5 ms·

> 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.

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.