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This past year I spoke at Oracle's Code One conference in San Francisco for the first time. I've never used Oracle products before and had never been to an Orac

This past year I spoke at Oracle's Code One conference in San Francisco for the first time. I've never used Oracle products before and had never been to an Oracle event before, but I was aware of Oracle's incredibly bad reputation in the dev community. When I got to the event it was MASSIVE. I think they have something like 30k+ attendees. As I was walking around, hanging out, and attending talks, I decided to make friends and chat up other people. This is where things got interesting. Through the 2 days I was at the event, I probably met nearly 100 developers, and when I asked all of them what they use Oracle for EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM openly told me that their companies use Oracle right now but they hate it and they were all in the process of transitioning to other providers or open source solutions. Every single person I met at Code One told me the exact same thing. That is pretty insane and I don't think it bodes well for Oracle that all of their customers are trying to find ways to get out of their ecosystem :x

ecshafer 8y ago
A lot of Oracle customers got oracle products 15 or 20 or more years ago. A lot of those developers, sysadmins and data base admins that have worked on oracle themselves are now into senior Management and executive positions. I wonder how much this has to do with transitions. That they know it sucks, so they are more willing to fight beyond standard "it's expensive" arguments. A bit of a shower thought, I have no evidence for this.
- elpakal 8y ago
  Speaking from my probably limited experience compared to others here, these early Oracle adopters turned senior/management you mentioned actually are the ones I saw fighting hardest to keep Oracle around. That is all they know and all they ever have known. In some cases even lying about other technology assessments and flat out sabotage to make sure things aint change. The most vocal pushback against Oracle I saw was from people who were not early adapters and had experienced other systems.
wtf42 8y ago
It's not because of poor Oracle reputation, it's because of technologies. Oracle is losing database-related markets. 15-20 years ago Oracle was №1 in database-related technologies and everyone knew it. For that time they had almost perfect solutions for most database-related problems on market. But market is changing. Today they stuck with their good solutions for outdated problems and their solutions doesn't solve modern problems well. So here is my short list of modern database-related problems, for which I think Oracle is not best at: - files/data storage (today there are better non-database solutions for that, 15-20 years ago it was a good practice to store files in database), - full-text search (10-15 years ago substring search was enough, today we want complex search criterions), - consistency across data centers, - key-value cache (today we want almost instantaneous cache answers), - OLAP (there are faster solutions on market). 15-20 years ago Oracle was one and only one solution for almost all database-related business problems. Today for many modern problems there are better solutions than Oracle.
- astrodust 8y ago
  Twenty years ago most of the databases we've come to trust were still quirky and strange (Postgres before SQL) or toy-like in capability (MySQL on MyISAM). A lot has changed since then. Competitors like DB2 and Sybase seem to have utterly faded away, so it's surpising that Oracle's still a factor at all. Is there anything that Oracle still does that nobody else can match?
  - dmckeon 8y ago
    Sales, and sailing.
    - astrodust 8y ago
      It's true. Postgres doesn't have a very competitive America's Cup team.
  - jchrisa 8y ago
    If you are doing financial services like insurance or banking, you might be stuck on Oracle because you need active active worldwide database replication and none of the 1st-gen NoSQLs offer global ACID transactions. As someone who's been working in databases for over a decade I've seen customers develop database evaluation strategies, but still be unable to migrate away from Oracle. That is changing with the distributed ACID transactions offered by databases like my employer FaunaDB.
skookumchuck 8y ago
I sold my ORCL a couple years ago (had held it for 20 years) for just that reason. A company whose customers use their product because they have to rather than because they want to is doomed. The same for Novell stock back in the day.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  The last straw for me was when I read they were suing their customers.
- microdrum 8y ago
  So Google is doomed? (I think it is.)
  - mamurphy 8y ago
    Google's primary service is selling search ads that consumers view, primarily via search. Consumers have almost no lock in, and consistently choose Google search over Bing, etc. Google is not at all like Oracle in this case.
    - microdrum 8y ago
      Google's business is selling ads to companies and agencies (which hate Google) and selling ad display tech to websites and publishers (which hate Google). They buy companies (Urchin, Doubleclick), make them free, destroy competition, introduce pricing. Pretty identical to the bad guys in tech history.
      - majewsky 8y ago
        Even if that's true, it doesn't matter. Consumers are using Google, so there is not really a free market for search ads from thee marketers' perspective.
  - Swenrekcah 8y ago
    I don’t like google but I use a lot of their products and of course am involuntarily tracked by them all over. I can hate them all I want, but I’m not their customer. So they have that going for them...
bitxbit 8y ago
I think it’s pretty insane that it’s taking companies this long to transition away from Oracle.
- cwbrandsma 8y ago
  Many of the Oracle system I worked on were huge. Hundreds or thousands of stored procedures that would have to be completely rewritten. Migrating the data...that is easy. Staring down a 10,000 line stored procedure is daunting.
tomelders 8y ago
There are a few companies who could all have the same slogan, but I’ll use Oracle in this example... Oracle: we make the stuff that other people make you use. Other candidates include (but not limited to) - Atlasian - Microsoft - Adobe
- brianberns 8y ago
  Microsoft’s development ecosystem (e.g. SQL Server, .NET) is top notch, even if you hate Windows and Office.
  - jackfoxy 8y ago
    As a Microsoft Development Technologies MVP, I can tell you MS gets it and has made huge progress in usefulness and usability of the DotNet ecosystem. Keep in mind there are on the order of 1M C# developers worldwide. Most in enterprise environments and most belonging to the dark matter developers. They don't hang out on HN, Twitter, go to conferences, write blogs, or even read them. This will keep MS dev ecosystem development focused on C# and object oriented for the rest of my life. But I can tell you all the MS techies in .NET development are interested in and respect F# and functional programming and want to see it succeed. There has been pain getting to cross-platform .NET, which is what NetStandard/NetCore is all about. It is pretty stable and useful today, and there is a lot of wood behind the development arrow going forward.
    - brianberns 8y ago
      I'm an F# coder in a company of C# "dark matter developers". (Thanks for that term!) There's no ecosystem I'd prefer to be working in than .NET.
      - samblr 8y ago
        Could you elaborate on what are missing parts in other ecosystems than .net/c#
        8y ago
starik36 8y ago
Salesforce's Dreamforce conferences are similar. There were 120k attendees the year I went. No developer (or not a lot) would knowingly choose Salesforce as a tool, yet all these folks are at the conference because the employer paid them to go.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  I don't think that comparison is really valid. I know tons of companies that run virtually all of their CRM on Salesforce, and this isn't going anywhere soon, nor do these companies have anything that they are planning on transitioning to. With Oracle, though, I think it really is a lack of technical positioning rather than any "devs hate them" sentiment that is a real existential risk to them long term. Lots of senior execs realize that Oracle's cloud technology is a joke, and more importantly their crazy licensing model makes it a major PITA to run Oracle DBs in any other cloud, and perhaps even more importantly that a lot of changes in dev architecture are making the huge, powerful, monolithic database less critical than it once was. Sure, there are lots of legacy mission critical apps that live and will live on Oracle for a long time, but executive leadership at many companies is now starting to see this (appropriately IMO) as a competitive disadvantage, and they will make choices to try to extricate themselves from Oracle as much as possible.
- pcurve 8y ago
  Don't forget PEGA. Management love PEGA and Salesforce.
prepend 8y ago
It’s funny, I first bought Oracle in 1999. Every Oracle user I talked with that year said the same thing. They all hate Oracle, they were all switching.
zelly 8y ago
It always amazed me that a primarily database company was worth that much money, since PostgreSQL is free and insanely well documented. It’s like a Fortune 500 company being based on selling the bash shell and tools for using bash. Open source for infrastructure level software has historically been wildly successful.
- mruts 8y ago
  Isn’t that exactly what Red Hat does? And Warren Buffet even just bought a stake in them.
tim333 8y ago
There's an interview with Ellison "Oracle is destined to beat Amazon at cloud database" oct 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ where he's chatting about some of his customers hating Oracle and wanting to get off, specifically Amazon and SAP. But he says they don't because the Oracle database is better and the other systems don't work properly.

ecshafer 8y ago

A lot of Oracle customers got oracle products 15 or 20 or more years ago. A lot of those developers, sysadmins and data base admins that have worked on oracle themselves are now into senior Management and executive positions. I wonder how much this has to do with transitions. That they know it sucks, so they are more willing to fight beyond standard "it's expensive" arguments. A bit of a shower thought, I have no evidence for this.

elpakal 8y ago
Speaking from my probably limited experience compared to others here, these early Oracle adopters turned senior/management you mentioned actually are the ones I saw fighting hardest to keep Oracle around. That is all they know and all they ever have known. In some cases even lying about other technology assessments and flat out sabotage to make sure things aint change. The most vocal pushback against Oracle I saw was from people who were not early adapters and had experienced other systems.

wtf42 8y ago

It's not because of poor Oracle reputation, it's because of technologies. Oracle is losing database-related markets. 15-20 years ago Oracle was №1 in database-related technologies and everyone knew it. For that time they had almost perfect solutions for most database-related problems on market. But market is changing. Today they stuck with their good solutions for outdated problems and their solutions doesn't solve modern problems well. So here is my short list of modern database-related problems, for which I think Oracle is not best at: - files/data storage (today there are better non-database solutions for that, 15-20 years ago it was a good practice to store files in database), - full-text search (10-15 years ago substring search was enough, today we want complex search criterions), - consistency across data centers, - key-value cache (today we want almost instantaneous cache answers), - OLAP (there are faster solutions on market). 15-20 years ago Oracle was one and only one solution for almost all database-related business problems. Today for many modern problems there are better solutions than Oracle.

astrodust 8y ago
Twenty years ago most of the databases we've come to trust were still quirky and strange (Postgres before SQL) or toy-like in capability (MySQL on MyISAM). A lot has changed since then. Competitors like DB2 and Sybase seem to have utterly faded away, so it's surpising that Oracle's still a factor at all. Is there anything that Oracle still does that nobody else can match?
- dmckeon 8y ago
  Sales, and sailing.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    It's true. Postgres doesn't have a very competitive America's Cup team.
- jchrisa 8y ago
  If you are doing financial services like insurance or banking, you might be stuck on Oracle because you need active active worldwide database replication and none of the 1st-gen NoSQLs offer global ACID transactions. As someone who's been working in databases for over a decade I've seen customers develop database evaluation strategies, but still be unable to migrate away from Oracle. That is changing with the distributed ACID transactions offered by databases like my employer FaunaDB.

skookumchuck 8y ago

I sold my ORCL a couple years ago (had held it for 20 years) for just that reason. A company whose customers use their product because they have to rather than because they want to is doomed. The same for Novell stock back in the day.

skookumchuck 8y ago
The last straw for me was when I read they were suing their customers.
microdrum 8y ago
So Google is doomed? (I think it is.)
- mamurphy 8y ago
  Google's primary service is selling search ads that consumers view, primarily via search. Consumers have almost no lock in, and consistently choose Google search over Bing, etc. Google is not at all like Oracle in this case.
  - microdrum 8y ago
    Google's business is selling ads to companies and agencies (which hate Google) and selling ad display tech to websites and publishers (which hate Google). They buy companies (Urchin, Doubleclick), make them free, destroy competition, introduce pricing. Pretty identical to the bad guys in tech history.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Even if that's true, it doesn't matter. Consumers are using Google, so there is not really a free market for search ads from thee marketers' perspective.
- Swenrekcah 8y ago
  I don’t like google but I use a lot of their products and of course am involuntarily tracked by them all over. I can hate them all I want, but I’m not their customer. So they have that going for them...

bitxbit 8y ago

I think it’s pretty insane that it’s taking companies this long to transition away from Oracle.

cwbrandsma 8y ago
Many of the Oracle system I worked on were huge. Hundreds or thousands of stored procedures that would have to be completely rewritten. Migrating the data...that is easy. Staring down a 10,000 line stored procedure is daunting.

tomelders 8y ago

There are a few companies who could all have the same slogan, but I’ll use Oracle in this example... Oracle: we make the stuff that other people make you use. Other candidates include (but not limited to) - Atlasian - Microsoft - Adobe

brianberns 8y ago
Microsoft’s development ecosystem (e.g. SQL Server, .NET) is top notch, even if you hate Windows and Office.
- jackfoxy 8y ago
  As a Microsoft Development Technologies MVP, I can tell you MS gets it and has made huge progress in usefulness and usability of the DotNet ecosystem. Keep in mind there are on the order of 1M C# developers worldwide. Most in enterprise environments and most belonging to the dark matter developers. They don't hang out on HN, Twitter, go to conferences, write blogs, or even read them. This will keep MS dev ecosystem development focused on C# and object oriented for the rest of my life. But I can tell you all the MS techies in .NET development are interested in and respect F# and functional programming and want to see it succeed. There has been pain getting to cross-platform .NET, which is what NetStandard/NetCore is all about. It is pretty stable and useful today, and there is a lot of wood behind the development arrow going forward.
  - brianberns 8y ago
    I'm an F# coder in a company of C# "dark matter developers". (Thanks for that term!) There's no ecosystem I'd prefer to be working in than .NET.
    - samblr 8y ago
      Could you elaborate on what are missing parts in other ecosystems than .net/c#
      - 8y ago

starik36 8y ago

Salesforce's Dreamforce conferences are similar. There were 120k attendees the year I went. No developer (or not a lot) would knowingly choose Salesforce as a tool, yet all these folks are at the conference because the employer paid them to go.

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
I don't think that comparison is really valid. I know tons of companies that run virtually all of their CRM on Salesforce, and this isn't going anywhere soon, nor do these companies have anything that they are planning on transitioning to. With Oracle, though, I think it really is a lack of technical positioning rather than any "devs hate them" sentiment that is a real existential risk to them long term. Lots of senior execs realize that Oracle's cloud technology is a joke, and more importantly their crazy licensing model makes it a major PITA to run Oracle DBs in any other cloud, and perhaps even more importantly that a lot of changes in dev architecture are making the huge, powerful, monolithic database less critical than it once was. Sure, there are lots of legacy mission critical apps that live and will live on Oracle for a long time, but executive leadership at many companies is now starting to see this (appropriately IMO) as a competitive disadvantage, and they will make choices to try to extricate themselves from Oracle as much as possible.
pcurve 8y ago
Don't forget PEGA. Management love PEGA and Salesforce.

prepend 8y ago

It’s funny, I first bought Oracle in 1999. Every Oracle user I talked with that year said the same thing. They all hate Oracle, they were all switching.

zelly 8y ago

It always amazed me that a primarily database company was worth that much money, since PostgreSQL is free and insanely well documented. It’s like a Fortune 500 company being based on selling the bash shell and tools for using bash. Open source for infrastructure level software has historically been wildly successful.

mruts 8y ago
Isn’t that exactly what Red Hat does? And Warren Buffet even just bought a stake in them.

tim333 8y ago

There's an interview with Ellison "Oracle is destined to beat Amazon at cloud database" oct 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ where he's chatting about some of his customers hating Oracle and wanting to get off, specifically Amazon and SAP. But he says they don't because the Oracle database is better and the other systems don't work properly.