6 ms·

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 ent

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
    I don't know about the Oracle identity suite but I'd like to say that OpenLDAP is a ridiculous joke. (Just like the MySQL/PostgreSQL vs Oracle DB debate at times). The only scalable LDAP server is the one from Sun Microsystem (openDS). It was killed when Oracle acquired Sun because they already had identity products. Then the sun guys quit to continue the products line under their own company, ForgeRock. https://forgerock.org/opendj/ https://forgerock.org/opendj/ I've done load testing and this ldap is taking millions of accounts, no problem. The best products are rarely free once you get out of the average web dev context. Funny thing, this one is both paid and open source.
    - horus_the_cat 10y ago
      Oracle's IM suite provides some questionable value. It's passable technically, questionable from the biz perspective and in reality is a land-and-expand product with lots of optional modules that Oracle is happy to 'advise' you about. Technically it works... sometimes. Custom shims have a tendency to lead to complications because the API isn't very well-exposed or documented... it was another acquisition product. Infrastructurally it's an unmitigated garbage fire. Oracle seems to think, e.g., your organization is too stupid (which is true, since you're an Oracle client) to know how to connect to AD from a nix machine or Java application, so the hardware footprint is huge. It's questionable biz-wise for two reasons. First, because it's sold as a "complete", off-the-shelf solution when in reality it's probably about a dozen analysts working on it full-time for months just to get its biz logic set up, and then a handful for maintenance. Second, because OIM aims to be a institution-wide, one-stop-shop product (which it is* good at), but institutions that acquire it are so large that they're bereft with inter-department politics and policies that make using it firm-wide difficult.
    - SteveNuts 10y ago
      What do you think about Red Hat's IDM/FreeIPA
      - user5994461 10y ago
        Don't know. Didn't try it.
- jgalt212 10y ago
  I guess so, but at our shop, if at all possible, we don't do any vendor specific SQL and all the tricky stuff is handled at the app level.
pjmlp 10y ago
> But I've never seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle. Lots of Fortune 500 do it, even to their mainframe backends.

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
  I don't know about the Oracle identity suite but I'd like to say that OpenLDAP is a ridiculous joke. (Just like the MySQL/PostgreSQL vs Oracle DB debate at times). The only scalable LDAP server is the one from Sun Microsystem (openDS). It was killed when Oracle acquired Sun because they already had identity products. Then the sun guys quit to continue the products line under their own company, ForgeRock. https://forgerock.org/opendj/ https://forgerock.org/opendj/ I've done load testing and this ldap is taking millions of accounts, no problem. The best products are rarely free once you get out of the average web dev context. Funny thing, this one is both paid and open source.
  - horus_the_cat 10y ago
    Oracle's IM suite provides some questionable value. It's passable technically, questionable from the biz perspective and in reality is a land-and-expand product with lots of optional modules that Oracle is happy to 'advise' you about. Technically it works... sometimes. Custom shims have a tendency to lead to complications because the API isn't very well-exposed or documented... it was another acquisition product. Infrastructurally it's an unmitigated garbage fire. Oracle seems to think, e.g., your organization is too stupid (which is true, since you're an Oracle client) to know how to connect to AD from a nix machine or Java application, so the hardware footprint is huge. It's questionable biz-wise for two reasons. First, because it's sold as a "complete", off-the-shelf solution when in reality it's probably about a dozen analysts working on it full-time for months just to get its biz logic set up, and then a handful for maintenance. Second, because OIM aims to be a institution-wide, one-stop-shop product (which it is* good at), but institutions that acquire it are so large that they're bereft with inter-department politics and policies that make using it firm-wide difficult.
  - SteveNuts 10y ago
    What do you think about Red Hat's IDM/FreeIPA
    - user5994461 10y ago
      Don't know. Didn't try it.
jgalt212 10y ago
I guess so, but at our shop, if at all possible, we don't do any vendor specific SQL and all the tricky stuff is handled at the app level.

pjmlp 10y ago

> But I've never seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle. Lots of Fortune 500 do it, even to their mainframe backends.