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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. W

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
    - user5994461 10y ago
      - Oracle was the only SQL DB able to shard. (might still be) - Oracle was the only database able to take multi GB or TB of data in a single table/DB. (Old MySQL/Postgre had various limitations like X GB per table for a long time, they still do). If you worked in the DB in the 200X years, Oracle was the standard and for good reasons. MySQL/Postgre were considered like toys, for good reasons.
      - Dangeranger 10y ago
        We are not making the comparison 10 years ago, we are making it now. What real features does Oracle have that MySQL/Maria/PostgreSQL do not have now.
        user5994461 10y ago
        Short version: Nothing changed in 10 years :D
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      That query optimiser is in many ways amazing, but it's mostly undocumented and the behaviour changes from version to version of the database.
  - BatFastard 10y ago
    DJT could learn from Oracle on how to manage a nation of resistant people.
- sz4kerto 10y ago
  Example: Oracle could do live replication and HA 15 years ago. Postgres introduced it recently -- if my billion-dollar company was relying on a single logical database, I'd sure as hell wait a few years to see Postgres HA stabilizing before considering using it.
  - hardwaresofton 10y ago
    So replication & high availability -- I assume these two points are one (as replication features would enable high availability). I understand what you're saying to mean simply replication, NOT a proper distributed database system allowing/facilitating writes using what we now know to be state-of-the-art theorems/methods. To rephrase, I assume you mean oracle dbs let people write to one database, and send updates to some mirrors somewhere else.
- pfarnsworth 10y ago
  I hate when people ask for "data to back it up". Just google it for yourself. This is a forum, not every post needs to be a peer-reviewed scientific paper. If you don't believe the OP then go ahead, but getting him/her to jump through hoops to try to prove a point is dumb.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    In this case, there is literally no data to back up the assertion because Oracle don't allow it. However, as the creator of [citation needed], I'd just like to say: if you want to say something in a forum, and it seems wrong, then I for one welcome data that backs up the assertion. Why should we take any one on face value?
  - hardwaresofton 10y ago
    While I understand your point, I think that where HN falls on this spectrum is precisely why HN is valuable (and what keeps it from becoming just another reddit clone). You're absolutely right in that the OP has no obligation to 'jump through hoops' to prove their point (and again they are free to not reply), but people on HN generally don't make claims without at least some citation/proof, and that's why (to me, and I'm sure others) HN is valuable. Everyone has opinions. The expectation on HN is usually of reasoned discourse, and fact-driven analysis (where applicable)... While this is a minor inconvenience for posters/community members, it does a whole lot to solidify HN as a worthwhile place for people who care about that kind of thing to hang out.
jsiepkes 10y ago
I think you are not taking into account the shift out of the DB and into the application layer. People care less and less what the DB can do. Yes large slow enterprises will continue to have a need for Oracle DB. But I've never seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle. Why? Because you dont need that much complexity when you only have a collection of "simple" services. Everyone who needs Oracle deserves Oracle.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > But I've never seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle. As a matter of fact, I did so multiple times in order to provide simple JSON APIs which consume data from massively huge enterprise software and expose them to nice shiny web apps. Can't name any more details though, but it works - at least if you use PHP, but I believe there's also an Oracle DB driver for nodejs, and most certainly for Java/JDBC.
- sz4kerto 10y ago
  That shift is somewhat insane though. Moving data out from the DB just to do stuff in the app that could be done inside the database is throwing performance out of the window.
  - jpgvm 10y ago
    In my experience using Oracle is throwing performance out the window. It's not uncommon to have 40+ machines running an Oracle product that struggles to support 1-2k concurrent users. For instance the Oracle Identity Manager, which is glorified LDAP was deployed on about that number of boxes at a previous company I worked at. It took over a year to implement and they still only used the LDAP functionality. In the end it was falling over under load testing of just 10k sythetic users. It needed to support 100k. I built up a single OpenLDAP box, just using the standard mdb backend and a ton of RAM. Easily crushed the load test. Sadly could't be implemented for political reasons. Screw Oracle, especially if you care about performance.
    - user5994461 10y ago
mschuster91 10y ago
> 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. I'd highly doubt that there's something one can do with Oracle that couldn't be done with a FOSS database - although it's certainly true that it requires more servers but servers are a commodity these days anyway. What's going to keep Oracle in the market is the amount of enterprise software that has been written without database abstraction and would require complete rewrites to support anything else than Oracle as its engine. The only exception to that I know of is SAP which supports MySQL backends, but then again SAP is only used by companies big enough to just mindlessly shell out big bucks for Oracle too if that's what they already use.
- mailslot 10y ago
  SAP bought Sybase. It's the parent of MSSQL, by Microsoft. Look, free databases are great, they just can't compete for real serious use. Not WordPress. More like NYSE.
  - nolok 10y ago
    While I mostly agree with the general point you're making, please do not confuse one particular kind of heavy work with the much more general "real serious use". Random case in point NASA is using pgsql for handling data streams from several of their probes, is that not real serious use ?
    - mailslot 10y ago
      I was thinking of something like NASA vs Farmville. Two left joins doesn't make a strong database case. If you're willing to throw mapreduce at everything as a solution, you won't need Oracle nor will you know how to take advantage.
ashayh 10y ago
No application, especially enterprise applications can have all business logic in the DB. It is spread out over huge, _multiple_ application code bases & even shell scripts and ad-hoc jobs. So it doesn't matter how "good" the DB is. If the App & presentation layers are so bad, that they introduce logical or other anomalies every so often, does it matter if the DB does not produce any error in a billion years? The Porsche analogy is cute. But if the business case could be solved by 10 scooters, isn't it be better & cheaper? When your "Porsche" is down, all customers are affected. With 5 scooters down, only 50% can be (if you design it that way). In many of these so called "enterprise" applications, what they _needed_ was 10-20 scooters, but they bought 2-3 Porsches. And it's usually because "no one gets fired for buying IBM". In many internal apps, companies literally are putting Wordpress like shitty CRUD CMS on Oracle because of this mentality.

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
  - user5994461 10y ago
    - Oracle was the only SQL DB able to shard. (might still be) - Oracle was the only database able to take multi GB or TB of data in a single table/DB. (Old MySQL/Postgre had various limitations like X GB per table for a long time, they still do). If you worked in the DB in the 200X years, Oracle was the standard and for good reasons. MySQL/Postgre were considered like toys, for good reasons.
    - Dangeranger 10y ago
      We are not making the comparison 10 years ago, we are making it now. What real features does Oracle have that MySQL/Maria/PostgreSQL do not have now.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        Short version: Nothing changed in 10 years :D
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    That query optimiser is in many ways amazing, but it's mostly undocumented and the behaviour changes from version to version of the database.
- BatFastard 10y ago
  DJT could learn from Oracle on how to manage a nation of resistant people.
sz4kerto 10y ago
Example: Oracle could do live replication and HA 15 years ago. Postgres introduced it recently -- if my billion-dollar company was relying on a single logical database, I'd sure as hell wait a few years to see Postgres HA stabilizing before considering using it.
- hardwaresofton 10y ago
  So replication & high availability -- I assume these two points are one (as replication features would enable high availability). I understand what you're saying to mean simply replication, NOT a proper distributed database system allowing/facilitating writes using what we now know to be state-of-the-art theorems/methods. To rephrase, I assume you mean oracle dbs let people write to one database, and send updates to some mirrors somewhere else.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
I hate when people ask for "data to back it up". Just google it for yourself. This is a forum, not every post needs to be a peer-reviewed scientific paper. If you don't believe the OP then go ahead, but getting him/her to jump through hoops to try to prove a point is dumb.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  In this case, there is literally no data to back up the assertion because Oracle don't allow it. However, as the creator of [citation needed], I'd just like to say: if you want to say something in a forum, and it seems wrong, then I for one welcome data that backs up the assertion. Why should we take any one on face value?
- hardwaresofton 10y ago
  While I understand your point, I think that where HN falls on this spectrum is precisely why HN is valuable (and what keeps it from becoming just another reddit clone). You're absolutely right in that the OP has no obligation to 'jump through hoops' to prove their point (and again they are free to not reply), but people on HN generally don't make claims without at least some citation/proof, and that's why (to me, and I'm sure others) HN is valuable. Everyone has opinions. The expectation on HN is usually of reasoned discourse, and fact-driven analysis (where applicable)... While this is a minor inconvenience for posters/community members, it does a whole lot to solidify HN as a worthwhile place for people who care about that kind of thing to hang out.

jsiepkes 10y ago

I think you are not taking into account the shift out of the DB and into the application layer. People care less and less what the DB can do. Yes large slow enterprises will continue to have a need for Oracle DB. But I've never seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle. Why? Because you dont need that much complexity when you only have a collection of "simple" services. Everyone who needs Oracle deserves Oracle.

mschuster91 10y ago
> But I've never seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle. As a matter of fact, I did so multiple times in order to provide simple JSON APIs which consume data from massively huge enterprise software and expose them to nice shiny web apps. Can't name any more details though, but it works - at least if you use PHP, but I believe there's also an Oracle DB driver for nodejs, and most certainly for Java/JDBC.
sz4kerto 10y ago
That shift is somewhat insane though. Moving data out from the DB just to do stuff in the app that could be done inside the database is throwing performance out of the window.
- jpgvm 10y ago
  In my experience using Oracle is throwing performance out the window. It's not uncommon to have 40+ machines running an Oracle product that struggles to support 1-2k concurrent users. For instance the Oracle Identity Manager, which is glorified LDAP was deployed on about that number of boxes at a previous company I worked at. It took over a year to implement and they still only used the LDAP functionality. In the end it was falling over under load testing of just 10k sythetic users. It needed to support 100k. I built up a single OpenLDAP box, just using the standard mdb backend and a ton of RAM. Easily crushed the load test. Sadly could't be implemented for political reasons. Screw Oracle, especially if you care about performance.
  - user5994461 10y ago

mschuster91 10y ago

> 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. I'd highly doubt that there's something one can do with Oracle that couldn't be done with a FOSS database - although it's certainly true that it requires more servers but servers are a commodity these days anyway. What's going to keep Oracle in the market is the amount of enterprise software that has been written without database abstraction and would require complete rewrites to support anything else than Oracle as its engine. The only exception to that I know of is SAP which supports MySQL backends, but then again SAP is only used by companies big enough to just mindlessly shell out big bucks for Oracle too if that's what they already use.

mailslot 10y ago
SAP bought Sybase. It's the parent of MSSQL, by Microsoft. Look, free databases are great, they just can't compete for real serious use. Not WordPress. More like NYSE.
- nolok 10y ago
  While I mostly agree with the general point you're making, please do not confuse one particular kind of heavy work with the much more general "real serious use". Random case in point NASA is using pgsql for handling data streams from several of their probes, is that not real serious use ?
  - mailslot 10y ago
    I was thinking of something like NASA vs Farmville. Two left joins doesn't make a strong database case. If you're willing to throw mapreduce at everything as a solution, you won't need Oracle nor will you know how to take advantage.

ashayh 10y ago

No application, especially enterprise applications can have all business logic in the DB. It is spread out over huge, _multiple_ application code bases & even shell scripts and ad-hoc jobs. So it doesn't matter how "good" the DB is. If the App & presentation layers are so bad, that they introduce logical or other anomalies every so often, does it matter if the DB does not produce any error in a billion years? The Porsche analogy is cute. But if the business case could be solved by 10 scooters, isn't it be better & cheaper? When your "Porsche" is down, all customers are affected. With 5 scooters down, only 50% can be (if you design it that way). In many of these so called "enterprise" applications, what they _needed_ was 10-20 scooters, but they bought 2-3 Porsches. And it's usually because "no one gets fired for buying IBM". In many internal apps, companies literally are putting Wordpress like shitty CRUD CMS on Oracle because of this mentality.