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China’s Biggest Startups Ditch Oracle and IBM for Home-Made Tech

98 points by ceohockey60 7y ago

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
This article is... not great journalism. Some Chinese startups are adopting open-source databases instead of Oracle and IBM. One of them, PingCAP's TiDB [1], happens to be built by a Chinese startup. And that's it? I was expecting to hear that the cold dead hand of the Chinese Communist Party was forcing this, but no, it seems to be simple capitalism at play -- nobody wants to pay the Oracle tax if they can avoid it. [1] https://github.com/pingcap/tidb https://github.com/pingcap/tidb
- meddlepal 7y ago
  Serious honest question for someone who might know but is anyone in the US adopting Oracle for green field projects based on valid technical merits or biz requirements these days? It's easy to dump on Oracle but I'm curious about legitimate technical or business requirement reasons for adopting Oracle in 2019.
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    Anyone onboarding to Salesforce is de facto adopting Oracle. Salesforce certainly seems to be popular these days.
    - swarnie_ 7y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people taking salesforce are going for a managed cloud options. It may be running Oracle but the business will likely be several abstraction steps away from managing it day to day.
  - yourapostasy 7y ago
    For some highly-specific performance scenarios, Oracle still cannot be beat. I know far, far more businesses where a supported Postgresql is perfectly suitable. I know only one business where Oracle was a defensible technical choice.
    - grumpydba 7y ago
      > For some highly-specific performance scenarios, Oracle still cannot be beat. Can you elaborate on this please? I do not think this statement is correct.
      - yourapostasy 7y ago
        Trading environment, there wasn't another solution with the lookup-and-matching performance they got out of Oracle, from what little was shared with me. I trust the source as he is the best programmer I know first-hand and never shied away from throwing together his own solution if he found benefit from it, like his own object database back in the early 80's.
        grumpydba 7y ago
        > Trading environment, there wasn't another solution with the lookup-and-matching performance they got out of Oracle, from what little was shared with me. I've been maintaining trading backend databases for roughly a decade. What oracle does, db2, sql server, sybase can do. And postgresql, MySQL most probably too. Most of the times the Oracle choice is dictated by a software editor whose devs are more familiar with Oracle and have an oracle first strategy.
theredbox 7y ago
Open Source is the worst thing that can happen to the US tech in US vs China trade war. Chinese scene is largely isolated from OSS in the west and more often than not they are just leeching whatever the rest of the world produces in terms of software. I dont want to picture chinese people as parasites I want to just point out that the contribution from chinese devs and mainly their tech companies could be better.
- simion314 7y ago
  Is there a list with the contribution and usage by country? You also need to consider the language problem, I can imagine that people that are not as good at communicating in english would have less contribution in english language projeccts but would contribute to native language projects (I seen small projects on github, game modding sites) by people that are bad english, use machine translation but that want they share their creation. Just yesterday I found a small project on github that I used for inspiration on how to solve a problem that had the code in english but all comments was in Japanse(I think) , my point is that you may not see the contribution that happen and you then assume those do not exist.
- est 7y ago
  > Chinese scene is largely isolated from OSS in the west and more often than not they are just leeching whatever the rest of the world produces in terms of software. > I dont want to picture chinese people as parasites I want to just point out that the contribution from chinese devs and mainly their tech companies could be better. Can you spot no Chinese company from these? - FSF patrons https://www.fsf.org/patrons https://www.fsf.org/patrons - Linux Foundation https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/ If you frequent Kernel lists you can find many Chinese contributors (from Redhat) - Eclipse Foundation https://www.eclipse.org/membership/exploreMembership.php#allmembers https://www.eclipse.org/membership/exploreMembership.php#all... - Apache Foundation https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks - Many Apache projects like Apache Dubbo https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-announces52 https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... - OpenSSL (exceptional support) https://www.openssl.org/support/acks.html https://www.openssl.org/support/acks.html - Ceph Foundation https://ceph.com/foundation/ https://ceph.com/foundation/ - OpenContainers Initiative https://www.opencontainers.org/about/members https://www.opencontainers.org/about/members - CNCF members https://www.cncf.io/about/members/ https://www.cncf.io/about/members/ - OpenStack foundation https://www.openstack.org/foundation/companies/ https://www.openstack.org/foundation/companies/ - Xen members https://xenproject.org/about-us/project-members/ https://xenproject.org/about-us/project-members/ - RISC-V Foundation https://riscv.org/membership/ https://riscv.org/membership/ - OpenPOWER members https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-members/ https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-members/ Are these leeching by your standards?
jacknews 7y ago
Advertorial? I'm sure more Chinese companies use MySQL, Postgres etc than TiDB?
- rapsey 7y ago
  Sounds like one. However the DB vendor business is certainly hard to get into and survive. If pingcap has that many paying customers then well done.
- turingbook 7y ago
  Postgres community is very small in China with MySQL dominating.
megaremote 7y ago
Startups were using Oracle and IBM? Seems an odd choice.
- swarnie_ 7y ago
  Our startup did, but that was 20 years ago and the Oracle regional office was literally the floor below us.
  - roel_v 7y ago
    "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", arguably the first book with a how-to for what we'd now call 'internet startups', was about using Oracle and Perl to build web applications. But yeah it was published 1997.
    - wmf 7y ago
      And the SPARC/Solaris/Oracle stack is arguably one of the things that brought down ArsDigita a few years later. They couldn't reduce costs to accommodate lower-end customers.
  - rwmj 7y ago
    20 years ago (is it so long??) we looked at Oracle for our start-up but the prices they wanted were ridiculous. We went with Informix instead which was acquired by IBM soon after. So can confirm, startups in the first dot com boom were looking at Oracle or IBM. I wanted us to use PostgreSQL but was overruled by management who thought they knew better.
- mcv 7y ago
  If startups are ditching Oracle and IBM, they went wrong in adopting Oracle and IBM in the first place. Do Chinese startups really do that? Can you still count as a startup when you're using Oracle and IBM? But it seems the headline is wrong, and the actual story is that large Chinese enterprises are ditching Oracle and IBM for a Chinese startup.
  - 7y ago
rsynnott 7y ago
So much like startups everywhere else, then.
thomaswang 7y ago
Well my guess is that they are planning for a time where they cannot use US tech. They planning on being self sufficient as a country.
Merrill 7y ago
Do Human Computer Interfaces developed by Chinese language programmers differ from HCI developed by English language programmers? It would seem that Chinese characters might be used instead of icons in some applications. Native Chinese OSS may be more suitable for use in China and have some advantages in HKN countries.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  I know that voice control is very popular in China, for text messages for example because writing on phones is much more cumbersome compared to latin alphabets. Might be interesting to see whether voice control is going to take off much faster in China than in some other regions over the coming decade.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    That’s quite interesting; I wonder, given the lack of official status for other dialects, is voice input compatible with them?
mruts 7y ago
I’m not a database guy and I only know enough SQL to get me through whatever task I need ro be complete. I used MemSQL at my last job and it seemed like an interesting idea. Can open source solutions provide the same features as MemSQL, MSSQL, and Oracle. can one db provide all of the features as the three above? If so, are there any technical reasons to go with them? Or any proprietary database. My intiution is that they are probably providing less and less value over time as the tech and knowledge diffuse into the open sphere. Is this true? I would appreciate some answers to the above questions!
johnklos 7y ago
Of course they did. That shit's expensive! And have you ever tried to get support out of Oracle? They only fix symptoms, not problems.
michaelcampbell 7y ago
"home made" hahaha....

98 points by ceohockey60 7y ago

This article is... not great journalism. Some Chinese startups are adopting open-source databases instead of Oracle and IBM. One of them, PingCAP's TiDB [1], happens to be built by a Chinese startup. And that's it? I was expecting to hear that the cold dead hand of the Chinese Communist Party was forcing this, but no, it seems to be simple capitalism at play -- nobody wants to pay the Oracle tax if they can avoid it. [1] https://github.com/pingcap/tidb https://github.com/pingcap/tidb

meddlepal 7y ago
Serious honest question for someone who might know but is anyone in the US adopting Oracle for green field projects based on valid technical merits or biz requirements these days? It's easy to dump on Oracle but I'm curious about legitimate technical or business requirement reasons for adopting Oracle in 2019.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  Anyone onboarding to Salesforce is de facto adopting Oracle. Salesforce certainly seems to be popular these days.
  - swarnie_ 7y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people taking salesforce are going for a managed cloud options. It may be running Oracle but the business will likely be several abstraction steps away from managing it day to day.
- yourapostasy 7y ago
  For some highly-specific performance scenarios, Oracle still cannot be beat. I know far, far more businesses where a supported Postgresql is perfectly suitable. I know only one business where Oracle was a defensible technical choice.
  - grumpydba 7y ago
    > For some highly-specific performance scenarios, Oracle still cannot be beat. Can you elaborate on this please? I do not think this statement is correct.
    - yourapostasy 7y ago
      Trading environment, there wasn't another solution with the lookup-and-matching performance they got out of Oracle, from what little was shared with me. I trust the source as he is the best programmer I know first-hand and never shied away from throwing together his own solution if he found benefit from it, like his own object database back in the early 80's.
      - grumpydba 7y ago
        > Trading environment, there wasn't another solution with the lookup-and-matching performance they got out of Oracle, from what little was shared with me. I've been maintaining trading backend databases for roughly a decade. What oracle does, db2, sql server, sybase can do. And postgresql, MySQL most probably too. Most of the times the Oracle choice is dictated by a software editor whose devs are more familiar with Oracle and have an oracle first strategy.

theredbox 7y ago

Open Source is the worst thing that can happen to the US tech in US vs China trade war. Chinese scene is largely isolated from OSS in the west and more often than not they are just leeching whatever the rest of the world produces in terms of software. I dont want to picture chinese people as parasites I want to just point out that the contribution from chinese devs and mainly their tech companies could be better.

simion314 7y ago
Is there a list with the contribution and usage by country? You also need to consider the language problem, I can imagine that people that are not as good at communicating in english would have less contribution in english language projeccts but would contribute to native language projects (I seen small projects on github, game modding sites) by people that are bad english, use machine translation but that want they share their creation. Just yesterday I found a small project on github that I used for inspiration on how to solve a problem that had the code in english but all comments was in Japanse(I think) , my point is that you may not see the contribution that happen and you then assume those do not exist.
est 7y ago
> Chinese scene is largely isolated from OSS in the west and more often than not they are just leeching whatever the rest of the world produces in terms of software. > I dont want to picture chinese people as parasites I want to just point out that the contribution from chinese devs and mainly their tech companies could be better. Can you spot no Chinese company from these? - FSF patrons https://www.fsf.org/patrons https://www.fsf.org/patrons - Linux Foundation https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/ https://www.linuxfoundation.org/membership/members/ If you frequent Kernel lists you can find many Chinese contributors (from Redhat) - Eclipse Foundation https://www.eclipse.org/membership/exploreMembership.php#allmembers https://www.eclipse.org/membership/exploreMembership.php#all... - Apache Foundation https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks - Many Apache projects like Apache Dubbo https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-announces52 https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-softwar... - OpenSSL (exceptional support) https://www.openssl.org/support/acks.html https://www.openssl.org/support/acks.html - Ceph Foundation https://ceph.com/foundation/ https://ceph.com/foundation/ - OpenContainers Initiative https://www.opencontainers.org/about/members https://www.opencontainers.org/about/members - CNCF members https://www.cncf.io/about/members/ https://www.cncf.io/about/members/ - OpenStack foundation https://www.openstack.org/foundation/companies/ https://www.openstack.org/foundation/companies/ - Xen members https://xenproject.org/about-us/project-members/ https://xenproject.org/about-us/project-members/ - RISC-V Foundation https://riscv.org/membership/ https://riscv.org/membership/ - OpenPOWER members https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-members/ https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-members/ Are these leeching by your standards?

jacknews 7y ago

Advertorial? I'm sure more Chinese companies use MySQL, Postgres etc than TiDB?

rapsey 7y ago
Sounds like one. However the DB vendor business is certainly hard to get into and survive. If pingcap has that many paying customers then well done.
turingbook 7y ago
Postgres community is very small in China with MySQL dominating.

megaremote 7y ago

Startups were using Oracle and IBM? Seems an odd choice.

swarnie_ 7y ago
Our startup did, but that was 20 years ago and the Oracle regional office was literally the floor below us.
- roel_v 7y ago
  "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing", arguably the first book with a how-to for what we'd now call 'internet startups', was about using Oracle and Perl to build web applications. But yeah it was published 1997.
  - wmf 7y ago
    And the SPARC/Solaris/Oracle stack is arguably one of the things that brought down ArsDigita a few years later. They couldn't reduce costs to accommodate lower-end customers.
- rwmj 7y ago
  20 years ago (is it so long??) we looked at Oracle for our start-up but the prices they wanted were ridiculous. We went with Informix instead which was acquired by IBM soon after. So can confirm, startups in the first dot com boom were looking at Oracle or IBM. I wanted us to use PostgreSQL but was overruled by management who thought they knew better.
mcv 7y ago
If startups are ditching Oracle and IBM, they went wrong in adopting Oracle and IBM in the first place. Do Chinese startups really do that? Can you still count as a startup when you're using Oracle and IBM? But it seems the headline is wrong, and the actual story is that large Chinese enterprises are ditching Oracle and IBM for a Chinese startup.
- 7y ago

rsynnott 7y ago

So much like startups everywhere else, then.

thomaswang 7y ago

Well my guess is that they are planning for a time where they cannot use US tech. They planning on being self sufficient as a country.

Merrill 7y ago

Do Human Computer Interfaces developed by Chinese language programmers differ from HCI developed by English language programmers? It would seem that Chinese characters might be used instead of icons in some applications. Native Chinese OSS may be more suitable for use in China and have some advantages in HKN countries.

Barrin92 7y ago
I know that voice control is very popular in China, for text messages for example because writing on phones is much more cumbersome compared to latin alphabets. Might be interesting to see whether voice control is going to take off much faster in China than in some other regions over the coming decade.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  That’s quite interesting; I wonder, given the lack of official status for other dialects, is voice input compatible with them?

mruts 7y ago

I’m not a database guy and I only know enough SQL to get me through whatever task I need ro be complete. I used MemSQL at my last job and it seemed like an interesting idea. Can open source solutions provide the same features as MemSQL, MSSQL, and Oracle. can one db provide all of the features as the three above? If so, are there any technical reasons to go with them? Or any proprietary database. My intiution is that they are probably providing less and less value over time as the tech and knowledge diffuse into the open sphere. Is this true? I would appreciate some answers to the above questions!

johnklos 7y ago

Of course they did. That shit's expensive! And have you ever tried to get support out of Oracle? They only fix symptoms, not problems.

michaelcampbell 7y ago

"home made" hahaha....