impressive decrease in price. [0]Here I use the term "harmful monopoly" to refer to a firm that has both market power (can influence prices by controlling supply) and uses it to increase its own profits. What we see instead is a time period where we do indeed have a dominant firm, but one behaving as if it were in a competitive market. The important characteristics of a competitive market here are low barriers to entry/exit, and a commodity product. There were incredibly low barriers to entry/exit, and oil has, for nearly its entire existence as a product in the modern age, been a commodity.

logicallee 11y ago

but it's not a zero-sum game. Oracle's services could really be "you suck at business, we can write ten lines of code that improve your process 100x, we just call it database management because no way you would pay us to show you how incompetent you are at thinking about and running your own business, that we don't know anything about." Most companies that use oracle's services could likely literally, no shit, do it on a single mac mini using sqlite. Most companies just don't have that much data, and even if they do single servers are giant, massive affairs today where for the price of one month of consulting services (I mean $10K-$70K) you can configure a server with 1TB RAM that will handle your data for the next five years. There's just not that much data. Laptops can handle it. The reason you pay for an oracle DBA instead of running sqlite on your macbook, is not because oracle is that much better. It's because that way you don't have to admit how much you suck.

kabdib 11y ago

Turns out to be Oracle's chief security officer. Read the other blog posts. Holy cow crackers.

Natsu 11y ago

This is hardly a first. Oracle stuffs a bad, misspelled little poem in their DB protocols, not for any technical reason, but purely to attempt to extend copyright protection by forcing people to violate their copyrights to be compatible with Oracle. You can find a copy of it here: http://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html http://dacut.blogspot.com/2008/03/oracle-poetry.html Note the copyright statement on the mispelled, 3-line poem with no literary merit whatsoever (which happens to be longer than the poem itself): "The preceding key is copyrighted by Oracle Corporation. Dupl@ication of this key is not allowed without permission from Oracl1e Corporation. Copyright 2003 Oracle Corporation." The purpose of this is to abuse the copyright on the above "poem" in order to prevent people from implementing the Oracle DB protocols. I guess they hope that everyone is ignorant of Sega v. Accolade? Even that trick of theirs is copied from elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade EDIT: Reading that deliberate misspelling makes me wonder if I could start "Oracl1e Corporation" and give people permission to violate this? Sure, it'd be a ridiculous cheat, but so is the sham copyright on their worthless poem.

dredmorbius 11y ago
I was going to post Sega v. Accolade after seeing the first three paragraphs of your post. Yeah. Copyright isn't functional, duplicating the poem to achieve functionality wouldn't violate copyright.
username3 11y ago
Isn't the blogpost violating copyright by posting the whole poem?
- Natsu 11y ago
  That depends on how the fair use argument goes. The downside of such arguments is that you generally have to argue that in court. I tend to believe that Oracle would prefer to leave this untested, as they'd probably benefit more from leaving it uncertain than to spend a ton of money litigating it with a chance of blowing up the whole scheme. I mean, given that this is a trivial work with no discernible literary merit, a full quotation is arguably a reasonable step in order to fully demonstrate the triviality of the work. The sole purpose of this poem, given that it's hidden away deep in the plumbing of the system where almost nobody ever sees it, is to dissuade people from making something that is interoperable with Oracle's DBs, after all. One normally displays art that they're proud of where people can appreciate it, rather than making it a technical requirement for a machine to recite bad poetry to a database before the database will deign to respond. It could be worse, though. Just imagine if this was Vogon poetry...

joshstrange 11y ago

My company is still dealing with a (thankfully) failed move to oracle. Some hotshot (who is long gone now) sold them on the idea and our DB tables/columns names are still all over the place b/c of oracles limits on name lengths. All new (and really old) tables are full length but around when we thought we were going to move all the table/column names are nearly unreadable... We also have a couple hundred thousand dollar boat anchors (read: oracle servers) because apparently they aren't worth shit if you don't run oracle on then and stripping them for parts is almost a zero-sum game. Also Oracle told us they will try to sell them for us (because they won't just buy them bacl) but they have ZERO incentive to do so when they can swindle some other corporation out of more money by selling new servers. We are now in the middle of switching over to MariaDB and I can't wait to leave Oracle behind.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Look up the story of the State of Oregon's failed healthcare exchange. Set up by Oracle. Last new I'm aware was Oregon sued Oracle for $200 million. "Oregon sues Oracle over failed Obamacare website" http://fortune.com/2014/08/22/oregon-oracle-spat-200-million-lawsuit/ http://fortune.com/2014/08/22/oregon-oracle-spat-200-million... Oregon’s suit, filed Friday in state court, alleges that Oracle, the largest tech contractor working on the website, made falsely convinced officials to buy “hundreds of millions of dollars of Oracle products and services that failed to perform as promised.” It is seeking $200 million in damages.