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Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and

Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and lockin is the game. Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs". And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.

geofft 8y ago
Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
- lordnacho 8y ago
  Not sure if you can call it "standard capitalist" but there are antitrust laws?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- foolrush 8y ago
  > Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. That isn’t necessarily “government” but a byproduct of a particular system that has spiralled into the bowl of capitalism upon capitalism; the lobbyists negotiated those laws on behalf of capitalism. Chicken egg issue that isn’t going away given how up to the neck capitalism is wired into government. In Europe, some protections against that are enforced by government.
- corodra 8y ago
  The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem. There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted. I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented. Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
  - greenshackle2 8y ago
    Uh? They switched from a JavaScript engine to a Relational Database Manager? Are you sure you don't mean a NoSQL DB rather than node.js? I googled a bit but couldn't find the article.
  - tomatocracy 8y ago
    For every one of those database migration success stories, there's a potential TSB style disaster though[1]. Problems with migration are real and potentially very serious. It's not just cost if it goes to plan that needs to be considered - for business critical systems, 'don't fix it if it isn't broken' is a good adage for a reason... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Migration_to_the_Sabadell_Proteo_banking_platform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Mi...
  - justinclift 8y ago
    > Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented. A more recent one, for future reference: https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-hello-postgres https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h... ;)
- mdpopescu 8y ago
  As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade. In this particular case, while I'm always against Imaginary Property, I suspect it's more the government contracts part [1]. [1] https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238 https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-starte...
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    > As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade. Sigh. I guess that goes along with "government is evil in all sorts of ways". Simply put, Oracle was the best product 20 years ago. Open Source DB projects were toys that would lose your data. So companies and orgs (and in our case, the govt) used what works. We developed on that. That was what was available, and we used it and paid the licensing costs. Well, lockin is a thing; for us and our customers. If we were to spend the time making a branch to use $other_DB, we need to properly test that as well. Do stored procedures work? Is time/date working right? Is there a close mapping of privileges? Is the DB appropriately audited? Are there active devs on it? All of those are YES for oracle. And its fuzzy about others. I'm sure we could defend using Postgres or other first tier open source DBs.... but how much work would it be to migrate? And for those customers who use Oracle elsewhere in their infra (multiple schemas for different webapps), they are unable to switch. They already have the DBAs in oracle. So, we'd have to support Oracle even after leaving. It's a lose-lose. But I'm sure painting it in the libertarian "government interference with free trade" fits your worldview. Because when I read > "As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!")" I see that the more likely solution is that I don't have enough information, and the surface answer is inadequate. There's a reason smarter people couldn't figure it out, and it's not because of pithy sayings. It's because the solution is a magnitude or 2 more complex than what it looks like.

geofft 8y ago

Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.

lordnacho 8y ago
Not sure if you can call it "standard capitalist" but there are antitrust laws?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
foolrush 8y ago
> Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. That isn’t necessarily “government” but a byproduct of a particular system that has spiralled into the bowl of capitalism upon capitalism; the lobbyists negotiated those laws on behalf of capitalism. Chicken egg issue that isn’t going away given how up to the neck capitalism is wired into government. In Europe, some protections against that are enforced by government.
corodra 8y ago
The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem. There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted. I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented. Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
- greenshackle2 8y ago
  Uh? They switched from a JavaScript engine to a Relational Database Manager? Are you sure you don't mean a NoSQL DB rather than node.js? I googled a bit but couldn't find the article.
- tomatocracy 8y ago
  For every one of those database migration success stories, there's a potential TSB style disaster though[1]. Problems with migration are real and potentially very serious. It's not just cost if it goes to plan that needs to be considered - for business critical systems, 'don't fix it if it isn't broken' is a good adage for a reason... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Migration_to_the_Sabadell_Proteo_banking_platform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Mi...
- justinclift 8y ago
  > Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented. A more recent one, for future reference: https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-hello-postgres https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h... ;)
mdpopescu 8y ago
As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade. In this particular case, while I'm always against Imaginary Property, I suspect it's more the government contracts part [1]. [1] https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238 https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-starte...
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  > As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!"), the answer is government interference with free trade. Sigh. I guess that goes along with "government is evil in all sorts of ways". Simply put, Oracle was the best product 20 years ago. Open Source DB projects were toys that would lose your data. So companies and orgs (and in our case, the govt) used what works. We developed on that. That was what was available, and we used it and paid the licensing costs. Well, lockin is a thing; for us and our customers. If we were to spend the time making a branch to use $other_DB, we need to properly test that as well. Do stored procedures work? Is time/date working right? Is there a close mapping of privileges? Is the DB appropriately audited? Are there active devs on it? All of those are YES for oracle. And its fuzzy about others. I'm sure we could defend using Postgres or other first tier open source DBs.... but how much work would it be to migrate? And for those customers who use Oracle elsewhere in their infra (multiple schemas for different webapps), they are unable to switch. They already have the DBAs in oracle. So, we'd have to support Oracle even after leaving. It's a lose-lose. But I'm sure painting it in the libertarian "government interference with free trade" fits your worldview. Because when I read > "As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!")" I see that the more likely solution is that I don't have enough information, and the surface answer is inadequate. There's a reason smarter people couldn't figure it out, and it's not because of pithy sayings. It's because the solution is a magnitude or 2 more complex than what it looks like.