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

by tlack 16y ago

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.

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

by 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.