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What hard problems are they solving that can't be solved with OSS today (tech problems)? I've heard things about their business apps division (business problem

by sb8244 10y ago

What hard problems are they solving that can't be solved with OSS today (tech problems)? I've heard things about their business apps division (business problems) and I can't say I particularly believe in their future there versus smaller focused companies.

mattzito 10y ago
So - I'm definitely not willing to go as far as the GP was with their statement, but Oracle's database technology is pretty amazing. I love postgres, Spark, NoSQL, etc. and think the progress they have made is amazing, but Oracle's database from a raw featureset is incredible. - Shared-something database clustering - true scale-out database clustering without writing sharding logic into your application, worrying about hot spots, or sacrificing significant performance due to overhead - query offload to storage for bulk reads - Flashback - someone wrote a bad update that might have messed with some data? You can tell the database to set your view of the database back to before that update to verify, and then decide if you want to move the whole database back, or just extract the records that were changed by that query - fine-grained permissioning - have a table with credit card numbers in it? Give everyone access to it, but the credit card numbers are all obfuscated - replication - block-level? statement-level? real-time? real-time with delay? Whatever you want. In fact, you can say "Hey, replicate this database to another datacenter, don't make it synchronous, but don't let it get more than 10 minutes out of sync" - also, btw, when you need to failover that database, if you're feeling really brave, oracle can do the whole thing for you automatically, because their database client will notify a watcher that a majority of them have lost the necessary access to the database, but can talk to the standby, and the watcher handles the failover I could go on and on. There's just so much intelligence in the Oracle database platform. Would I ever pay for it? No, it's better to build applications that don't need that level of sophistication. But if you're a big company who doesn't want to write software to be smart about data storage and recovery, Oracle does an amazing job at just guaranteeing your data won't go away. On the business apps side of things, I think their software is mostly terrible, but I also think that they do focus on problems that OSS typically has not. If you are a manufacturer of satellites, there is probably not an OSS ERP solution that will work for you. If you need to store 300,000 personnel records, there's probably not an OSS HCM solution for you. None of this means that they're not eventually doomed nor that they're not shitty, but it is very fair to say that their software deals with hard problems that OSS has not typically focused on.
- djfergus 10y ago
  Great comment, thanks for the details on the specific tech - this is rarely captured in the regular "just replace Oracle with PGSQL" threads on HN. I think you can add to this the fact that Oracle has been hardening the platform and building/fixing edge cases for 30 years. This goes a long way to preventing procurement departments from moving away from the "no-one got fired for buying <dinosaur-x>" model. I heard a crazy stat that 99% of Oracle's business ($36B revenue, $9B profit) comes from the top 0.01% of customers (basically the US Govt and the Fortune 10). The average OSS start up is not going to materially affect this. The real problem (solvable with tech? maybe?) is changing the culture in which big orgs evaluate and procure IT. Otherwise Oracle will just be an attractive exit for startups rather than competition that can be threatened...
  - mattzito 10y ago
    > I heard a crazy stat that 99% of Oracle's business ($36B revenue, $9B profit) comes from the top 0.01% of customers (basically the US Govt and the Fortune 10). The average OSS start up is not going to materially affect this. That's almost certainly not true, given my experience with Oracle's business. I think it's fine to say that 90% of Oracle's business comes from the Global 1000, but I know what some F500 bills from Oracle were, and they were in the $100m-$200m/year range, so you need a much broader spread to get to 36b
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    They've done an awful job of hardening their platform. Cease and desist letters to those who give them reproducible test cases because they violated some sort of copyright/license term does not harden anything other than the arteries of DBAs everywhere.
- sb8244 10y ago
  Thanks for this. I've heard good things about their DB and appreciate you writing down things you've liked about it. I can see the viability there given the other comment that .01% of customers provide the majority revenue, if they need this level of sophistication.
- 10y ago

by sb8244 10y ago

mattzito 10y ago

So - I'm definitely not willing to go as far as the GP was with their statement, but Oracle's database technology is pretty amazing. I love postgres, Spark, NoSQL, etc. and think the progress they have made is amazing, but Oracle's database from a raw featureset is incredible. - Shared-something database clustering - true scale-out database clustering without writing sharding logic into your application, worrying about hot spots, or sacrificing significant performance due to overhead - query offload to storage for bulk reads - Flashback - someone wrote a bad update that might have messed with some data? You can tell the database to set your view of the database back to before that update to verify, and then decide if you want to move the whole database back, or just extract the records that were changed by that query - fine-grained permissioning - have a table with credit card numbers in it? Give everyone access to it, but the credit card numbers are all obfuscated - replication - block-level? statement-level? real-time? real-time with delay? Whatever you want. In fact, you can say "Hey, replicate this database to another datacenter, don't make it synchronous, but don't let it get more than 10 minutes out of sync" - also, btw, when you need to failover that database, if you're feeling really brave, oracle can do the whole thing for you automatically, because their database client will notify a watcher that a majority of them have lost the necessary access to the database, but can talk to the standby, and the watcher handles the failover I could go on and on. There's just so much intelligence in the Oracle database platform. Would I ever pay for it? No, it's better to build applications that don't need that level of sophistication. But if you're a big company who doesn't want to write software to be smart about data storage and recovery, Oracle does an amazing job at just guaranteeing your data won't go away. On the business apps side of things, I think their software is mostly terrible, but I also think that they do focus on problems that OSS typically has not. If you are a manufacturer of satellites, there is probably not an OSS ERP solution that will work for you. If you need to store 300,000 personnel records, there's probably not an OSS HCM solution for you. None of this means that they're not eventually doomed nor that they're not shitty, but it is very fair to say that their software deals with hard problems that OSS has not typically focused on.

djfergus 10y ago
Great comment, thanks for the details on the specific tech - this is rarely captured in the regular "just replace Oracle with PGSQL" threads on HN. I think you can add to this the fact that Oracle has been hardening the platform and building/fixing edge cases for 30 years. This goes a long way to preventing procurement departments from moving away from the "no-one got fired for buying <dinosaur-x>" model. I heard a crazy stat that 99% of Oracle's business ($36B revenue, $9B profit) comes from the top 0.01% of customers (basically the US Govt and the Fortune 10). The average OSS start up is not going to materially affect this. The real problem (solvable with tech? maybe?) is changing the culture in which big orgs evaluate and procure IT. Otherwise Oracle will just be an attractive exit for startups rather than competition that can be threatened...
- mattzito 10y ago
  > I heard a crazy stat that 99% of Oracle's business ($36B revenue, $9B profit) comes from the top 0.01% of customers (basically the US Govt and the Fortune 10). The average OSS start up is not going to materially affect this. That's almost certainly not true, given my experience with Oracle's business. I think it's fine to say that 90% of Oracle's business comes from the Global 1000, but I know what some F500 bills from Oracle were, and they were in the $100m-$200m/year range, so you need a much broader spread to get to 36b
- chris_wot 10y ago
  They've done an awful job of hardening their platform. Cease and desist letters to those who give them reproducible test cases because they violated some sort of copyright/license term does not harden anything other than the arteries of DBAs everywhere.
sb8244 10y ago
Thanks for this. I've heard good things about their DB and appreciate you writing down things you've liked about it. I can see the viability there given the other comment that .01% of customers provide the majority revenue, if they need this level of sophistication.
10y ago