6 ms·

Oracle shuts down PostgreSQL test servers

72 points by murrayb 16y ago

moe 16y ago
Oracle scared of PostgreSQL? Good times.
- Locke1689 16y ago
  Honestly, they probably don't care about them. That doesn't mean they'll just run their servers for free, though.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Yep. Oracle is scared of pretty much any other database (properly not sqlite, but otherwise). They are so scared that they prevent anyone with an Oracle license from publishing a benchmark of it. Which can only mean that they suck at everything except playing golf.
  - viraptor 16y ago
    To be honest it makes some sense in their case. Just look at the amount of blog posts that compare how fast databases are by running an insert of 1M rows, then a couple of selects and declaring a "winner" based on that... I'm sure Oracle wouldn't like any "tests" like that published.
    - ahi 16y ago
      I don't think that is really their concern. Even if Oracle comes out on top in benchmarks they lose. "We're spending how much to get a x% performance increase?" Once numbers are attached a rational decision can be made come buying decision time. Oracle wants/needs that decision to be based on qualitative arguments, "our space unicorn is better than they're blue elephant."
  - gaius 16y ago
    They are so scared that they prevent anyone with an Oracle license from publishing a benchmark of it Then what's this? http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp
    - ergo98 16y ago
      It was sanctioned by Oracle.
      - gaius 16y ago
        You can wriggle all you like, but here's a published, third-party Oracle benchmark showing it well ahead of the competition. Why are they "afraid"?
        ergo98 16y ago
        Wriggle? What? I think you're confused. All of the major DB vendors have clauses saying that you can't publish benchmarks without their written consent. Not surprisingly that supports a hearty confirmation bias. What's the confusion?
  - ergo98 16y ago
    >They are so scared that they prevent anyone with an Oracle license from publishing a benchmark of it I believe every single major database vendor does this. It's called a DeWitt clause. The arguable justification is that it avoids misleading or incompetent benchmarks from slandering their product, but in reality it's so the only benchmarks published are the ones that favour them. I recently was looking to add Microsoft's new AppFabric (sort of like Redis) to an install, but strangely was finding zero performance metrics on it. I finally plowed ahead to discover that one of the first EULA demands is that you don't publish any benchmarks. I cancelled the install and moved on. Products that can't bear comparison instantly enter the land of the dubious.
bioinformatics 16y ago
I have access to Solaris on SPARC-based machines, would be glad to help.
- bioinformatics 16y ago
  Found the http://pgfoundry.org/ http://pgfoundry.org/ site and will add the system to it.
julius_geezer 16y ago
It sounds pretty bush-league.
elptacek 16y ago
Boo.
guelo 16y ago
I'm scared of Oracle. Having built my current career around Java I'm actually glad Google has forked Java with the Android project.
- nitrogen 16y ago
  I feel your pain. I've decided that after my current big Java project, I'm going to move into HTML5+CSS3/Ruby web apps. I've seen what people are doing with JS these days, and I wonder why I'm still writing my UI in C++/Qt and Java. I find Sunoracle's lackadaisical treatment of Java 7 and JavaFX unacceptable.
- davidw 16y ago
  Ahem: http://harmony.apache.org/ http://harmony.apache.org/
- cageface 16y ago
  Agreed. I've been enjoying dabbling lately with some of the new JVM languages but with Oracle at the helm I'm really not sure if this is a good investment of time. I think the open-source community really undervalues Postgres. MySQL does what it does well enough but the Postgres team has done a phenomenal job building a robust, fully-featured open RDBMS. Hopefully the replication features of the 9.x release will get it into more server rooms.
lsc 16y ago
Man, Oracle works /hard/ to maintain their bad reputation. I mean, they do some good work, look at BTRFS, but it looks like their general public relations to nerds is really, really bad. To some extent, you have to make a choice to focus your marketing on managers or to focus your marketing on Engineers... but even so, it sometimes seems that oracle goes out of it's way to piss off the Engineers.
bdwalter 16y ago
There seems to be no end of the enterprise deuche-baggery that is Oracle.
ars 16y ago
Debian could probably provide a build server if they ask. The have them anyway, and they build PostgreSQL anyway when it's uploaded to debian (although obviously that's not every commit). But with ccache a rebuild is not very expensive.
- rnicholson 16y ago
  I think it was more about Solaris support than just the mere fact of having another build server. Sun Microsystems - and for a short time its new owner Oracle - had provided three member servers to ensure PostgreSQL was stable on the Solaris operating system.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Well... If we forget the Ubuntu genes, Nexenta could be described as Debian GNU/OpenSolaris ;-)
  - cageface 16y ago
    With the end of OpenSolaris I think it would be wise for the open-source community to write off Solaris support. Time spent supporting Solaris is time better spent making Linux a better server OS and making sure that things like Postgres work as efficiently and reliably as possible on Linux.
    - gleb_sitnikov 16y ago
      Linux will never get all enterprise features of Solaris. That OS, broken into a myriad of distributions, driven by lammers who think they are making smth great while they're not - is it gonna become your OS of choice for a mission critical system? Where did you see "the end of OpenSolaris"? Is all that FUD made by Linux users who I so happy to blame the competitor? See http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/opensolaris/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/opensolaris...
  - dedward 16y ago
    It was entirely about ensuring that postgres worked properly on Solaris - nothing at all to do with build speed or anything like that.
Confusion 16y ago
Could it be that this was an accident? I can imagine someone at Oracle going "Sun guys, what do these servers do?". The Sun guys, some of whom may have already left Oracle, some of whom may have shifted departments recently, don't know and say: "they don't seem to be used for anything, according to the administration. There's some weird postgres stuff going on there, but it doesn't seem to do anything useful". "Well OK", the Oracle guy says, "then we can use those machines elsewhere".
jacquesm 16y ago
Don't blame on malice what you can most likely comfortably blame on incompetence or miscommunication.
4chan4ever 16y ago
http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/are-commercial-databases-worth-it http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/are-commercial-databa...
rnicholson 16y ago
I wonder if this move has more to do with killing off Solaris than with Oracle directly trying to screw PostgreSQL.
- bnoordhuis 16y ago
  I don't think so. It's not uncommon to run Oracle on Solaris + SUN hardware. Not a large market but one with high profit margins. Why would Oracle want to kill a cash cow?
  - ams6110 16y ago
    For years, Solaris was the "original" platform upon which Oracle was developed. Everything else was a port. Solaris got the patches first, etc. Several Oracls DBAs I know used to say "if you want to run Oracle you might as well run it on Solaris"
    - astine 16y ago
      That is true, but Oracle recently has been pushing Linux, not Solaris. The Exadata, which is Oracle's first attempt to to build a database appliance on Sun hardware uses Linux, not Solaris, for example.
adolfoabegg 16y ago
They're trying to avoid what Paul Graham said: "It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does." http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
- adolfoabegg 16y ago
  from the same post: "In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end" products against the ceiling."
  - silvestrov 16y ago
    I think Apple is the exception. They ate the other mp3 players and they ate the other mobile companies' profits. So it seems like if the high end is cheap enough, it can eat downwards.
compay 16y ago
I'm a big fan of Postgres and have a hard time overcoming my visceral dislike for Oracle. But I suppose this makes perfect sense for them. Businesses protect themselves from real and potential threats. If I were an Oracle shareholder, this is probably what I would want and expect them to do.
- ahi 16y ago
  Except it does nothing to protect Oracle. The cost is so inconsequential somebody is going to provide hosting. All they achieved was a couple days (hours?) of hassle for the pgsql people and pissing off some devs. Zero competitive advantage was achieved while confirming to developers they can't be trusted. If it was an accident, Oracle employs humans. If this was purposeful, Oracle employs idiots.
vegai 16y ago
So PostgreSQL won't work on Solaris soon. Nothing works in it anyway, so will anyone even notice?
- astine 16y ago
  I will. I run PostgreSQL on Solaris at the day job and it runs very well. (Most things run fine on Solaris so long as you avoid X.) We use a lot of Sun hardware where I contract, and it will be very annoying if I end up having to port my software to MySQL to make Oracle happy.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]

72 points by murrayb 16y ago

moe 16y ago

Oracle scared of PostgreSQL? Good times.

Locke1689 16y ago
Honestly, they probably don't care about them. That doesn't mean they'll just run their servers for free, though.
tomjen3 16y ago
Yep. Oracle is scared of pretty much any other database (properly not sqlite, but otherwise). They are so scared that they prevent anyone with an Oracle license from publishing a benchmark of it. Which can only mean that they suck at everything except playing golf.
- viraptor 16y ago
  To be honest it makes some sense in their case. Just look at the amount of blog posts that compare how fast databases are by running an insert of 1M rows, then a couple of selects and declaring a "winner" based on that... I'm sure Oracle wouldn't like any "tests" like that published.
  - ahi 16y ago
    I don't think that is really their concern. Even if Oracle comes out on top in benchmarks they lose. "We're spending how much to get a x% performance increase?" Once numbers are attached a rational decision can be made come buying decision time. Oracle wants/needs that decision to be based on qualitative arguments, "our space unicorn is better than they're blue elephant."
- gaius 16y ago
  They are so scared that they prevent anyone with an Oracle license from publishing a benchmark of it Then what's this? http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp
  - ergo98 16y ago
    It was sanctioned by Oracle.
    - gaius 16y ago
      You can wriggle all you like, but here's a published, third-party Oracle benchmark showing it well ahead of the competition. Why are they "afraid"?
      - ergo98 16y ago
        Wriggle? What? I think you're confused. All of the major DB vendors have clauses saying that you can't publish benchmarks without their written consent. Not surprisingly that supports a hearty confirmation bias. What's the confusion?
- ergo98 16y ago
  >They are so scared that they prevent anyone with an Oracle license from publishing a benchmark of it I believe every single major database vendor does this. It's called a DeWitt clause. The arguable justification is that it avoids misleading or incompetent benchmarks from slandering their product, but in reality it's so the only benchmarks published are the ones that favour them. I recently was looking to add Microsoft's new AppFabric (sort of like Redis) to an install, but strangely was finding zero performance metrics on it. I finally plowed ahead to discover that one of the first EULA demands is that you don't publish any benchmarks. I cancelled the install and moved on. Products that can't bear comparison instantly enter the land of the dubious.

bioinformatics 16y ago

I have access to Solaris on SPARC-based machines, would be glad to help.

bioinformatics 16y ago
Found the http://pgfoundry.org/ http://pgfoundry.org/ site and will add the system to it.

julius_geezer 16y ago

It sounds pretty bush-league.

elptacek 16y ago

Boo.

guelo 16y ago

I'm scared of Oracle. Having built my current career around Java I'm actually glad Google has forked Java with the Android project.

nitrogen 16y ago
I feel your pain. I've decided that after my current big Java project, I'm going to move into HTML5+CSS3/Ruby web apps. I've seen what people are doing with JS these days, and I wonder why I'm still writing my UI in C++/Qt and Java. I find Sunoracle's lackadaisical treatment of Java 7 and JavaFX unacceptable.
davidw 16y ago
Ahem: http://harmony.apache.org/ http://harmony.apache.org/
cageface 16y ago
Agreed. I've been enjoying dabbling lately with some of the new JVM languages but with Oracle at the helm I'm really not sure if this is a good investment of time. I think the open-source community really undervalues Postgres. MySQL does what it does well enough but the Postgres team has done a phenomenal job building a robust, fully-featured open RDBMS. Hopefully the replication features of the 9.x release will get it into more server rooms.

lsc 16y ago

Man, Oracle works /hard/ to maintain their bad reputation. I mean, they do some good work, look at BTRFS, but it looks like their general public relations to nerds is really, really bad. To some extent, you have to make a choice to focus your marketing on managers or to focus your marketing on Engineers... but even so, it sometimes seems that oracle goes out of it's way to piss off the Engineers.

bdwalter 16y ago

There seems to be no end of the enterprise deuche-baggery that is Oracle.

ars 16y ago

Debian could probably provide a build server if they ask. The have them anyway, and they build PostgreSQL anyway when it's uploaded to debian (although obviously that's not every commit). But with ccache a rebuild is not very expensive.

rnicholson 16y ago
I think it was more about Solaris support than just the mere fact of having another build server. Sun Microsystems - and for a short time its new owner Oracle - had provided three member servers to ensure PostgreSQL was stable on the Solaris operating system.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Well... If we forget the Ubuntu genes, Nexenta could be described as Debian GNU/OpenSolaris ;-)
- cageface 16y ago
  With the end of OpenSolaris I think it would be wise for the open-source community to write off Solaris support. Time spent supporting Solaris is time better spent making Linux a better server OS and making sure that things like Postgres work as efficiently and reliably as possible on Linux.
  - gleb_sitnikov 16y ago
    Linux will never get all enterprise features of Solaris. That OS, broken into a myriad of distributions, driven by lammers who think they are making smth great while they're not - is it gonna become your OS of choice for a mission critical system? Where did you see "the end of OpenSolaris"? Is all that FUD made by Linux users who I so happy to blame the competitor? See http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/opensolaris/overview/index.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/opensolaris...
- dedward 16y ago
  It was entirely about ensuring that postgres worked properly on Solaris - nothing at all to do with build speed or anything like that.

Confusion 16y ago

Could it be that this was an accident? I can imagine someone at Oracle going "Sun guys, what do these servers do?". The Sun guys, some of whom may have already left Oracle, some of whom may have shifted departments recently, don't know and say: "they don't seem to be used for anything, according to the administration. There's some weird postgres stuff going on there, but it doesn't seem to do anything useful". "Well OK", the Oracle guy says, "then we can use those machines elsewhere".

jacquesm 16y ago

Don't blame on malice what you can most likely comfortably blame on incompetence or miscommunication.

4chan4ever 16y ago

http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/are-commercial-databases-worth-it http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/are-commercial-databa...

rnicholson 16y ago

I wonder if this move has more to do with killing off Solaris than with Oracle directly trying to screw PostgreSQL.

bnoordhuis 16y ago
I don't think so. It's not uncommon to run Oracle on Solaris + SUN hardware. Not a large market but one with high profit margins. Why would Oracle want to kill a cash cow?
- ams6110 16y ago
  For years, Solaris was the "original" platform upon which Oracle was developed. Everything else was a port. Solaris got the patches first, etc. Several Oracls DBAs I know used to say "if you want to run Oracle you might as well run it on Solaris"
  - astine 16y ago
    That is true, but Oracle recently has been pushing Linux, not Solaris. The Exadata, which is Oracle's first attempt to to build a database appliance on Sun hardware uses Linux, not Solaris, for example.

adolfoabegg 16y ago

They're trying to avoid what Paul Graham said: "It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does." http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

adolfoabegg 16y ago
from the same post: "In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end" products against the ceiling."
- silvestrov 16y ago
  I think Apple is the exception. They ate the other mp3 players and they ate the other mobile companies' profits. So it seems like if the high end is cheap enough, it can eat downwards.

compay 16y ago

I'm a big fan of Postgres and have a hard time overcoming my visceral dislike for Oracle. But I suppose this makes perfect sense for them. Businesses protect themselves from real and potential threats. If I were an Oracle shareholder, this is probably what I would want and expect them to do.

ahi 16y ago
Except it does nothing to protect Oracle. The cost is so inconsequential somebody is going to provide hosting. All they achieved was a couple days (hours?) of hassle for the pgsql people and pissing off some devs. Zero competitive advantage was achieved while confirming to developers they can't be trusted. If it was an accident, Oracle employs humans. If this was purposeful, Oracle employs idiots.

vegai 16y ago

So PostgreSQL won't work on Solaris soon. Nothing works in it anyway, so will anyone even notice?

astine 16y ago
I will. I run PostgreSQL on Solaris at the day job and it runs very well. (Most things run fine on Solaris so long as you avoid X.) We use a lot of Sun hardware where I contract, and it will be very annoying if I end up having to port my software to MySQL to make Oracle happy.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]