9 ms·

Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies

217 points by daamien 11y ago

daamien 11y ago
direct link to the PDF : http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/43080/PostgreSQL_Oracle.pdf http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/43080/Postgr...
- metachris 11y ago
  This is the PDF in English (via Google Translate): https://www.metachris.com/download/PostgreSQL_Oracle_en.pdf https://www.metachris.com/download/PostgreSQL_Oracle_en.pdf
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    So their argument is that Postgres is not feature complete with Oracle due to this new law? Yeah, that's not going to fly. All the register needs to show are the few things Oracle can do that Postgres can't and then Oracle will only be allowed to be used in those limited scenarios.
vamur 11y ago
Postgresql's greatest advantage - no headache from dealing with BS from Oracle or MS.
- joelhaasnoot 11y ago
  Pay hundreds of thousands in support contracts, get peanuts (and/or worse advice than the documentation).
  - vetinari 11y ago
    Using Oracle product in a non-Oracle VM? Now you get the privilege to pay licensing for all the cores in your environment where you can migrate the VM to. With such a policy, what could possibly go wrong?
  - newjersey 11y ago
    Free software saves money because you don't pay per core/processor/user/whatever. With proprietary software, you have to agree to auditing by the vendor (or their representative) and they decide whether you're in compliance. Why anyone would willingly agree to such agreements is beyond me.
- smoyer 11y ago
  +1 We have been building/rebuilding our applications on top of PostgreSQL but there are still a lot of departments that buy the "Oracle is better / We need paid support" propaganda. Props to Russia for their forward thinking views.
  - simula67 11y ago
    You can get paid support with Postgres : http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/subscriptions http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/subsc...
    - film42 11y ago
      We've been using 2ndQuadrant for a few years and love working with them: http://2ndquadrant.com/en/support/support-postgresql/ http://2ndquadrant.com/en/support/support-postgresql/
    - famerr 11y ago
      They are mentioned in original PDF on page 7 http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/43080/PostgreSQL_Oracle.pdf http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/43080/Postgr.... Mentioned as a company and a product, that has lots of add ons on top of PostgreSQL for reliability, distributed computing and operability.
ioltas 11y ago
I would be curious to see the evolution of the revenue of Oracle in Russia for 2016 Q1, including its Y2Y growth and the direct effects of the introduction of this law. The sole existence of this letter is proving that revenue took a serious hit.
je42 11y ago
Oracle gets desperate ;)
- Sven7 11y ago
  This has been Oracle's (i.e. Larry Ellison's) sales and marketing M.O. since forever. Read up on why Raymond Lane left the company. And sad part is it works.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Only till it doesn't. One day they'll try this tactic and discover that they've burned so many folks early in their career that a majority will see through the tactic. Or alternatively decision makers will consult with staff that advise them directly and THEY will have been burned. And the third thing that can happen, which happened with a friend of mine, is that a really bad solution is implemented at a very large ongoing cost, the executive who made the decision leaves (which is what often happens with incompetent executives) and their replacement walks in, sees the disaster, doesn't care about saving his predecessors stupidity and decides to remove the bad solution, and makes sure that the vendor who caused the headache goes to the bottom of the pile when it considerating them during tenders for new business. You know what they say: it costs less to keep existing business (especially in a saturated marketplace where you are the market leader) than it costs to drum up new business. Believe me, this is a very short to medium term sales solution. When it goes wrong it's not easy to recover from. When competitors start taking market share from Oracle they'll find it very hard to recover their market share without immense upheaval and systemic change throughout their business. Microsoft learned this the hard way. Oracle's time will come! Can't come soon enough.
  - salemh 11y ago
    I was interested in reading up on this, and found this article if others are interested: http://www.peoplesoft-planet.com/anatomy-power-play-ray-lane-left-oracle/ http://www.peoplesoft-planet.com/anatomy-power-play-ray-lane...
davidgerard 11y ago
Let me say again how our workplace conversion from Oracle to Postgres has made EVERYTHING SO MUCH BETTER. Not just from never having to talk to Oracle ever again - but the fact that we can give every app its own PG clustered pair without ever having to think the word "license". Nothing has to play nice with anything else. (We also have some MySQL - from old in-house apps and from third-party things like Drupal, Magento, WordPress and MediaWiki - and some MongoDB, which we're pushing to get converted to Postgres because it does key-value comparably fast and means one less dependency, though that's nothing like as urgent as getting off Oracle was.)
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Yeah, until MySQL gets a corrupted LSN that points into the future and you have to dump the table then reimport it... :P
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Chris is referring to this: http://rationalwiki.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/mysql-database-problems-work-in-progress.html http://rationalwiki.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/mysql-database-pr... which I eventually resolved by carefully hand-exporting the corrupt table to CSV and reimporting it. I think we lost one revision from 2008. I HATE MYSQL SO MUCH. (unfortunately, MediaWiki is one of those things where MySQL or preferably MariaDB is the only realistic option - other DBs are hypothetically supported, but in practice not well enough unless you want to do the heavy lifting yourself.)
revelation 11y ago
I love that chart on the second to last page. The axis are labeled "Completeness of vision" and "Ability to execute".
- athrun 11y ago
  This is Gartner's famous "Magic Quadrant".
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Which is largely used for propaganda and often doesn't exactly mean very much.
    - scholia 11y ago
      The Magic Quadrant is just the eye-catching bit of what is generally a fairly substantial (15,000-25,000 word) report.
  - scholia 11y ago
    You can download the whole report from Microsoft (not surprising, since it came out top): https://info.microsoft.com/CO-SQL-CNTNT-FY16-09Sep-14-MQOperational-Register.html https://info.microsoft.com/CO-SQL-CNTNT-FY16-09Sep-14-MQOper... I've posted a big version of the Magic Quadrant here: http://imgur.com/3qFwPd6 http://imgur.com/3qFwPd6
- mcguire 11y ago
  I'm assuming Oracle is in the lower left?
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Gartner identifies Micrsoft and Oracle as the leaders on the top right. Mongo, EnterpriseDB and Redisnare in the upper right as well.
- mistermann 11y ago
praptak 11y ago
Why do companies choose Oracle nowadays? I mean valid technical reasons, not being clueless or stuck in the abusive relationship of vendor lock-in.
- calpaterson 11y ago
  A common reason seems to be that the person in charge of procurement puts importance some operational aspect that Oracle has that other RDBMSs do not have. For example, some specific availability scenario that Oracle RAC solves, some security feature like row level security (which Postgres does have now) or some disaster recovery thing in RMAN. Most procurement processes only consider price once all criteria have been met so a common "attack vector" for an Oracle salesman is to get some criterion added that only Oracle can provide :). The other common reason is if you'll be deploying some existing application on top of your RDBMS and it either only supports Oracle (ie: it uses Oracle's proprietary language somehow or simply not ported to Postgres) or you already have lots of Oracle DBAs. Most big organisations are very brownfield so the technology choice is path dependent.
  - acdha 11y ago
    I think you're right, particularly about the apps – if you don't work at a large shop it's easy to forget how many businesses run the various financial apps which Oracle sells, and such apps tend to be used by senior management so e.g. the CFO is voting against changes unless there's a really good justification. Once you've got it in house, the argument will be that you don't want to have to hire experts for more than one database, which is how some people end up running a normal web app on Oracle because it's the only supported HA/backup/etc. option offered by the central IT group. At one previous employer, we had to deal with several hours of downtime daily because they kept not getting the $$$$ budget needed for Oracle's online backup product and so it went down for how ever long it took to write data out to a poorly configured tape backup. Trying to use MySQL or Postgres happened by necessity but was heavily FUDed over what might happen and all of the (internal) users had just been trained that the systems weren't available before 7:30 AM.
- Spooky23 11y ago
ivanceras 11y ago
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. (Gandhi) Hits hard
- xiaq 11y ago
  This. My first reaction to the news is that it is a clear evidence that PostgreSQL is now fully on par with Oracle in terms of everything average IT companies need to be concerned with. If I were Oracle and my product is still ahead of PostgreSQL at least in some areas, I wouldn't be so upset.
  - lucb1e 11y ago
    Yeah I was thinking the same, if it's clearly subpar then there would be no reason to send the letter in the first place. That's logic managers without technical knowledge can understand.
code_research 11y ago
Would be very interesting to have an open document listing alternatives from the PostgreSQL universe to every point in that document (a gitbook maybe?). A few minutes ago I was thinking that "database firewall" could be a problem, but then I found [0] immediately. [0] https://github.com/uptimejp/sql_firewall https://github.com/uptimejp/sql_firewall
chris_wot 11y ago
Oracle is beginning to find they are in trouble. Here's a small example: I'm hearing from a fairly reliable source that quite a few large Australian banks are replacing Oracle (my source didn't say with what). They are citing the enormous cost of the licenses, along with difficulty getting adequate support without paying a fortune. My contact himself is in upper management of a large corporation and Oracle screwed him on licensing, forcing him to pay a huge amount of money from his budget that he badly needed to spend on other projects. This delayed these projects by about 3 months, and put a bit of pressure on the area of the business he oversaw. He's also investigating the best way of quietly getting rid of Oracle as fast as possible. That will take some time, but he's at the point of rejecting any new solutions that require Oracle products. I'm not at all surprised. Medium sized businesses used to use Oracle due to perceived reliability and features, however there have been a number of things that are making them reconsider: * A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don't need. * difficulty in getting support - Oracle are notorious for not responding in a timely fashion to tickets, and a willingness by the CSO to completely ignore serious security flaws. I experienced this myself four years ago when my boss put me in charge of a clear Unicode bug in their OLEDB driver - the bug had been open for 2 years and by the time I left a year later Oracle had almost wilfully ignored everything we wrote, even ignoring a program we built in .NET that showed the problem. Throughout the ticket we dealt with something like 4 support people, each of whom didn't understand Unicode and who needed a basic backgrounder on how UTF8 works. * license costs are ridiculous, and frankly not worth it. * it can often be hard to find people who can troubleshoot performance issues. Even highly skilled people face a black box when they work on improving query performance as the CBO is largely a black box that can change from version to version. Without a clear explanation of how the CBO actually makes decisions it's often a bit of a crapshoot when tuning queries. * Oracle DBAs are very expensive, compared to how much you can pay an equivalent skilled DBA who knows Postgres or even SQL Server. * there are few features most medium sized businesses need that can't be done in Postgres.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  > * A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don't need. Woah. So essentially Oracle's "sales" reps behave like the mob. How have they gotten away with this for so long?
iamcreasy 11y ago
This semester I am taking a DBMS course and the instructor works at one of NASA's NSSDCA center in South Dakota. He mentioned in that class that, this NSSDCA center is in the process of moving away from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The transfer process is going on for over 2 years. Even the book we are following changed their focus from Oracle to MySQL from recent edition.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  I'd be asking the lecturer to change yo a different textbook...
  - iamcreasy 11y ago
    What's wrong with the current book? This is what we are reading : Database Systems: Design, Implementation, & Management 11th Edition
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Anything that uses MySQL as a teaching example is just plain wrong.
      - brianwawok 11y ago
        Why? It demos the basic concepts fine. Maybe they can use MariaDB instead?
        chris_wot 11y ago
        It also encourages students to use MySQL. If they were concerned with cost, they should have just picked Postgres.
kafkaesq 11y ago
Hmm, this part: It's poorly written in terms of Russian grammar, suggests that rather than being a "rogue" effort by an overseas affiliate (which Oracle will no doubt try to spin it as, once this turd floats to the to the top of the English-speaking business press, as it hopefully will), it's more likely that someone directly with Oracle provided a few "talking points" in English, and these were hastily translated into Russian by someone local (i.e. using GT or some other tool, and carelessly edited).
needusername 11y ago
Fun bit: PostgreS "ships" a Java 8/JDBC 4.2 driver, Oracle does not.
jgalt212 11y ago
Are there consultancies that specialize in Oracle -> (Postgress, MySQL, SQL server, et al) migrations? I mean, I'm sure there are but, when coupled with a skill set that helps you counter "license reviews" that could be quite a business.
postila 11y ago
Thank you guys for all thoughts here (a lot of interesting ones, as usual on HN)! I'm going to analyze them and create a compilation. Meanwhile PostgresPro (extended PostgreSQL version, distributed by Oleg Bartunov's company "Postgres Professional") officially included to the Russian Software Registry: https://reestr.minsvyaz.ru/reestr/65273/ https://reestr.minsvyaz.ru/reestr/65273/ [ru] ~~ Nikolay Samokhvalov
boksiora 11y ago
boo, they are afraid

217 points by daamien 11y ago

direct link to the PDF : http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/43080/PostgreSQL_Oracle.pdf http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/43080/Postgr...

metachris 11y ago
This is the PDF in English (via Google Translate): https://www.metachris.com/download/PostgreSQL_Oracle_en.pdf https://www.metachris.com/download/PostgreSQL_Oracle_en.pdf
- chris_wot 11y ago
  So their argument is that Postgres is not feature complete with Oracle due to this new law? Yeah, that's not going to fly. All the register needs to show are the few things Oracle can do that Postgres can't and then Oracle will only be allowed to be used in those limited scenarios.

vamur 11y ago

Postgresql's greatest advantage - no headache from dealing with BS from Oracle or MS.

joelhaasnoot 11y ago
Pay hundreds of thousands in support contracts, get peanuts (and/or worse advice than the documentation).
- vetinari 11y ago
  Using Oracle product in a non-Oracle VM? Now you get the privilege to pay licensing for all the cores in your environment where you can migrate the VM to. With such a policy, what could possibly go wrong?
- newjersey 11y ago
  Free software saves money because you don't pay per core/processor/user/whatever. With proprietary software, you have to agree to auditing by the vendor (or their representative) and they decide whether you're in compliance. Why anyone would willingly agree to such agreements is beyond me.
smoyer 11y ago
+1 We have been building/rebuilding our applications on top of PostgreSQL but there are still a lot of departments that buy the "Oracle is better / We need paid support" propaganda. Props to Russia for their forward thinking views.
- simula67 11y ago
  You can get paid support with Postgres : http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/subscriptions http://www.enterprisedb.com/products-services-training/subsc...
  - film42 11y ago
    We've been using 2ndQuadrant for a few years and love working with them: http://2ndquadrant.com/en/support/support-postgresql/ http://2ndquadrant.com/en/support/support-postgresql/
  - famerr 11y ago
    They are mentioned in original PDF on page 7 http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/43080/PostgreSQL_Oracle.pdf http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/43080/Postgr.... Mentioned as a company and a product, that has lots of add ons on top of PostgreSQL for reliability, distributed computing and operability.

ioltas 11y ago

I would be curious to see the evolution of the revenue of Oracle in Russia for 2016 Q1, including its Y2Y growth and the direct effects of the introduction of this law. The sole existence of this letter is proving that revenue took a serious hit.

je42 11y ago

Oracle gets desperate ;)

Sven7 11y ago
This has been Oracle's (i.e. Larry Ellison's) sales and marketing M.O. since forever. Read up on why Raymond Lane left the company. And sad part is it works.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Only till it doesn't. One day they'll try this tactic and discover that they've burned so many folks early in their career that a majority will see through the tactic. Or alternatively decision makers will consult with staff that advise them directly and THEY will have been burned. And the third thing that can happen, which happened with a friend of mine, is that a really bad solution is implemented at a very large ongoing cost, the executive who made the decision leaves (which is what often happens with incompetent executives) and their replacement walks in, sees the disaster, doesn't care about saving his predecessors stupidity and decides to remove the bad solution, and makes sure that the vendor who caused the headache goes to the bottom of the pile when it considerating them during tenders for new business. You know what they say: it costs less to keep existing business (especially in a saturated marketplace where you are the market leader) than it costs to drum up new business. Believe me, this is a very short to medium term sales solution. When it goes wrong it's not easy to recover from. When competitors start taking market share from Oracle they'll find it very hard to recover their market share without immense upheaval and systemic change throughout their business. Microsoft learned this the hard way. Oracle's time will come! Can't come soon enough.
- salemh 11y ago
  I was interested in reading up on this, and found this article if others are interested: http://www.peoplesoft-planet.com/anatomy-power-play-ray-lane-left-oracle/ http://www.peoplesoft-planet.com/anatomy-power-play-ray-lane...

davidgerard 11y ago

Let me say again how our workplace conversion from Oracle to Postgres has made EVERYTHING SO MUCH BETTER. Not just from never having to talk to Oracle ever again - but the fact that we can give every app its own PG clustered pair without ever having to think the word "license". Nothing has to play nice with anything else. (We also have some MySQL - from old in-house apps and from third-party things like Drupal, Magento, WordPress and MediaWiki - and some MongoDB, which we're pushing to get converted to Postgres because it does key-value comparably fast and means one less dependency, though that's nothing like as urgent as getting off Oracle was.)

chris_wot 11y ago
Yeah, until MySQL gets a corrupted LSN that points into the future and you have to dump the table then reimport it... :P
- davidgerard 11y ago
  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Chris is referring to this: http://rationalwiki.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/mysql-database-problems-work-in-progress.html http://rationalwiki.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/mysql-database-pr... which I eventually resolved by carefully hand-exporting the corrupt table to CSV and reimporting it. I think we lost one revision from 2008. I HATE MYSQL SO MUCH. (unfortunately, MediaWiki is one of those things where MySQL or preferably MariaDB is the only realistic option - other DBs are hypothetically supported, but in practice not well enough unless you want to do the heavy lifting yourself.)

revelation 11y ago

I love that chart on the second to last page. The axis are labeled "Completeness of vision" and "Ability to execute".

athrun 11y ago
This is Gartner's famous "Magic Quadrant".
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Which is largely used for propaganda and often doesn't exactly mean very much.
  - scholia 11y ago
    The Magic Quadrant is just the eye-catching bit of what is generally a fairly substantial (15,000-25,000 word) report.
- scholia 11y ago
  You can download the whole report from Microsoft (not surprising, since it came out top): https://info.microsoft.com/CO-SQL-CNTNT-FY16-09Sep-14-MQOperational-Register.html https://info.microsoft.com/CO-SQL-CNTNT-FY16-09Sep-14-MQOper... I've posted a big version of the Magic Quadrant here: http://imgur.com/3qFwPd6 http://imgur.com/3qFwPd6
mcguire 11y ago
I'm assuming Oracle is in the lower left?
- Spooky23 11y ago
  Gartner identifies Micrsoft and Oracle as the leaders on the top right. Mongo, EnterpriseDB and Redisnare in the upper right as well.
mistermann 11y ago

praptak 11y ago

Why do companies choose Oracle nowadays? I mean valid technical reasons, not being clueless or stuck in the abusive relationship of vendor lock-in.

calpaterson 11y ago
A common reason seems to be that the person in charge of procurement puts importance some operational aspect that Oracle has that other RDBMSs do not have. For example, some specific availability scenario that Oracle RAC solves, some security feature like row level security (which Postgres does have now) or some disaster recovery thing in RMAN. Most procurement processes only consider price once all criteria have been met so a common "attack vector" for an Oracle salesman is to get some criterion added that only Oracle can provide :). The other common reason is if you'll be deploying some existing application on top of your RDBMS and it either only supports Oracle (ie: it uses Oracle's proprietary language somehow or simply not ported to Postgres) or you already have lots of Oracle DBAs. Most big organisations are very brownfield so the technology choice is path dependent.
- acdha 11y ago
  I think you're right, particularly about the apps – if you don't work at a large shop it's easy to forget how many businesses run the various financial apps which Oracle sells, and such apps tend to be used by senior management so e.g. the CFO is voting against changes unless there's a really good justification. Once you've got it in house, the argument will be that you don't want to have to hire experts for more than one database, which is how some people end up running a normal web app on Oracle because it's the only supported HA/backup/etc. option offered by the central IT group. At one previous employer, we had to deal with several hours of downtime daily because they kept not getting the $$$$ budget needed for Oracle's online backup product and so it went down for how ever long it took to write data out to a poorly configured tape backup. Trying to use MySQL or Postgres happened by necessity but was heavily FUDed over what might happen and all of the (internal) users had just been trained that the systems weren't available before 7:30 AM.
Spooky23 11y ago

ivanceras 11y ago

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. (Gandhi) Hits hard

xiaq 11y ago
This. My first reaction to the news is that it is a clear evidence that PostgreSQL is now fully on par with Oracle in terms of everything average IT companies need to be concerned with. If I were Oracle and my product is still ahead of PostgreSQL at least in some areas, I wouldn't be so upset.
- lucb1e 11y ago
  Yeah I was thinking the same, if it's clearly subpar then there would be no reason to send the letter in the first place. That's logic managers without technical knowledge can understand.

code_research 11y ago

Would be very interesting to have an open document listing alternatives from the PostgreSQL universe to every point in that document (a gitbook maybe?). A few minutes ago I was thinking that "database firewall" could be a problem, but then I found [0] immediately. [0] https://github.com/uptimejp/sql_firewall https://github.com/uptimejp/sql_firewall

chris_wot 11y ago

Oracle is beginning to find they are in trouble. Here's a small example: I'm hearing from a fairly reliable source that quite a few large Australian banks are replacing Oracle (my source didn't say with what). They are citing the enormous cost of the licenses, along with difficulty getting adequate support without paying a fortune. My contact himself is in upper management of a large corporation and Oracle screwed him on licensing, forcing him to pay a huge amount of money from his budget that he badly needed to spend on other projects. This delayed these projects by about 3 months, and put a bit of pressure on the area of the business he oversaw. He's also investigating the best way of quietly getting rid of Oracle as fast as possible. That will take some time, but he's at the point of rejecting any new solutions that require Oracle products. I'm not at all surprised. Medium sized businesses used to use Oracle due to perceived reliability and features, however there have been a number of things that are making them reconsider: * A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don't need. * difficulty in getting support - Oracle are notorious for not responding in a timely fashion to tickets, and a willingness by the CSO to completely ignore serious security flaws. I experienced this myself four years ago when my boss put me in charge of a clear Unicode bug in their OLEDB driver - the bug had been open for 2 years and by the time I left a year later Oracle had almost wilfully ignored everything we wrote, even ignoring a program we built in .NET that showed the problem. Throughout the ticket we dealt with something like 4 support people, each of whom didn't understand Unicode and who needed a basic backgrounder on how UTF8 works. * license costs are ridiculous, and frankly not worth it. * it can often be hard to find people who can troubleshoot performance issues. Even highly skilled people face a black box when they work on improving query performance as the CBO is largely a black box that can change from version to version. Without a clear explanation of how the CBO actually makes decisions it's often a bit of a crapshoot when tuning queries. * Oracle DBAs are very expensive, compared to how much you can pay an equivalent skilled DBA who knows Postgres or even SQL Server. * there are few features most medium sized businesses need that can't be done in Postgres.

rpgmaker 11y ago
> * A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don't need. Woah. So essentially Oracle's "sales" reps behave like the mob. How have they gotten away with this for so long?

iamcreasy 11y ago

This semester I am taking a DBMS course and the instructor works at one of NASA's NSSDCA center in South Dakota. He mentioned in that class that, this NSSDCA center is in the process of moving away from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The transfer process is going on for over 2 years. Even the book we are following changed their focus from Oracle to MySQL from recent edition.

chris_wot 11y ago
I'd be asking the lecturer to change yo a different textbook...
- iamcreasy 11y ago
  What's wrong with the current book? This is what we are reading : Database Systems: Design, Implementation, & Management 11th Edition
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Anything that uses MySQL as a teaching example is just plain wrong.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      Why? It demos the basic concepts fine. Maybe they can use MariaDB instead?
      - chris_wot 11y ago
        It also encourages students to use MySQL. If they were concerned with cost, they should have just picked Postgres.

kafkaesq 11y ago

Hmm, this part: It's poorly written in terms of Russian grammar, suggests that rather than being a "rogue" effort by an overseas affiliate (which Oracle will no doubt try to spin it as, once this turd floats to the to the top of the English-speaking business press, as it hopefully will), it's more likely that someone directly with Oracle provided a few "talking points" in English, and these were hastily translated into Russian by someone local (i.e. using GT or some other tool, and carelessly edited).

needusername 11y ago

Fun bit: PostgreS "ships" a Java 8/JDBC 4.2 driver, Oracle does not.

jgalt212 11y ago

Are there consultancies that specialize in Oracle -> (Postgress, MySQL, SQL server, et al) migrations? I mean, I'm sure there are but, when coupled with a skill set that helps you counter "license reviews" that could be quite a business.

postila 11y ago

Thank you guys for all thoughts here (a lot of interesting ones, as usual on HN)! I'm going to analyze them and create a compilation. Meanwhile PostgresPro (extended PostgreSQL version, distributed by Oleg Bartunov's company "Postgres Professional") officially included to the Russian Software Registry: https://reestr.minsvyaz.ru/reestr/65273/ https://reestr.minsvyaz.ru/reestr/65273/ [ru] ~~ Nikolay Samokhvalov

boksiora 11y ago

boo, they are afraid