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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 Postgre

by 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.
- bane 10y ago
  It honestly never occurred to anybody to check. It's such a rock solid standard tool the notion that it wouldn't be approved and Oracle would be for some vague handwavy "security" policy reasons was not a notion that anybody entertained, not even the client PM, until we got to deployment.
bastardoperator 10y ago
Companies these days chose Oracle for one reason. They're scared of being sued. Several operations I've been involved with chose it as insurance policy. They want the ability to defer litigation to Oracle should it occur. Oracle touts its support and aggressive legal defense as a selling point. Engineers don't recommend Oracle, C titles and Sr. Management do. Sorry to hear about your issues, I'm sure the product worked amazingly on Postgres.
- DrScump 10y ago
  In a sense, it's become the 21st Century version of the old IBM meme: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
aNoob7000 10y ago
Not to be a dick, but what kind of issues did you have with their import/export tools? As someone who has worked with Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases for many years, you sound like someone who has never worked with their database. Oracle databases might be expensive but you can move data between instances and schemas using SQLLDR or DataPump with ease.
- bane 10y ago
  It's a fair question. Keeping in mind that we literally had nobody who'd ever used Oracle in their careers (or at least beyond fairly basic uses a decade ago)...we had a fairly simple set of tables, one of which had a CLOB attribute. Every single export option available in Oracle SQL Developer truncated the CLOB field whenever it felt like, and half of the exported formats were exported without escaping content in the CLOB so that they were unparseable on import. When we finally called in the Oracle consultants, they said "we never use the import/export tools in SQL Developer" and moved on to SQLLDR, but failed for exiting reasons last seen in 1980's computing like "Error in Index ORA-42321" and then other issues with the parser. Data Pump didn't work for some reason only the consultants know, but "minor version mismatch" was something they liked to say. I don't remember the final solution, but I believe it was a hackneyed combination of writing some python code to connect to one of the databases, dumping the table data to a bunch of INSERT statements then just copy-pasting the whole output back into SQL Developer and running it in chunks until everything could be inserted into the new table. We couldn't just write more python code to pump the data back in because of some permissions problem that nobody could ever quite resolve satisfactorily. We also couldn't just load the file through the SQL Developer because it would only load files that were sitting in a specific, inaccessible directory on that specific server, not through the GUI. I think this was when the lightbulb went off in all of our heads and we collectively realized "it's this terrible on purpose" Total shit show with hundreds of thousands of dollars flushed down the toilet for no additional capability, huge program delays and a good reminder why nobody uses Oracle for new starts on software these days, it's absolute garbage and a curse on any organization that sustains it.
  - aNoob7000 10y ago
Bombthecat 10y ago
Similar just exchange postgre with MySQL.... For a fucking simple CMS! Not even Mission critical! But they demand oracle..

by bane 10y ago

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.

bane 10y ago
It honestly never occurred to anybody to check. It's such a rock solid standard tool the notion that it wouldn't be approved and Oracle would be for some vague handwavy "security" policy reasons was not a notion that anybody entertained, not even the client PM, until we got to deployment.

bastardoperator 10y ago

Companies these days chose Oracle for one reason. They're scared of being sued. Several operations I've been involved with chose it as insurance policy. They want the ability to defer litigation to Oracle should it occur. Oracle touts its support and aggressive legal defense as a selling point. Engineers don't recommend Oracle, C titles and Sr. Management do. Sorry to hear about your issues, I'm sure the product worked amazingly on Postgres.

DrScump 10y ago
In a sense, it's become the 21st Century version of the old IBM meme: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

aNoob7000 10y ago

Not to be a dick, but what kind of issues did you have with their import/export tools? As someone who has worked with Oracle and Microsoft SQL databases for many years, you sound like someone who has never worked with their database. Oracle databases might be expensive but you can move data between instances and schemas using SQLLDR or DataPump with ease.

bane 10y ago
It's a fair question. Keeping in mind that we literally had nobody who'd ever used Oracle in their careers (or at least beyond fairly basic uses a decade ago)...we had a fairly simple set of tables, one of which had a CLOB attribute. Every single export option available in Oracle SQL Developer truncated the CLOB field whenever it felt like, and half of the exported formats were exported without escaping content in the CLOB so that they were unparseable on import. When we finally called in the Oracle consultants, they said "we never use the import/export tools in SQL Developer" and moved on to SQLLDR, but failed for exiting reasons last seen in 1980's computing like "Error in Index ORA-42321" and then other issues with the parser. Data Pump didn't work for some reason only the consultants know, but "minor version mismatch" was something they liked to say. I don't remember the final solution, but I believe it was a hackneyed combination of writing some python code to connect to one of the databases, dumping the table data to a bunch of INSERT statements then just copy-pasting the whole output back into SQL Developer and running it in chunks until everything could be inserted into the new table. We couldn't just write more python code to pump the data back in because of some permissions problem that nobody could ever quite resolve satisfactorily. We also couldn't just load the file through the SQL Developer because it would only load files that were sitting in a specific, inaccessible directory on that specific server, not through the GUI. I think this was when the lightbulb went off in all of our heads and we collectively realized "it's this terrible on purpose" Total shit show with hundreds of thousands of dollars flushed down the toilet for no additional capability, huge program delays and a good reminder why nobody uses Oracle for new starts on software these days, it's absolute garbage and a curse on any organization that sustains it.
- aNoob7000 10y ago

Bombthecat 10y ago

Similar just exchange postgre with MySQL.... For a fucking simple CMS! Not even Mission critical! But they demand oracle..