4 ms·

Good for mariadb and a good eye opener for any EU government system that is stuck on oracle. Mariadb 10.3 is going to be a haven (or rehab) for oracle veterans

Good for mariadb and a good eye opener for any EU government system that is stuck on oracle. Mariadb 10.3 is going to be a haven (or rehab) for oracle veterans. https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/what-is-mariadb-103/#compatibility https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/what-is-mariadb-103/#compa...

sz4kerto 9y ago
> stuck on oracle. What is the problem with Oracle except the price? edit: sorry, I mean the DB, not the company.
- espadrine 9y ago
  Its behavior towards open-source software has been chaotic, sometimes birthing great projects (eg. btrfs, which wasn't even a great fit for their database systems), sometimes strangling them slowly (eg. OpenOffice). Overall, its relationship with external contributors has been awkward.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Not sure what that has to do with anything. Companies aren't interested in how altruistic their vendor is. They care if their product works and is supported. Also many of Oracle's customers aren't exactly strangers to aggressive tactics in the marketplace.
- erhardm 9y ago
  "...shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers and make a whole shitload of money..."[0] 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147
  - sz4kerto 9y ago
    I meant the database, not the company.
    - erhardm 9y ago
      By using the DB you have to deal with the company. By giving a grant to a company that is (apparently) more ethical will signal what kind of behavior you encourage, hence choosing to work with MariaDB over OracleDB.
      - sz4kerto 9y ago
        Well, OK, but e.g. REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW ON COMMIT might be more valuable to you than working with a more ethical company. YMMV, of course.
  - scriptproof 9y ago
    And also send letter to FCC to encourage repeal Net Neutrality, try to make use of API copyrightable, try to steal Android revenues from Google with debatable reasons, and so ones... That is for the company in general, but for the customers of their database, there is also much to say.
- threeseed 9y ago
  It's all about the price. The database is largely irrelevant. I have been involved in a dozen or so Hadoop deployments now and almost all of them are there not because it will allow them to do amazing new things but because the licenses for Teradata or Oracle were too expensive. So they have a giant "data lake" aka "dumping ground" on HDFS and keep just the mission critical data in the EDW.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, did all of those clients use CDH (Cloudera Hadoop)? They're pretty much becoming a hegemony in their own right like DataStax and Cassandra
    - coredog64 9y ago
      We run both CDH and Cassandra at my employer. DataStax made a play, but they were Oracle level expensive, so we stuck with OSS. CDH provides benefits in the early days, but at this point it feels more constraining. Their release cadence is slow, so we're stuck writing long term workarounds for bugs that we're fixed two years ago in the upstream project. The stuff that they are working on is half-baked and doesn't support what would seem to be trivial use cases. I wouldn't be surprised if their ecosystem calcifies now that they are public.
      - smueller1234 9y ago
        We had a similar experience and walked away very early on. Now run >1k node clusters without outside consulting.
    - threeseed 9y ago
      Bit late to reply but it was a mix of the big two. Cloudera and Hortonworks. And I wouldn't say Cloudera is dominating Hadoop.
  - koolba 9y ago
    Without proper planning, most data lakes end up as the digital equivalent of a super fund site.
- mathnode 9y ago
  Lots of RBDMS's have their issues or drawbacks, none like Oracle DB. The only RDBMS where you actually have to throw cash at it to solve a problem like scale or backups. The Oracle RDBMS is absolutely terrible. You'd have to be absolutely mad to use it, even if it was free. In all my years I have never met anyone ever that chose it for it's technical merit, especially from people whom have knowledge of more than one RDBMS. Whatever it's got, another RDBMS's do it properly, and (usually) for a lot less money. Pick a feature, any feature they advertise and will most likely be from a product they acquired, or half-arsed themselves. I am not at all convinced any oracle engineer knows about fsync(). EDIT: PL/SQL is not a feature. It's a punishment.
thorin 9y ago
Can you clarify this? The reason Oracle is so prevalent is that many companies have millions of lines of code in pl/sql, may use many proprietry Oracle features which until recently weren't implemented in SQLServer or Postgres. There's also the aggressive license thing and the issue of moving a complex realtime financial system. I've spent years working on large scale Oracle/other db systems for banks and utilities, so interested to hear the story behind this...
- michielr 9y ago
  When running with sql_mode=ORACLE, the server now understands a subset of Oracle's PL/SQL language instead of the traditional MariaDB syntax for stored routines. See MDEV-10142, MDEV-10764 and MariaDB-10.3.0 release notes to know the current status. So after the update you can use a (subset) of pl/sql.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    Nice. This really is a shot at Oracle's hegemony when it comes to enterprise databases. Has anyone here done a migration from Oracle's offering to MariaDB? How difficult was it?
  - thorin 9y ago
    That's what I was expecting to see but I couldn't find in your post. Thanks for the clarification. Would be good to see a similar mode in postgres as I know pgsql is close, transpilation makes stored procs cool!
pjmlp 9y ago
There are lots of features that open source databases still don't have. How well does Maria DB handle distributed transactions across the database cluster? Or how does Maria DB handle object based schemas? What about the stored procedures language features versus PL/SQL? Don't get me wrong, it is great that Maria DB is getting lots of money so that their developers can improve it, but there are lots of database features that keep us on Oracle and SQL Server, specially when we only care about business value and not FOSS religious discussions.
- scriptproof 9y ago
  Distributed transactions: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/xa-transactions/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/xa-transactions/ Stored procedures: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/stored-procedures/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/stored-procedures/
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    What about support at the driver level for Java and .NET applications or heterogeneous database schemas? It is not clear how "XA START" maps into each server. Am I supposed to manually mess around with text ids? Nice to see stored procedures are supported, but they seem pretty basic in language features when compared with PL/SQL or Transact SQL.
    - crypto5 9y ago
      > What about support at the driver level for Java and .NET applications or heterogeneous database schemas? I guess MariaDB JDBC driver already has two phase commit logic, because MySql has it for decade. It is enough for distributed transactions in "heterogeneous database schemas".

sz4kerto 9y ago

> stuck on oracle. What is the problem with Oracle except the price? edit: sorry, I mean the DB, not the company.

espadrine 9y ago
Its behavior towards open-source software has been chaotic, sometimes birthing great projects (eg. btrfs, which wasn't even a great fit for their database systems), sometimes strangling them slowly (eg. OpenOffice). Overall, its relationship with external contributors has been awkward.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Not sure what that has to do with anything. Companies aren't interested in how altruistic their vendor is. They care if their product works and is supported. Also many of Oracle's customers aren't exactly strangers to aggressive tactics in the marketplace.
erhardm 9y ago
"...shit mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers and make a whole shitload of money..."[0] 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147
- sz4kerto 9y ago
  I meant the database, not the company.
  - erhardm 9y ago
    By using the DB you have to deal with the company. By giving a grant to a company that is (apparently) more ethical will signal what kind of behavior you encourage, hence choosing to work with MariaDB over OracleDB.
    - sz4kerto 9y ago
      Well, OK, but e.g. REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW ON COMMIT might be more valuable to you than working with a more ethical company. YMMV, of course.
- scriptproof 9y ago
  And also send letter to FCC to encourage repeal Net Neutrality, try to make use of API copyrightable, try to steal Android revenues from Google with debatable reasons, and so ones... That is for the company in general, but for the customers of their database, there is also much to say.
threeseed 9y ago
It's all about the price. The database is largely irrelevant. I have been involved in a dozen or so Hadoop deployments now and almost all of them are there not because it will allow them to do amazing new things but because the licenses for Teradata or Oracle were too expensive. So they have a giant "data lake" aka "dumping ground" on HDFS and keep just the mission critical data in the EDW.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, did all of those clients use CDH (Cloudera Hadoop)? They're pretty much becoming a hegemony in their own right like DataStax and Cassandra
  - coredog64 9y ago
    We run both CDH and Cassandra at my employer. DataStax made a play, but they were Oracle level expensive, so we stuck with OSS. CDH provides benefits in the early days, but at this point it feels more constraining. Their release cadence is slow, so we're stuck writing long term workarounds for bugs that we're fixed two years ago in the upstream project. The stuff that they are working on is half-baked and doesn't support what would seem to be trivial use cases. I wouldn't be surprised if their ecosystem calcifies now that they are public.
    - smueller1234 9y ago
      We had a similar experience and walked away very early on. Now run >1k node clusters without outside consulting.
  - threeseed 9y ago
    Bit late to reply but it was a mix of the big two. Cloudera and Hortonworks. And I wouldn't say Cloudera is dominating Hadoop.
- koolba 9y ago
  Without proper planning, most data lakes end up as the digital equivalent of a super fund site.
mathnode 9y ago
Lots of RBDMS's have their issues or drawbacks, none like Oracle DB. The only RDBMS where you actually have to throw cash at it to solve a problem like scale or backups. The Oracle RDBMS is absolutely terrible. You'd have to be absolutely mad to use it, even if it was free. In all my years I have never met anyone ever that chose it for it's technical merit, especially from people whom have knowledge of more than one RDBMS. Whatever it's got, another RDBMS's do it properly, and (usually) for a lot less money. Pick a feature, any feature they advertise and will most likely be from a product they acquired, or half-arsed themselves. I am not at all convinced any oracle engineer knows about fsync(). EDIT: PL/SQL is not a feature. It's a punishment.

thorin 9y ago

Can you clarify this? The reason Oracle is so prevalent is that many companies have millions of lines of code in pl/sql, may use many proprietry Oracle features which until recently weren't implemented in SQLServer or Postgres. There's also the aggressive license thing and the issue of moving a complex realtime financial system. I've spent years working on large scale Oracle/other db systems for banks and utilities, so interested to hear the story behind this...

michielr 9y ago
When running with sql_mode=ORACLE, the server now understands a subset of Oracle's PL/SQL language instead of the traditional MariaDB syntax for stored routines. See MDEV-10142, MDEV-10764 and MariaDB-10.3.0 release notes to know the current status. So after the update you can use a (subset) of pl/sql.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  Nice. This really is a shot at Oracle's hegemony when it comes to enterprise databases. Has anyone here done a migration from Oracle's offering to MariaDB? How difficult was it?
- thorin 9y ago
  That's what I was expecting to see but I couldn't find in your post. Thanks for the clarification. Would be good to see a similar mode in postgres as I know pgsql is close, transpilation makes stored procs cool!

pjmlp 9y ago

There are lots of features that open source databases still don't have. How well does Maria DB handle distributed transactions across the database cluster? Or how does Maria DB handle object based schemas? What about the stored procedures language features versus PL/SQL? Don't get me wrong, it is great that Maria DB is getting lots of money so that their developers can improve it, but there are lots of database features that keep us on Oracle and SQL Server, specially when we only care about business value and not FOSS religious discussions.

scriptproof 9y ago
Distributed transactions: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/xa-transactions/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/xa-transactions/ Stored procedures: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/stored-procedures/ https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/stored-procedures/
- pjmlp 9y ago
  What about support at the driver level for Java and .NET applications or heterogeneous database schemas? It is not clear how "XA START" maps into each server. Am I supposed to manually mess around with text ids? Nice to see stored procedures are supported, but they seem pretty basic in language features when compared with PL/SQL or Transact SQL.
  - crypto5 9y ago
    > What about support at the driver level for Java and .NET applications or heterogeneous database schemas? I guess MariaDB JDBC driver already has two phase commit logic, because MySql has it for decade. It is enough for distributed transactions in "heterogeneous database schemas".