6 ms·

Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out. https://www.youtube.com/res

by harry8 9y ago

Bryan Cantrill give a great lecture. I saw him give an overview of DTrace a decade or more ago and remain impressed. Check him out. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bryan+cantrill It's sad that we live in a world where a company doing good , innovative and useful tech is gobbled up by a company like Oracle who should not exist and do largely on their ability to con ignorant senior management and even more ignorant boards of directors. Is there ever a technical reason to use Oracle? If there is what percentage of Oracle sales does it account for? Ie if it really is non-zero I bet it's a single digit percentage. Woeful company from the top down is their reputation and they've earned it.

topkeker 9y ago
Unfortunately the world doesn't run off technical ability though. Oracle is a mammoth because it's proficient at extracting value and profit from its businesses. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but it's the equivalent of someone destroying artwork and making a gain from it and wondering how they get away with it when the world doesn't care about art, they care about money.
- ptero 9y ago
  IIRC, Oracle got a huge boost from US government as it was the semi-official database engine developed (for the Navy?) with taxpayer funds, then deployed (again with taxpayer funds). I'm not complaining, the US probably needed a better DB engine, but it was partly luck, partly backroom agreements that launched and supported Oracle for years. That said, maybe I got my facts badly mixed up.
  - MrMorden 9y ago
    CIA. (Source: Larry Ellison, as quoted in Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-billionaire-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...) Which is why the villain in Charlie Stross's _The Jennifer Morgue_ is "Ellis Billington".
  - frou_dh 9y ago
    I think it's SQLite that had Navy origins.
    - ptero 9y ago
      You are probably right. I recall reading that Oracle development was funded by a DARPA-style mechanism, but I may have confused it with something. As MrMorden says in another comment it was likely the CIA who funded the development.
ams6110 9y ago
The Oracle rdbms was at least for a while unmatched. It had programmability, functionality, and tunability that no other database had. If you needed what it provided, and could afford it, there was no real substitute. Today, Postgres has come a long way, and distributed databases are much more developed. There is probably much less technical justification for using Oracle than there was 10+ years ago. Also many companies would pay for Oracle and just use it for CRUD operations. That was throwing money away, no doubt.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Uh, doesn't everything you do with a database reduce to CRUD? I understand that sometimes you do the composition of many CRUD operations, but this is still CRUD.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - 0xCMP 9y ago
    Literally everything you do with memory and disks can also be reduced to CRUD, but that is an extreme example to show my point: a DB does a lot more. A well written DB, in this case a good RDBMS, gives you stronger guarantees that data is saved and accessed in certain ways. That by itself is worth using a better one that gives you better guarantees. But they also provide stronger typing and checking of the data. They provide a programming language neutral way to access the data quickly and efficiently. They index data to make queries on it faster. They do much of this automatically so you think it's all simple CRUD operations, but they also provide ways to explain what they're doing if it isn't working as expected. I can count the number of programs (not DBs) on my hand that I know of that can explain themselves accurately without needing a debugger. Edit: I don't mean to be annoying. Most people on HN knew this and I'm not assuming you didn't, but while most people just use RDBMS for simple CRUD operations they're losing out on the power that these databases have been designed with.
    - bpyne 9y ago
tatersolid 9y ago
The product that built Oracle the company, their RDBMS, is frankly one of the worst pieces of "enterprise" software I've ever encountered. Oracle's only redeeming quality seems to be free golf at nice country clubs paid for by Oracle salespeople.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Open source databases still don't have a developer environment that matches what Oracle or SQL Server offer. Same applies to their stored procedures languages and deployment options.
  - Tostino 9y ago
    See, once I actually started using pl/pgsql, I found it really powerful and a match for T-SQL. Never used PL/SQL though, so can't compare.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      And which PostgreSQL developer editor can match SQL Server Management Studio? Because pgAdmin isn't it, specially after it became an Electron app.
      - Tostino 9y ago
        You're not wrong there. I miss SSMS. pgAdmin3 wasn't a terrible application. Nowhere near SSMS, but not terrible (other than stability... it's shit there). pgAdmin4 is unusable.
      - fulminatorz68 9y ago
        Who actually uses these glorified IDEs? No one I've hired.
  - jen20 9y ago
    JetBrain's DataGrip is getting there for a wide variety of databases, including Postgres.

by harry8 9y ago

topkeker 9y ago

Unfortunately the world doesn't run off technical ability though. Oracle is a mammoth because it's proficient at extracting value and profit from its businesses. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you in principle, but it's the equivalent of someone destroying artwork and making a gain from it and wondering how they get away with it when the world doesn't care about art, they care about money.

ptero 9y ago
IIRC, Oracle got a huge boost from US government as it was the semi-official database engine developed (for the Navy?) with taxpayer funds, then deployed (again with taxpayer funds). I'm not complaining, the US probably needed a better DB engine, but it was partly luck, partly backroom agreements that launched and supported Oracle for years. That said, maybe I got my facts badly mixed up.
- MrMorden 9y ago
  CIA. (Source: Larry Ellison, as quoted in Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-billionaire-2014-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-cia-made-larry-ellison-a-...) Which is why the villain in Charlie Stross's _The Jennifer Morgue_ is "Ellis Billington".
- frou_dh 9y ago
  I think it's SQLite that had Navy origins.
  - ptero 9y ago
    You are probably right. I recall reading that Oracle development was funded by a DARPA-style mechanism, but I may have confused it with something. As MrMorden says in another comment it was likely the CIA who funded the development.

ams6110 9y ago

The Oracle rdbms was at least for a while unmatched. It had programmability, functionality, and tunability that no other database had. If you needed what it provided, and could afford it, there was no real substitute. Today, Postgres has come a long way, and distributed databases are much more developed. There is probably much less technical justification for using Oracle than there was 10+ years ago. Also many companies would pay for Oracle and just use it for CRUD operations. That was throwing money away, no doubt.

closeparen 9y ago
Uh, doesn't everything you do with a database reduce to CRUD? I understand that sometimes you do the composition of many CRUD operations, but this is still CRUD.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xCMP 9y ago
  Literally everything you do with memory and disks can also be reduced to CRUD, but that is an extreme example to show my point: a DB does a lot more. A well written DB, in this case a good RDBMS, gives you stronger guarantees that data is saved and accessed in certain ways. That by itself is worth using a better one that gives you better guarantees. But they also provide stronger typing and checking of the data. They provide a programming language neutral way to access the data quickly and efficiently. They index data to make queries on it faster. They do much of this automatically so you think it's all simple CRUD operations, but they also provide ways to explain what they're doing if it isn't working as expected. I can count the number of programs (not DBs) on my hand that I know of that can explain themselves accurately without needing a debugger. Edit: I don't mean to be annoying. Most people on HN knew this and I'm not assuming you didn't, but while most people just use RDBMS for simple CRUD operations they're losing out on the power that these databases have been designed with.
  - bpyne 9y ago

tatersolid 9y ago

The product that built Oracle the company, their RDBMS, is frankly one of the worst pieces of "enterprise" software I've ever encountered. Oracle's only redeeming quality seems to be free golf at nice country clubs paid for by Oracle salespeople.

pjmlp 9y ago
Open source databases still don't have a developer environment that matches what Oracle or SQL Server offer. Same applies to their stored procedures languages and deployment options.
- Tostino 9y ago
  See, once I actually started using pl/pgsql, I found it really powerful and a match for T-SQL. Never used PL/SQL though, so can't compare.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    And which PostgreSQL developer editor can match SQL Server Management Studio? Because pgAdmin isn't it, specially after it became an Electron app.
    - Tostino 9y ago
      You're not wrong there. I miss SSMS. pgAdmin3 wasn't a terrible application. Nowhere near SSMS, but not terrible (other than stability... it's shit there). pgAdmin4 is unusable.
    - fulminatorz68 9y ago
      Who actually uses these glorified IDEs? No one I've hired.
- jen20 9y ago
  JetBrain's DataGrip is getting there for a wide variety of databases, including Postgres.