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This has been said before but it's worth repeating, Oracle is not an engineering company. They are giant sales organization with an engineering department tacke

by mustpax 16y ago

This has been said before but it's worth repeating, Oracle is not an engineering company. They are giant sales organization with an engineering department tacked on. They probably considered Sun's workforce before the acquisition as a liability instead of as an asset. The assets were in Sun's products, patents and customers. In that calculus, the people who quit willingly just represent severance checks Oracle doesn't have to write.

tlack 16y ago
But won't the products suffer severely once the brains behind them leave? No organization as old and large as Oracle can discount that.
- rdtsc 16y ago
  What the grandparent post said is correct -- Oracle is a sales company. They sell a seemingly engineering product -- a database. But that doesn't matter. Most organization who buy that database could probably manage with Postgres if they had to (not saying "all", just "most"). So why do they buy it? Because Oracle salesmen play golf well and know how to lose to the right CEO/CIO/CTO person. Yes, Oracle DB is "golfware" not "software". There is a whole ecosystem of training and support that they have built. Keeping that up is worth a lot more than rolling out better software, because that is where the money is coming from. So when the best Sun engineers leave, Oracle managers are probably thinking "good riddance, we could replace them with 10 engineers in India for the same price!" and the sad thing is, -- they are probably correct for the market they are in.
  - sandGorgon 16y ago
    upvoted for "golfware"
  - hga 16y ago
    Thing is, there was a long period in the '90s when Oracle was the best solution, period. Non-mainframe DB2 was by the mid-90s (and perhaps earlier) nice, cheaper and simpler to administer but used conventional locking instead of MVCC (works for a small group of DB engineers but doesn't scale as well with lots of developers), MySQL was a non-ACID nightmare (heck, unless my research was really off in mid-1997 Linux didn't truly impliment fsync back then), PostgresSQL wasn't ready for prime time and the less said about SQLServer the better (it's improved since them or so I'm sold). And small fry like Informix weren't particularly worth dealing with, Ingres was dying, etc. etc. You can see how the above golfware paradigm could easily sink in when you really did have arguably the best solution, even if it cost twice as much as the next best (DB2, who's ecosystem (e.g. books) was and I'm sure still is much less rich). However as you and many others have noted the world is very different now.
    - tlack 16y ago
      I remember the same situation around those days: everyone wanted to get a database behind their site, but MySQL felt like you were running with scissors. It was easy to sell Oracle to clients then despite the $5k+ cost. Oracle's sales cycle may been protecting them until now, but they must realize what will happen when they abandon their strong technical underpinnings.
cturner 16y ago
They are giant sales organization with an engineering department tacked on. Years ago we had oracle sales present to our office. During questions I asked what was being done to make sqlplus feature competitive against the free software consoles like psql, mysql on basic features (e.g. browsable command-line history). The presenter was surprised I had complaints about it. He fired it up on his laptop on the projector. It crashed during startup. Laughs all-round and beyond that the Oracle reps didn't even pretend to be interested. I'm not sure who they thought they were selling to. I came to the same conclusion as you.
- gaius 16y ago
  In the early 00s I was at an Oracle sales conference. Now I was never in Sales myself mind, I was a consultant (and actually employed by an Oracle partner) but the sales types always had the best canapes and cocktails, so we blagged our way in. So, it's time for the main event, in the auditorium. They got smoke machines. They got lasers. They got Vanessa Mae (or a clone thereof) wearing next to nothing and playing up a storm on the electric violin. They got cheerleaders and they got MCs on stage rappin' about bringing Oracle's rivals TO THEIR KNEES. And the crowd (99% Oracle salesmen) went wild. I'm at the back wth my little clique of weapons-grade cynics and we're like, WTF have we gotten ourselves into. Oracle ain't even a sales organization, they're a full on religious revival.

by mustpax 16y ago

tlack 16y ago

But won't the products suffer severely once the brains behind them leave? No organization as old and large as Oracle can discount that.

rdtsc 16y ago
What the grandparent post said is correct -- Oracle is a sales company. They sell a seemingly engineering product -- a database. But that doesn't matter. Most organization who buy that database could probably manage with Postgres if they had to (not saying "all", just "most"). So why do they buy it? Because Oracle salesmen play golf well and know how to lose to the right CEO/CIO/CTO person. Yes, Oracle DB is "golfware" not "software". There is a whole ecosystem of training and support that they have built. Keeping that up is worth a lot more than rolling out better software, because that is where the money is coming from. So when the best Sun engineers leave, Oracle managers are probably thinking "good riddance, we could replace them with 10 engineers in India for the same price!" and the sad thing is, -- they are probably correct for the market they are in.
- sandGorgon 16y ago
  upvoted for "golfware"
- hga 16y ago
  Thing is, there was a long period in the '90s when Oracle was the best solution, period. Non-mainframe DB2 was by the mid-90s (and perhaps earlier) nice, cheaper and simpler to administer but used conventional locking instead of MVCC (works for a small group of DB engineers but doesn't scale as well with lots of developers), MySQL was a non-ACID nightmare (heck, unless my research was really off in mid-1997 Linux didn't truly impliment fsync back then), PostgresSQL wasn't ready for prime time and the less said about SQLServer the better (it's improved since them or so I'm sold). And small fry like Informix weren't particularly worth dealing with, Ingres was dying, etc. etc. You can see how the above golfware paradigm could easily sink in when you really did have arguably the best solution, even if it cost twice as much as the next best (DB2, who's ecosystem (e.g. books) was and I'm sure still is much less rich). However as you and many others have noted the world is very different now.
  - tlack 16y ago
    I remember the same situation around those days: everyone wanted to get a database behind their site, but MySQL felt like you were running with scissors. It was easy to sell Oracle to clients then despite the $5k+ cost. Oracle's sales cycle may been protecting them until now, but they must realize what will happen when they abandon their strong technical underpinnings.

cturner 16y ago

They are giant sales organization with an engineering department tacked on. Years ago we had oracle sales present to our office. During questions I asked what was being done to make sqlplus feature competitive against the free software consoles like psql, mysql on basic features (e.g. browsable command-line history). The presenter was surprised I had complaints about it. He fired it up on his laptop on the projector. It crashed during startup. Laughs all-round and beyond that the Oracle reps didn't even pretend to be interested. I'm not sure who they thought they were selling to. I came to the same conclusion as you.

gaius 16y ago
In the early 00s I was at an Oracle sales conference. Now I was never in Sales myself mind, I was a consultant (and actually employed by an Oracle partner) but the sales types always had the best canapes and cocktails, so we blagged our way in. So, it's time for the main event, in the auditorium. They got smoke machines. They got lasers. They got Vanessa Mae (or a clone thereof) wearing next to nothing and playing up a storm on the electric violin. They got cheerleaders and they got MCs on stage rappin' about bringing Oracle's rivals TO THEIR KNEES. And the crowd (99% Oracle salesmen) went wild. I'm at the back wth my little clique of weapons-grade cynics and we're like, WTF have we gotten ourselves into. Oracle ain't even a sales organization, they're a full on religious revival.