5 ms·

Could the HNers who have bought Oracle db or its enterprise apps share why they chose Oracle over other options. I have have been working in the s/w development

Could the HNers who have bought Oracle db or its enterprise apps share why they chose Oracle over other options. I have have been working in the s/w development side in the banking sector but I was never part of the purchasing decision for infrastructure. I do suspect that the banks keep on buying Oracle or IBM DB2 because of their (Oracle and IBM) reputation for reliability and the army of Oracle or DB2 DBA already in the banks' employment. I have often recommended Jboss over Weblogic for my applications but that option is not considered viable because of Oracle's reputation and existing support contracts. So, why did you buy Oracle db over say (i)Postgres (ii) MS SQL or Sybase ?

bni 11y ago
Consultants that sell Oracle to customers on a regular basis get personal bonuses from Oracle. These could be personal vacation trips or cash.
kailuowang 11y ago
I imagine it's extremely rare that someone comes to HN regularly would choose to buy Oracle with alternative options on the table. Here is the cynical view: the majority of "enterprise" S/W development happens in companies whose CTOs knows very little about software development other than the powerpoint slides they saw from sales or consultants. And all their CEOs can do to improve their technology is to throw more money to those CTOs, who in most cases can only spend those money by buying expensive services/support, hiring AAA brand consultants and hiring as many managers as it takes to "improve the productivity." Well, what else can they do, good engineers don't want to work there.
toyg 11y ago
I work in the space. Oracle gets picked because is perceived as "safe" by executives, because they have armies of people you can shout at when things go wrong (not that it will solve anything, but executives usually enjoy it). In addition, their portfolio is so vast that any large business will likely have something else that can be leveraged in any discussion ("don't like our db pricing? Let me cut the renewal price of this other product you bought last year. Or what if I throw in a few licenses of that other product you were already evaluating?"). This also allows one good product to cover for the shortcomings of others ("ok, this project failed horribly, but that other thing last year was hot stuff! You got to give us another chance!"). Of course, they already are on the list of approved vendors, so there is no bureaucracy or exposure for whoever signs the purchase order. CYA rules. If you want to get really technical, however, most Oracle products will just "tick all boxes". They might not be the best option, the fastest one or the easiest to maintain (and they are never the cheapest), but they're likely the most feature-complete. For example, the db: want multiple active-active instances? can do. Active-passive? can do. Multiple names for same instance? can do. Multiple instances on same box? can do. Cross-platform? can do. Working without DNS? can do. Objects? can do. XML? Can do. Your company has weird storage requirements? No prob. Maintenance tools? More than you will ever use. And so on and so forth. On paper (which is where executives live), it's hard to justify anything else; problems only come up when you actually try to use the beast.
- craftsman 11y ago
  This is spot on. Regarding the last paragraph, I was once in a meeting at a very large company in which an AVP asked me and several other experienced engineers: "Ignore the technical details; is there any reason we shouldn't purchase this large suite of Oracle products?" That was the litmus test, so yes, it's purely a safety play for many.
  - eitally 11y ago
    The good news is that Oracle is pretty much the only vendor like this these days, and no matter how many companies they buy, they are slowly seeing erosion of both their core business and their peripheral apps/services by upstarts ... not to mention SAP pivoting much more intelligently to the modern, cloud-based SAAS world.
  - aswanson 11y ago
    That is hilarious, straight out of an SNL/Onion skit. And these are the folks who run the world.
    - pas 11y ago
      Because it usually doesn't matter. If you are not a Google/Facebook scale op, cobbling together something with SQLite on a battery backed RAM disk is probably properly enough. I'm pretty sure that could run the store part of Amazon with enough madness thrown at it. So for most companies UX is more important than how messy your backing store is. And yes, delivering good UX requires quick iterations, and that probably means a good operational support for experimenting with various data access patterns, but - again - SQL is enough. Just throw more Hadoop at it, if not. (For specialized data stores. Or just more hardware and even more 12c instances and use that as your key-value store. Doesn't matter. Wrap it and spend more time on UX and features.) Yes, disrupting them with better technical skills is possible, but don't forget that in the end you have to provide value, and rarely a "contains only F/OSS" sticker is enough.
protomyth 11y ago
It was required and included by one of our vendors in their product. We pay the vendor and they pass on to Oracle the yearly licensing fee. Oracle does support their products and quite a lot of people know how they work. I'm not sure why the vendor chose Oracle.
alaxsxaq 11y ago
There are products in niche spaces (Higher Ed, for instance) that are built entirely on the Oracle platform. The one we run has a front-end that was built on the old Oracle Forms product and still runs that code on the Oracle WebLogic server and, at its core, are thousands of pl/sql functions and procedures. The companies that have owned this product have had numerous (unsuccessful) projects to migrate the system away from its dependency on Oracle technology. The database is a solid product, but there is a lot of stuff bolted on and configuration and management is more complicated that it should be and too many features that should be part of the core are expensive extra-cost options. I have a love/hate thing with this company - decent support, over-priced products, and a horrid sleazy sales team that I avoid like the plague.
bm98 11y ago
In many cases the decision to go with Oracle was made decades ago, and the cost of migrating large, legacy databases and codebases away from Oracle is higher than the cost of continuing to use Oracle. Oracle licenses can be very expensive, but migrating and rewriting and retesting working code can be even more expensive! Also, Oracle is pretty good at achieving vendor lock-in. For example they introduced a rapid web application development platform called "Apex" [1] about a decade ago and shipped it with every Oracle database (even the "free" Oracle Express Edition). In my experience, developers who use it tend to like it, it does achieve rapid development, and there's really nothing else like it outside of Oracle. Once an organization has Apex apps, though, there's no migration path to Postgres that doesn't involve completely redeveloping the Apex applications from scratch. Finally, despite all of the ways in which Oracle seems to be business and developer unfriendly, for a developer or DBA trained and experienced and entrenched in the Oracle ecosystem (and for whom license costs and sales tactics are not a concern), it's really not such a bad place to be IMHO. I personally would not choose Oracle for my own ventures but in the cases where Oracle has been chosen for me, I enjoy working in the ecosystem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Application_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Application_Express

bni 11y ago

Consultants that sell Oracle to customers on a regular basis get personal bonuses from Oracle. These could be personal vacation trips or cash.

kailuowang 11y ago

I imagine it's extremely rare that someone comes to HN regularly would choose to buy Oracle with alternative options on the table. Here is the cynical view: the majority of "enterprise" S/W development happens in companies whose CTOs knows very little about software development other than the powerpoint slides they saw from sales or consultants. And all their CEOs can do to improve their technology is to throw more money to those CTOs, who in most cases can only spend those money by buying expensive services/support, hiring AAA brand consultants and hiring as many managers as it takes to "improve the productivity." Well, what else can they do, good engineers don't want to work there.

toyg 11y ago

I work in the space. Oracle gets picked because is perceived as "safe" by executives, because they have armies of people you can shout at when things go wrong (not that it will solve anything, but executives usually enjoy it). In addition, their portfolio is so vast that any large business will likely have something else that can be leveraged in any discussion ("don't like our db pricing? Let me cut the renewal price of this other product you bought last year. Or what if I throw in a few licenses of that other product you were already evaluating?"). This also allows one good product to cover for the shortcomings of others ("ok, this project failed horribly, but that other thing last year was hot stuff! You got to give us another chance!"). Of course, they already are on the list of approved vendors, so there is no bureaucracy or exposure for whoever signs the purchase order. CYA rules. If you want to get really technical, however, most Oracle products will just "tick all boxes". They might not be the best option, the fastest one or the easiest to maintain (and they are never the cheapest), but they're likely the most feature-complete. For example, the db: want multiple active-active instances? can do. Active-passive? can do. Multiple names for same instance? can do. Multiple instances on same box? can do. Cross-platform? can do. Working without DNS? can do. Objects? can do. XML? Can do. Your company has weird storage requirements? No prob. Maintenance tools? More than you will ever use. And so on and so forth. On paper (which is where executives live), it's hard to justify anything else; problems only come up when you actually try to use the beast.

craftsman 11y ago
This is spot on. Regarding the last paragraph, I was once in a meeting at a very large company in which an AVP asked me and several other experienced engineers: "Ignore the technical details; is there any reason we shouldn't purchase this large suite of Oracle products?" That was the litmus test, so yes, it's purely a safety play for many.
- eitally 11y ago
  The good news is that Oracle is pretty much the only vendor like this these days, and no matter how many companies they buy, they are slowly seeing erosion of both their core business and their peripheral apps/services by upstarts ... not to mention SAP pivoting much more intelligently to the modern, cloud-based SAAS world.
- aswanson 11y ago
  That is hilarious, straight out of an SNL/Onion skit. And these are the folks who run the world.
  - pas 11y ago
    Because it usually doesn't matter. If you are not a Google/Facebook scale op, cobbling together something with SQLite on a battery backed RAM disk is probably properly enough. I'm pretty sure that could run the store part of Amazon with enough madness thrown at it. So for most companies UX is more important than how messy your backing store is. And yes, delivering good UX requires quick iterations, and that probably means a good operational support for experimenting with various data access patterns, but - again - SQL is enough. Just throw more Hadoop at it, if not. (For specialized data stores. Or just more hardware and even more 12c instances and use that as your key-value store. Doesn't matter. Wrap it and spend more time on UX and features.) Yes, disrupting them with better technical skills is possible, but don't forget that in the end you have to provide value, and rarely a "contains only F/OSS" sticker is enough.

protomyth 11y ago

It was required and included by one of our vendors in their product. We pay the vendor and they pass on to Oracle the yearly licensing fee. Oracle does support their products and quite a lot of people know how they work. I'm not sure why the vendor chose Oracle.

alaxsxaq 11y ago

There are products in niche spaces (Higher Ed, for instance) that are built entirely on the Oracle platform. The one we run has a front-end that was built on the old Oracle Forms product and still runs that code on the Oracle WebLogic server and, at its core, are thousands of pl/sql functions and procedures. The companies that have owned this product have had numerous (unsuccessful) projects to migrate the system away from its dependency on Oracle technology. The database is a solid product, but there is a lot of stuff bolted on and configuration and management is more complicated that it should be and too many features that should be part of the core are expensive extra-cost options. I have a love/hate thing with this company - decent support, over-priced products, and a horrid sleazy sales team that I avoid like the plague.

bm98 11y ago

In many cases the decision to go with Oracle was made decades ago, and the cost of migrating large, legacy databases and codebases away from Oracle is higher than the cost of continuing to use Oracle. Oracle licenses can be very expensive, but migrating and rewriting and retesting working code can be even more expensive! Also, Oracle is pretty good at achieving vendor lock-in. For example they introduced a rapid web application development platform called "Apex" [1] about a decade ago and shipped it with every Oracle database (even the "free" Oracle Express Edition). In my experience, developers who use it tend to like it, it does achieve rapid development, and there's really nothing else like it outside of Oracle. Once an organization has Apex apps, though, there's no migration path to Postgres that doesn't involve completely redeveloping the Apex applications from scratch. Finally, despite all of the ways in which Oracle seems to be business and developer unfriendly, for a developer or DBA trained and experienced and entrenched in the Oracle ecosystem (and for whom license costs and sales tactics are not a concern), it's really not such a bad place to be IMHO. I personally would not choose Oracle for my own ventures but in the cases where Oracle has been chosen for me, I enjoy working in the ecosystem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Application_Express https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Application_Express