3 ms·

I don't understand why binary Oracle compatibly isn't the number one effort in the OS DB market. That would significantly move the FYO-point.

jteo 16y ago
Purchasing decisions are made by managers, not the ones doing the actual work. Hence Oracle fits the bill if your company can afford it: It's number one, expensive (which implies good quality), and everyone else uses it. Ergo, no one ever got fired for choosing Oracle, licensing costs be damned.
- mseebach 16y ago
  Did you read the linked article? As long as there is a FYO point, there's a market for moving that point downwards. Also, I'm not aiming to kill Oracle overnight, I'm aiming at slowly chipping away at Oracles dominance. Right now there's a huge market for serving apps that for some reason are locked into Oracle, and are too expensive to re-write.
- shpxnvz 16y ago
  That may be the case in some places, but certainly not everywhere. One of the public companies I've worked with uses Oracle to the tune of several million per year in licensing fees. The CEO is responsible for maximizing shareholder value and he's not stupid - he approves the checks to vendors and knows very well that a single company accounts for an overwhelming percentage of their annual software costs. Therefore they are actively looking for alternatives where the cost-benefit ratio of switching is favorable. Heck, they would be negligent not to investigate ways to reduce their costs on behalf of the shareholders.
shpxnvz 16y ago
It's already being done, based on Postgres. http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus_as/overview.do http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus_as/overvi...
rbanffy 16y ago
Why would anyone consciously cripple a fine database with a "varchar2" type is beyond my understanding. Diversity is more important than Oracle compatibility. Also, migrating a big Oracle install is not something businesses do. I see lots of big databases that are two or three releases back. And, lets be sincere, Oracle's RDBMS has a lot of clustering/availability features that no free alternative can touch. Its fate will be the one of the mainframe - Oracle (along with Microsoft) will keep losing the lower end at the same time Oracle pushes the higher end forward with new features that don't exist elsewhere.

jteo 16y ago

Purchasing decisions are made by managers, not the ones doing the actual work. Hence Oracle fits the bill if your company can afford it: It's number one, expensive (which implies good quality), and everyone else uses it. Ergo, no one ever got fired for choosing Oracle, licensing costs be damned.

mseebach 16y ago
Did you read the linked article? As long as there is a FYO point, there's a market for moving that point downwards. Also, I'm not aiming to kill Oracle overnight, I'm aiming at slowly chipping away at Oracles dominance. Right now there's a huge market for serving apps that for some reason are locked into Oracle, and are too expensive to re-write.
shpxnvz 16y ago
That may be the case in some places, but certainly not everywhere. One of the public companies I've worked with uses Oracle to the tune of several million per year in licensing fees. The CEO is responsible for maximizing shareholder value and he's not stupid - he approves the checks to vendors and knows very well that a single company accounts for an overwhelming percentage of their annual software costs. Therefore they are actively looking for alternatives where the cost-benefit ratio of switching is favorable. Heck, they would be negligent not to investigate ways to reduce their costs on behalf of the shareholders.

shpxnvz 16y ago

It's already being done, based on Postgres. http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus_as/overview.do http://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres_plus_as/overvi...

rbanffy 16y ago

Why would anyone consciously cripple a fine database with a "varchar2" type is beyond my understanding. Diversity is more important than Oracle compatibility. Also, migrating a big Oracle install is not something businesses do. I see lots of big databases that are two or three releases back. And, lets be sincere, Oracle's RDBMS has a lot of clustering/availability features that no free alternative can touch. Its fate will be the one of the mainframe - Oracle (along with Microsoft) will keep losing the lower end at the same time Oracle pushes the higher end forward with new features that don't exist elsewhere.