5 ms·

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-

by 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 Today they stuck with their good solutions for outdated problems and their solutions doesn't solve modern problems well.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.
  - jefftk 8y ago
    Doesn't Spanner support ACID transactions? (Disclosure: I work for Google)
    - mav3rick 8y ago
      Yes it does.
- Apocryphon 8y ago
  Suing people.
- matwood 8y ago
  Sales. What I hear from friends in big co's is that the decision to use Oracle is made on the golf course and not in engineering. Engineering is actively moving to the other technologies, and eventually the companies will stop paying for Oracle because it is no longer in use.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  which is so odd to me, I use DB2, in that our AIX/Oracle teams have many people working as "DBA" but on our DB2 iSeries there are two of us and our data sets are as large. The difference is there are so many things that the iSeries does automatically that it makes being a DBA a breeze. I really need to get an understanding of the issues the Orcale team faces one day but they tend to look down on us and the pc groups
  - vbezhenar 8y ago
    When oracle corrupts data, you have to google magic incantations and type them in console. I did that many times. But what I never understood is why do I have to do so in the first place, why Oracle does not self-heal itself.
    - TylerE 8y ago
      Consultant income driven development.
- aNoob7000 8y ago
  Active-Active clustering also know as Oracle RAC.
- atombender 8y ago
  Well, it's undeniable that as an OLTP RDBMS, Oracle is very good, at least if you ignore the complexities of managing it. Almost nobody can beat it on features. For example, consider partitioning. Oracle has had seamless predicate-based table partitioning for about 20 years now. Postgres is getting there, but is still lagging behind. With Oracle you just tell it to partition by some expression(s) and off you go. Then there are things like multi-master replication, bitmap indexing and other nice features. Oracle is also extremely fast. The underlying table storage is very pragmatic, with a hybrid MVCC system that has both an undo and a redo log. Tables are written in-place, and transaction contention is handled by linked lists of records to the undo log, so getting an older copy of a row is still almost as cheap as Postgres. Of course, it's beaten in some areas. It's not great a full text search, I believe. Compared to Oracle, Postgres' transactional DDL is positively magical. With Oracle and nearly every other database out there, things like "drop table" can't run inside a transaction. I would never want to work with Oracle, but I can't deny that it's got some great features.
- flas9sd 8y ago
  Thanks for pointing me to "Postgres before SQL" - the history page at postgresql.org has links to the initial documents - QUEL is like a hint of an alternative universe. I think it is time to pick up a book by Michael Stonebraker.
  - ezequiel-garzon 8y ago
    And thank you in turn for the reference. It does indeed sound very interesting [1]. I had never heard of QUEL either [2]. [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/history.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/history.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages
- protomyth 8y ago
  SQL Server is a fork of Sybase’s code, so the child product became much more popular than the parent.
  - simtel20 8y ago
    My understanding is that it's a complete rewrite, perhaps more than once at this point.
    - protomyth 8y ago
      Probably, but it started as a fork. Last I looked a T-SQL programmer can adapt pretty quickly still.
- bigiain 8y ago
  > Is there anything that Oracle still does that nobody else can match? Selling to enterprise.
twblalock 8y ago
Oracle isn't great in the cloud or with autoscaling either. With the move to microservices it is less important to have one giant centralized database, and "less good" alternatives have become good enough. Oracle is pretty much the opposite of agile when it comes to facing these challenges.

by wtf42 8y ago

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.
- jefftk 8y ago
  Doesn't Spanner support ACID transactions? (Disclosure: I work for Google)
  - mav3rick 8y ago
    Yes it does.
Apocryphon 8y ago
Suing people.
matwood 8y ago
Sales. What I hear from friends in big co's is that the decision to use Oracle is made on the golf course and not in engineering. Engineering is actively moving to the other technologies, and eventually the companies will stop paying for Oracle because it is no longer in use.
Shivetya 8y ago
which is so odd to me, I use DB2, in that our AIX/Oracle teams have many people working as "DBA" but on our DB2 iSeries there are two of us and our data sets are as large. The difference is there are so many things that the iSeries does automatically that it makes being a DBA a breeze. I really need to get an understanding of the issues the Orcale team faces one day but they tend to look down on us and the pc groups
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  When oracle corrupts data, you have to google magic incantations and type them in console. I did that many times. But what I never understood is why do I have to do so in the first place, why Oracle does not self-heal itself.
  - TylerE 8y ago
    Consultant income driven development.
aNoob7000 8y ago
Active-Active clustering also know as Oracle RAC.
atombender 8y ago
Well, it's undeniable that as an OLTP RDBMS, Oracle is very good, at least if you ignore the complexities of managing it. Almost nobody can beat it on features. For example, consider partitioning. Oracle has had seamless predicate-based table partitioning for about 20 years now. Postgres is getting there, but is still lagging behind. With Oracle you just tell it to partition by some expression(s) and off you go. Then there are things like multi-master replication, bitmap indexing and other nice features. Oracle is also extremely fast. The underlying table storage is very pragmatic, with a hybrid MVCC system that has both an undo and a redo log. Tables are written in-place, and transaction contention is handled by linked lists of records to the undo log, so getting an older copy of a row is still almost as cheap as Postgres. Of course, it's beaten in some areas. It's not great a full text search, I believe. Compared to Oracle, Postgres' transactional DDL is positively magical. With Oracle and nearly every other database out there, things like "drop table" can't run inside a transaction. I would never want to work with Oracle, but I can't deny that it's got some great features.
flas9sd 8y ago
Thanks for pointing me to "Postgres before SQL" - the history page at postgresql.org has links to the initial documents - QUEL is like a hint of an alternative universe. I think it is time to pick up a book by Michael Stonebraker.
- ezequiel-garzon 8y ago
  And thank you in turn for the reference. It does indeed sound very interesting [1]. I had never heard of QUEL either [2]. [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/history.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/history.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages
protomyth 8y ago
SQL Server is a fork of Sybase’s code, so the child product became much more popular than the parent.
- simtel20 8y ago
  My understanding is that it's a complete rewrite, perhaps more than once at this point.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    Probably, but it started as a fork. Last I looked a T-SQL programmer can adapt pretty quickly still.
bigiain 8y ago
> Is there anything that Oracle still does that nobody else can match? Selling to enterprise.

twblalock 8y ago

Oracle isn't great in the cloud or with autoscaling either. With the move to microservices it is less important to have one giant centralized database, and "less good" alternatives have become good enough. Oracle is pretty much the opposite of agile when it comes to facing these challenges.