20 ms·

Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change

194 points by phonon 10y ago

cm2187 10y ago
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.
- endymi0n 10y ago
  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.
- miahi 10y ago
  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).
  - beagle3 10y ago
    What's "current", and what's your benchmark? Mine is video encoding using FFMPEG (where I run more program threads than FFMPEG decides is optimal in order to make sure no cpu thread is idle). I get at most 15% over hyperthreading off, and often about 5-10% less than hyperthreading off (For the whole process, beginning to end). On real cores, it is close to being linear in the number of cores (not quite, but it is close).
    - jmiserez 10y ago
      As I understand HT, in it's most basic form it will try to utilize all processing units by executing code from a second thread whenever possible. FFMPG most likely maxes out usage of all arithmetic and floating point units and limits branching to a minimum, so it would make sense that there are no real performance gains with HT.
      - beagle3 10y ago
        Of course. The question is, what is the kind of load in which it delivers 80% over a non HT core, as the GP claims? I've certainly never seen this kind of load.
      - stuckagain 10y ago
        For any kind of branchy pointer-chasing workload hyperthreading will easily double the throughput. These workloads spend all of their time waiting for load and recovering from mispredicted branches. Oracle is the poster child of this kind of workload. For decades now we've had to suffer these weird internet arguments about whether hyperthreading is "real", as if there was a naturally-occuring correct number of frontends on a CPU. If someone wants to put more instruction decoders on their CPU there is no rational argument that is "wrong".
  - cm2187 10y ago
    I guess it must really depend on the task. My basic understanding of hyper threading is that it is typically useful in memory intensive applications, where the core spends a lot of time (20ish cycles) waiting to get data from RAM. HT then executes the other thread while waiting. I presume a database must be memory intensive.
  - benchaney 10y ago
    Is this really true? I would have expected that as branch predicters and cache prefetchers improve, hyperthreading would become less effective.
- benchaney 10y ago
  True. I was pondering the trade off of switching off hyperthreading on AWS because of this.
brad0 10y ago
Is support the only reason people choose Oracle databases over something free like MySQL or Postgres?
- rosser 10y ago
  The thing you need to understand about Oracle is that it's never — well, never in my experience, and I've worked as a DBA (mostly postgres, but I have had my hands on some Oracle) for a decade now — chosen by the technologists. It's chosen by management. Usually non-technical management. Often dangerously so. But Oracle support basically doesn't answer the phone unless you're regularly cutting them six-figure checks, so you kinda need that level of management to be making the decision whether or not to use the platform.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Engineers need to learn how to stand their ground
    - threeseed 10y ago
      That's cute. And it might even work in a startup. But likely not. But in the enterprise world nobody really cares what engineers think. You have Enterprise Architects, Technical Architects, Solution Architects etc. who get paid exorbitant amounts of money, are political animals and can masterfully straddle the line between business and technology. Most of them are ex-engineers so they aren't entirely useless and since they have their own language they will make you look stupid. Can't articulate the transition from a tactical to strategic solution and explain what business capabilities it aligns to ? Well good luck getting that past the central Enterprise Architects who will need to sign off on your choice before it heads to Procurement/Legal. Architects along with IT managers and CIOs are the people whom the famous Oracle Sales machine targets with golf games, overseas trips and fancy dinners. It's never engineers. I spent a few years at Oracle. They are a multi billion dollar company for a reason.
      - raverbashing 10y ago
toyg 10y ago
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?
- coleca 10y ago
  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.
- rj0049 10y ago
  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.
echelon 10y ago
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...
- djhworld 10y ago
  Many years. 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
  - gumaflux 10y ago
    Until external forces turn these monoliths into heavy liabilities and block adaptability. Another important factor is today's engineers are tomorrows architects.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      They still have to answer to the managers. Also in the enterprise space code changes are measured in dollars/euro/yan/... per hour, not engineer happiness.
      - kpil 10y ago
        Eh, that's true just about everywhere... Code = Money. You spend some money, get new and hopefully better code, and with some luck you will get a return on the investment, ie more money than you spent on doing it. Unless you are doing it for fun. Or don't know what to do with all the money you have.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        You misunderstood me. That better code had a cost of 1 000 euros, due to the amount of hours spent on it. How much profit did those euros spent on developer salary brought to the business revenue?
dzhiurgis 10y ago
Does it impact RDS layer-thing they offer?
StreamBright 10y ago
No way, lucky we do not use any Oracle products. This might push some companies over to some other platforms.
Joeri 10y ago
Oracle is making a big push to move customers from aws and azure to their own cloud hosting. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-expansion-011717.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-... Raising prices for hosting with the competitor makes perfect sense when viewed from that angle.
- giis 10y ago
  Remember, Oracle also forced 'Redhat' customers (who rely on Oracle DB) to their Linux in similar manner. Now I wonder BTRFS is not getting enough attention, because its started by Oracle and their history with open-source?
  - mshook 10y ago
    The main btrfs devs who were at Oracle have been at Facebook for a while, so you can't blame Oracle for btrfs not moving along haha
  - sllabres 10y ago
    Not an expert in Oracle DB licensing. Could you explain?
    - giis 10y ago
      I'm not expert in licensing too. I've friends who said, when they needed enterprise support for Oracle DB running on Redhat, directly/indirectly the message they received is to migrate from Redhat linux to Oracle linux. I think that quite clear by some kind of 'cold-war' going on between Redhat & Oracle. http://fossforce.com/2016/03/microsoft-oracle-oracle-tried-red-hat/ http://fossforce.com/2016/03/microsoft-oracle-oracle-tried-r...
      - chris_wot 10y ago
        The very fact that you must be an "expert" in licensing really says everything you need to know about Oracle licenses.
jpalomaki 10y ago
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).
- geodel 10y ago
  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.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    "But today a lot of modern cloud infrastructure is getting written in Go" I don't think so. I our circles, we think 'Go' is a thing, but in most of the world, it's not. Rust, Go, these are all popular with new companies. Enterprises are so often .Net/Java + Oracle etc.. It's a big world of hospitals, large companies, government agencies etc..
    - geodel 10y ago
      Yes, enterprise apps are not yet there. But lot of infra-like software would have been written in Java if Go were not there. There is growing awareness of Go at big enterprises such as where I work. It will start with sucking oxygen for new projects which would be by default in Java.
webreac 10y ago
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.
- toyg 10y ago
  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.
  - z3t4 10y ago
    is it not standard practice to support at least two different db systems !?
    - toyg 10y ago
      For certain values of "support". Say you start on Oracle and then want to move to SqlServer? Migration will likely be a risky endeavor, even if the application supports either db when starting from scratch. To begin with, you'll need something to copy schemas across, be it in the app itself or not, and hope everything made it across. Then you'll have to hope the app doesn't need db-specific stuff (say, a sequence that you only get on sqlserver) that you don't have because you started on Ora. And then you'll have to move all the 3rd party tooling and hacks that you built over the years around that same database - from backup solutions to custom queries etc. It's rarely as easy as "copy it all and turn it back on", and all this work often has to be done by expensive application specialists. At that point, having to choose between paying hundreds of thousands to move db, or a few extra thousands per year to keep things as they are, the business decision is not as simple as one would think.
  - sqldba 10y ago
    DBA jobs haven't been entirely offshore'd. It happens in cycles. * Offshore to save money. Databases are a car, just follow the script / maintenance manual and everything will be okay right? * Discover the awful quality, security, never-ending cycle of bodies, lack of retention of information, zero innovation, frustrated staff having to try to deal with them, and and most of all costs which creep up (a lot like Oracle licensing). * Insource to qualified internal staff and retain knowledge, save money, and fix all the problems the outsourced company wouldn't. * Now that everything is fixed, create work manuals, and offshore again. This will get out of date over time, servers will get replaced, new software comes along, and things go to pot again. Repeat. To be fair, companies also often institute long and complex policies which stifle any kind of remediation an offshore staffer would do - because they can't. Internal employees learn the system, how to get things done, and they do it. I work for a team that has taken over from multiple offshore companies in this way. We find all of these things and worse, really just the most awfully maintained systems around - no backups, no maintenance, no organisation, nothing. They don't even patch but they say they do! And they've paid millions (and tens of millions) for the privilege! There's really no comparison so don't mistake the two for a second. As for automation - well - tools have made it so that one DBA can "manage" hundreds of servers at once if they're standardised in certain ways. But you'd be surprised at how many things can go wrong and how few can be automated, especially when the rest of the companies don't have proper automation infrastructure in place. Large enterprises are still fiefdoms of managers who want local employees and to retain their own jobs. Performance tuning and improvements though are extremely time consuming. You can, for some projects, focus entirely on single digit servers for years at a time if they're important enough.
WhiteSource1 10y ago
They are really struggling with the cloud. This isn't going to help Oracle at all. They might be able to stick around for a while because their legacy system is everywhere. But....
unixhero 10y ago
lol
mailslot 10y ago
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.
- tomcam 10y ago
  Don't understand the downvotes?
- hardwaresofton 10y ago
  OK, so the one point you've brought up is the query optimizer... do you have any data to back this up? a comparison between query speeds for trivial & non-trivial data sets/queries? Could you put into words a little bit more of what the Oracle DB does that Maria/MySQL/Postgres could not?
  - cstejerean 10y ago
    I think the Oracle license prohibits people from publishing performance benchmarks of Oracle against other databases. Or at least that's what I remember.
    - keketi 10y ago
      Very reassuring.
    - hardwaresofton 10y ago
      Welp, that's dissapointing, but it gives me a solid reason to never ever trust the claim that Oracle is "just better" than anything else. Claims without proof should hold very little weight with any critical mind. I'm totally open to the idea that Oracle is better in at least some ways (surely their engineers aren't just twiddling their thumbs all day), but I need to see it proven. So far the features that oracle had that people have mentioned: - An amazing query optimizer - Replication (enabling High Availability) features available 15 years ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
throwaway-2013 10y ago
I think the days of "no one ever gets fired for buying oracle" are over. 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 10y ago
  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.
benchaney 10y ago
Could you disable hyperthreading on AWS? If oracle licenses are a significant portion of you per machine cost, it probably isn't worth it.
chenster 10y ago
"Oracle Fanboy" - LOL, seriously?
- golfer 10y ago
  I was shocked by this too.. Boggles the mind that this would even exist.
  - frugalmail 10y ago
    Think of the morons that have based their career on attaining the latest certification in their chosen application.
    - boulos 10y ago
      Your comment would be just as useful if you did s/morons/people/. You can highlight that it's awfully risky to pigeonhole yourself into corporate certifications, but calling people moronic isn't civil.
      - chenster 10y ago
        smartass a better one?
throw2016 10y ago
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.
- jay-saint 10y ago
  The acquisition of NetSuite is helping them move into the midmarket. Snapping up growing companies as they outgrow Quickbooks and hopping they keep growing.
rbanffy 10y ago
Just reading this article makes me want to migrate every Oracle workload to something I don't have to worry about.
bane 10y ago
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.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  I heard once that they actually try to dumb down the books they publish so that people will need to pay Oracle for more support.
- 65827 10y ago
  What a great takedown, couldn't agree more
- craigvn 10y ago
  Oracle is shit, but sounds like you should have used it from the start if the client didn't approve PostgreSQL.
  - 10y ago
racecar789 10y ago
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.

194 points by phonon 10y ago

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.

endymi0n 10y ago
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.
miahi 10y ago
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).
- beagle3 10y ago
  What's "current", and what's your benchmark? Mine is video encoding using FFMPEG (where I run more program threads than FFMPEG decides is optimal in order to make sure no cpu thread is idle). I get at most 15% over hyperthreading off, and often about 5-10% less than hyperthreading off (For the whole process, beginning to end). On real cores, it is close to being linear in the number of cores (not quite, but it is close).
  - jmiserez 10y ago
    As I understand HT, in it's most basic form it will try to utilize all processing units by executing code from a second thread whenever possible. FFMPG most likely maxes out usage of all arithmetic and floating point units and limits branching to a minimum, so it would make sense that there are no real performance gains with HT.
    - beagle3 10y ago
      Of course. The question is, what is the kind of load in which it delivers 80% over a non HT core, as the GP claims? I've certainly never seen this kind of load.
    - stuckagain 10y ago
      For any kind of branchy pointer-chasing workload hyperthreading will easily double the throughput. These workloads spend all of their time waiting for load and recovering from mispredicted branches. Oracle is the poster child of this kind of workload. For decades now we've had to suffer these weird internet arguments about whether hyperthreading is "real", as if there was a naturally-occuring correct number of frontends on a CPU. If someone wants to put more instruction decoders on their CPU there is no rational argument that is "wrong".
- cm2187 10y ago
  I guess it must really depend on the task. My basic understanding of hyper threading is that it is typically useful in memory intensive applications, where the core spends a lot of time (20ish cycles) waiting to get data from RAM. HT then executes the other thread while waiting. I presume a database must be memory intensive.
- benchaney 10y ago
  Is this really true? I would have expected that as branch predicters and cache prefetchers improve, hyperthreading would become less effective.
benchaney 10y ago
True. I was pondering the trade off of switching off hyperthreading on AWS because of this.

brad0 10y ago

Is support the only reason people choose Oracle databases over something free like MySQL or Postgres?

rosser 10y ago
The thing you need to understand about Oracle is that it's never — well, never in my experience, and I've worked as a DBA (mostly postgres, but I have had my hands on some Oracle) for a decade now — chosen by the technologists. It's chosen by management. Usually non-technical management. Often dangerously so. But Oracle support basically doesn't answer the phone unless you're regularly cutting them six-figure checks, so you kinda need that level of management to be making the decision whether or not to use the platform.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Engineers need to learn how to stand their ground
  - threeseed 10y ago
    That's cute. And it might even work in a startup. But likely not. But in the enterprise world nobody really cares what engineers think. You have Enterprise Architects, Technical Architects, Solution Architects etc. who get paid exorbitant amounts of money, are political animals and can masterfully straddle the line between business and technology. Most of them are ex-engineers so they aren't entirely useless and since they have their own language they will make you look stupid. Can't articulate the transition from a tactical to strategic solution and explain what business capabilities it aligns to ? Well good luck getting that past the central Enterprise Architects who will need to sign off on your choice before it heads to Procurement/Legal. Architects along with IT managers and CIOs are the people whom the famous Oracle Sales machine targets with golf games, overseas trips and fancy dinners. It's never engineers. I spent a few years at Oracle. They are a multi billion dollar company for a reason.
    - raverbashing 10y ago

toyg 10y ago

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?

coleca 10y ago
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.
rj0049 10y ago
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.

echelon 10y ago

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...

djhworld 10y ago
Many years. 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
- gumaflux 10y ago
  Until external forces turn these monoliths into heavy liabilities and block adaptability. Another important factor is today's engineers are tomorrows architects.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    They still have to answer to the managers. Also in the enterprise space code changes are measured in dollars/euro/yan/... per hour, not engineer happiness.
    - kpil 10y ago
      Eh, that's true just about everywhere... Code = Money. You spend some money, get new and hopefully better code, and with some luck you will get a return on the investment, ie more money than you spent on doing it. Unless you are doing it for fun. Or don't know what to do with all the money you have.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        You misunderstood me. That better code had a cost of 1 000 euros, due to the amount of hours spent on it. How much profit did those euros spent on developer salary brought to the business revenue?

dzhiurgis 10y ago

Does it impact RDS layer-thing they offer?

StreamBright 10y ago

No way, lucky we do not use any Oracle products. This might push some companies over to some other platforms.

Joeri 10y ago

Oracle is making a big push to move customers from aws and azure to their own cloud hosting. https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-expansion-011717.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-... Raising prices for hosting with the competitor makes perfect sense when viewed from that angle.

giis 10y ago
Remember, Oracle also forced 'Redhat' customers (who rely on Oracle DB) to their Linux in similar manner. Now I wonder BTRFS is not getting enough attention, because its started by Oracle and their history with open-source?
- mshook 10y ago
  The main btrfs devs who were at Oracle have been at Facebook for a while, so you can't blame Oracle for btrfs not moving along haha
- sllabres 10y ago
  Not an expert in Oracle DB licensing. Could you explain?
  - giis 10y ago
    I'm not expert in licensing too. I've friends who said, when they needed enterprise support for Oracle DB running on Redhat, directly/indirectly the message they received is to migrate from Redhat linux to Oracle linux. I think that quite clear by some kind of 'cold-war' going on between Redhat & Oracle. http://fossforce.com/2016/03/microsoft-oracle-oracle-tried-red-hat/ http://fossforce.com/2016/03/microsoft-oracle-oracle-tried-r...
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      The very fact that you must be an "expert" in licensing really says everything you need to know about Oracle licenses.

jpalomaki 10y ago

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).

geodel 10y ago
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.
- edblarney 10y ago
  "But today a lot of modern cloud infrastructure is getting written in Go" I don't think so. I our circles, we think 'Go' is a thing, but in most of the world, it's not. Rust, Go, these are all popular with new companies. Enterprises are so often .Net/Java + Oracle etc.. It's a big world of hospitals, large companies, government agencies etc..
  - geodel 10y ago
    Yes, enterprise apps are not yet there. But lot of infra-like software would have been written in Java if Go were not there. There is growing awareness of Go at big enterprises such as where I work. It will start with sucking oxygen for new projects which would be by default in Java.

webreac 10y ago

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.

toyg 10y ago
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.
- z3t4 10y ago
  is it not standard practice to support at least two different db systems !?
  - toyg 10y ago
    For certain values of "support". Say you start on Oracle and then want to move to SqlServer? Migration will likely be a risky endeavor, even if the application supports either db when starting from scratch. To begin with, you'll need something to copy schemas across, be it in the app itself or not, and hope everything made it across. Then you'll have to hope the app doesn't need db-specific stuff (say, a sequence that you only get on sqlserver) that you don't have because you started on Ora. And then you'll have to move all the 3rd party tooling and hacks that you built over the years around that same database - from backup solutions to custom queries etc. It's rarely as easy as "copy it all and turn it back on", and all this work often has to be done by expensive application specialists. At that point, having to choose between paying hundreds of thousands to move db, or a few extra thousands per year to keep things as they are, the business decision is not as simple as one would think.
- sqldba 10y ago
  DBA jobs haven't been entirely offshore'd. It happens in cycles. * Offshore to save money. Databases are a car, just follow the script / maintenance manual and everything will be okay right? * Discover the awful quality, security, never-ending cycle of bodies, lack of retention of information, zero innovation, frustrated staff having to try to deal with them, and and most of all costs which creep up (a lot like Oracle licensing). * Insource to qualified internal staff and retain knowledge, save money, and fix all the problems the outsourced company wouldn't. * Now that everything is fixed, create work manuals, and offshore again. This will get out of date over time, servers will get replaced, new software comes along, and things go to pot again. Repeat. To be fair, companies also often institute long and complex policies which stifle any kind of remediation an offshore staffer would do - because they can't. Internal employees learn the system, how to get things done, and they do it. I work for a team that has taken over from multiple offshore companies in this way. We find all of these things and worse, really just the most awfully maintained systems around - no backups, no maintenance, no organisation, nothing. They don't even patch but they say they do! And they've paid millions (and tens of millions) for the privilege! There's really no comparison so don't mistake the two for a second. As for automation - well - tools have made it so that one DBA can "manage" hundreds of servers at once if they're standardised in certain ways. But you'd be surprised at how many things can go wrong and how few can be automated, especially when the rest of the companies don't have proper automation infrastructure in place. Large enterprises are still fiefdoms of managers who want local employees and to retain their own jobs. Performance tuning and improvements though are extremely time consuming. You can, for some projects, focus entirely on single digit servers for years at a time if they're important enough.

WhiteSource1 10y ago

They are really struggling with the cloud. This isn't going to help Oracle at all. They might be able to stick around for a while because their legacy system is everywhere. But....

unixhero 10y ago

lol

mailslot 10y ago

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.

tomcam 10y ago
Don't understand the downvotes?
hardwaresofton 10y ago
OK, so the one point you've brought up is the query optimizer... do you have any data to back this up? a comparison between query speeds for trivial & non-trivial data sets/queries? Could you put into words a little bit more of what the Oracle DB does that Maria/MySQL/Postgres could not?
- cstejerean 10y ago
  I think the Oracle license prohibits people from publishing performance benchmarks of Oracle against other databases. Or at least that's what I remember.
  - keketi 10y ago
    Very reassuring.
  - hardwaresofton 10y ago
    Welp, that's dissapointing, but it gives me a solid reason to never ever trust the claim that Oracle is "just better" than anything else. Claims without proof should hold very little weight with any critical mind. I'm totally open to the idea that Oracle is better in at least some ways (surely their engineers aren't just twiddling their thumbs all day), but I need to see it proven. So far the features that oracle had that people have mentioned: - An amazing query optimizer - Replication (enabling High Availability) features available 15 years ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

throwaway-2013 10y ago

I think the days of "no one ever gets fired for buying oracle" are over. 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 10y ago
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.

benchaney 10y ago

Could you disable hyperthreading on AWS? If oracle licenses are a significant portion of you per machine cost, it probably isn't worth it.

chenster 10y ago

"Oracle Fanboy" - LOL, seriously?

golfer 10y ago
I was shocked by this too.. Boggles the mind that this would even exist.
- frugalmail 10y ago
  Think of the morons that have based their career on attaining the latest certification in their chosen application.
  - boulos 10y ago
    Your comment would be just as useful if you did s/morons/people/. You can highlight that it's awfully risky to pigeonhole yourself into corporate certifications, but calling people moronic isn't civil.
    - chenster 10y ago
      smartass a better one?

throw2016 10y ago

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.

jay-saint 10y ago
The acquisition of NetSuite is helping them move into the midmarket. Snapping up growing companies as they outgrow Quickbooks and hopping they keep growing.

rbanffy 10y ago

Just reading this article makes me want to migrate every Oracle workload to something I don't have to worry about.

bane 10y ago

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.

nitrogen 10y ago
I heard once that they actually try to dumb down the books they publish so that people will need to pay Oracle for more support.
65827 10y ago
What a great takedown, couldn't agree more
craigvn 10y ago
Oracle is shit, but sounds like you should have used it from the start if the client didn't approve PostgreSQL.
- 10y ago

racecar789 10y ago

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.