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Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-license-to-publish-oracle-and-sql-server-performance-test https://stackoverflow.com/ques

Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-license-to-publish-oracle-and-sql-server-performance-test https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l...: The standard license (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-152015.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-...) you agree to when you download software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) does state that you're not allowed to disclose benchmarks. You may not: <<list of things you cannot do>> - disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent. I sadly suspect that Paul Förster might need a lawyer if anyone from Oracle finds out about that post. Which, given that this is trending on Hacker News, they easily might.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
parhamn 6y ago
What are the damage claims for something like this, if any? Surely neither side would want to litigate this.
- mothsonasloth 6y ago
  Not damage claims. You are going against Larry Ellison, who is the boogey man of enterprise software. The guy can spend money on a buying a Russian Mig29 fighter plane. I am sure he can throw some money to make someones life a misery because he can.
- jojobas 6y ago
  I'd love EFF to take this on and publish all the discovery findings.
- dwheeler 6y ago
  Oracle may very well want to litigate it. I doubt they care about the optics. This is the well-known DeWitt clause, so named because Oracle crafted it to squelch database research being performed by Dr. David DeWitt. I believe these clauses should be clearly ruled as illegal, but to my knowledge they still persist. Details here: https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html
  - amenod 6y ago
    If they decide to litigate, they might learn what a Streisand effect[0] is. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
    - scott_w 6y ago
      > I doubt they care about the optics. I’ve never dealt with Oracle myself, yet even I’ve known about their reputation since before I joined the software industry.
      - amenod 6y ago
        Yes, but this looks like they are scared of benchmarks. Weird, right? :)
        scott_w 6y ago
        I recall Intel having similar clauses (for ICC?) so I don’t think it’s that strange for certain parts of the industry.
        dwheeler 6y ago
        They aren't scared of benchmarks, because they've rendered benchmarks about their products illegal unless they like the results.
    - dwheeler 6y ago
      I highly doubt Oracle cares about the Steisand effect. Oracle has long been lampooned for its lawyers, e.g., this old Bonkers World cartoon: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts , and people have been complaining about the DeWitt clause since around 1982. I think the Streisand effect is not going to work in this case. The kind of people who decide to write Oracle multi-hundred-million dollar checks don't seem to care about this, because they have kept paying money for decades. So there's no reason for Oracle to care about it. The clause was added specifically at the direction of Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is co-founder, executive chairman and chief technology officer (CTO) of Oracle, and the sixth richest person in the world... he has no reason to care what people think about these contracts, because no matter what he's still rich. The courts don't care about the Streisand effect either; they're used to people being unhappy about some of their rulings. And if there was going to a Streisand effect, you'd think it'd have already happened in the last 38 years. Don't get me wrong, I loathe the DeWitt clause (as does DeWitt). Making the truth illegal, which is what this does, hurts all of society. But a Streisand effect will not get you there. What's needed is a court ruling or law that strikes such clauses down. I'd much rather see a world where people can freely compare different products. I like Oracle's VirtualBox, for example; that thing can compete on its own merits. But that's my point; products should be able to compete on their own merits, instead of having legal clauses that prevent honest comparisons.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  Larry loved those full banner Exadata claims against competitors in your airport terminal. A week later, they’d be gone after HP/Dell/IBM/Cisco sent the lawyers to contest. Larry would just rotate the banner, mission accomplished, no fine with a retraction. Since competitors make bank selling Oracle solutions and can’t publish a bmark w/o his permission he doesn’t need to litigate. It’s his ocean.
rantwasp 6y ago
people have known this things for quite a while (ie as as far as perf goes oracle is not worth it) and there is a reason why oracle includes that in the license. also, this comparison would not register as a proper “benchmark” as it’s not even close to how you would perform a proper benchmark. it’s more of a data point. on top of that there is the optics of suing a guy that wrote an email over some insane provision in your license. probably not worth it. and probably that provision is there to stop competitors from doing an apples to apples comparison and publishing the results that show how much oracle sucks. as a closing thought: i’ve never heard about anyone starting a new project and even considering oracle as a db for it. it’s mostly locked in people that have to put up with this stuff. legacy code is a bee
- aidos 6y ago
  I was once subjected to the oracle dB for an ill fated social network project. They purchased 2 servers and oracle licences for 8 cores along with coldfusion licences and then it turned out that a special driver was required to allow them to talk to each other - I managed to find one from a company in germany that only cost a couple of grand. But hey, they were going to be big and only enterprise solutions were on the table - despite my suggestions. I’m not sure how much it all cost to get started in the end, but it was a lot of cash before development even started. Aside from that, it was not a fun experience developing for it. I mean, for the most part a relation dB is a relational dB, but there was something about working with oracle that just felt broken compared to postgres.
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    if you think this is ridiculous you should see how it’s licensed for cloud instances and the shenanigans played around “virtual” cores.
    - josephcsible 6y ago
      For anyone unaware of the details of this, here's the gist of it: if you run Oracle in a VM, you need to pay for Oracle licenses for every CPU of every host in the entire VM cluster, even if you know for sure it will never run on most of them.
GordonS 6y ago
> You may not: <<list of things you cannot do>> I mean... does anyone here think this is in any way reasonable? Is this even legal?
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  In one of the Star Wars movies, there was a hooded and cloaked figure who, in response to that very same question, said, "I will make it legal." There's no proof that figure wasn't Larry Ellison. /s
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I can't argue with that. I suppose regardless of how ridiculous it is, Oracle has very deep pockets and is infamously litigious, and the US legal system doesn't help - given that, I doubt legality really matters...
    - ethbro 6y ago
      You can't sue someone for violating ToS... right? At worst, you can refuse to do business with them and revoke any current contracts. You'd have to sue under actual law, which would presumably be libel, which is (in)famously hard to prove in the US [1]. If he had a good faith belief that what he reported was true, that case goes nowhere. Indeed, in lieu of a signed and dated note declaring his knowledge that his benchmarks are (a) false and (b) shared in an attempt to harm Oracle, that case goes nowhere. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
      - jojobas 6y ago
        You could sue for damages arising from breach of contract I guess. And in the US you don't always have to substantiate your damages.
      - Reelin 6y ago
        As far as I understand it you are correct about ToS not generally having much in the way of teeth in the US. But once you download a piece of software you're no longer dealing with the ToS but rather a license granted to you under copyright law. Those do have (arguably too many) teeth in the US.
airstrike 6y ago
> any program benchmark tests Don't think installation size or length of time taken to set up the program really qualify as a "program benchmark test", so he should be fine
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  Why not? Installation time and disk size are two values that may be important for some customers, and measuring those might therefore be considered benchmarks.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    He did not run a "program benchmark test". Terms are meant to be specific
- ric2b 6y ago
  Would you want to argue about that in court?
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Absolutely. Seems like a clear cut case. There was no program running benchmarks here
jojobas 6y ago
Chances are, he lives in a country where essentially saying "by purchasing our product you agree not to tell anyone how bad it is" is unenforceable. That might even include US.
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  The fact that something is unenforceable is a poor way of stopping rich lawyer-based companies, such as Oracle, from attempting to enforce it nonetheless.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Not all countries allow the "sue to bankruptcy" litigation model. I'd truly love to see this unfold in Germany, for example. They typically award costs to the winner too.
    - 411111111111111 6y ago
      While you're likely correct that this wouldn't work in Germany as in a situation like this Oracle would've to pay their layers, the defendants lawyer as well as the courts costs if they repeal too often... There are other avenues for them to ruin his live, which I can imagine them taking. I.e not extending his employers licence or making them pay even more. Oracle loves to make examples and ain't pulling their punches
      - jojobas 6y ago
        Surely discrimination on a public license offer would not be considered funny in Germany either?
      - to11mtm 6y ago
        I mean it probably would be a protracted battle, but one that a person would likely be able to win in the EU. The most classic example I can think of was the McLibel case; one of the critical points in that being overturned was the gross disparity in legal resources of each side was considered a violation of the defendant's rights.
brightball 6y ago
SQL Server has the same thing if I’m not mistaken. There’s a big reddit benchmark post that goes out of its way not to say SQL Server in the benchmark just for that reason.
jrockway 6y ago
People are scared of corporations, but they don't really have much ability to damage you. They can't cause physical harm to your body. They can't take away your loved ones. All they can do is take some money. You started life with $0, so you can probably make it all back. It would be inconvenient, but not an existential crisis. The likeliest outcome is that nothing will happen. The second most likely outcome is that they will say "don't do that again". People in this thread have a lot of speculation as to how evil Oracle is, but I haven't really seen them go out of their way to ruin people's lives. They sued Google over the range check function because they wanted a percentage of Android, not because they wanted to make Larry Page's life miserable. Legal action costs money, a lot of money, and even companies we think of as evil don't go out of their way to expose themselves to lawsuits. More scary to me than evil corporations are people that spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt to encourage others to self-censor where they are afraid to speak out themselves. Everyone knows about Oracle's benchmark clause. Everyone knows that you personally would never even think of violating it. The author of this post sees it differently, and on a forum called "Hacker News", we should celebrate the risk he's taking, not spread fear about what could happen in the worst case.
- bmn__ 6y ago
  > It would be inconvenient, but not an existential crisis. Don't generalise from your life; you only have to take care of yourself and Ayaya. A majority of people are deeply committed to a relationship/family/tribe, where losing all one's money definitely constitutes a crisis.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    Hey now, leave my Ayaya out of this. Here is my point -- the potential losses are bounded. They can't unteach you what you've learned in 30 years of work, so you can probably earn income even after losing the biggest lawsuit EvilCorp can muster. Or go work at Starbucks if you are somehow banned from using computers, which is not really something that can happen for violating a software EULA. Compare this to driving to work -- you could get in a car accident that leaves you with a permanent brain injury. You'd never work again. You'd never recognize your family again. It's a big downside! And yet we drive. Furthermore, I would be a little surprised to be reading "Extreme Car News" and seeing the first comment say "wow, you shouldn't modify your car to have that kind of acceleration, you could die!" People are aware of the risk, as they are experts in the field, and we are here to learn what we can from their experience without taking the risk ourselves. It therefore surprises me that everyone on a forum called "Hacker News" is speculating about the worst case outcome for writing a single mailing list post. The discussion has devolved into a trainwreck of "look at what could happen to that guy, I'm glad that's not me," which I think is pretty nasty to the author of the mailing list post, and kind of against the hacker spirit. He took a risk. Let's learn what we can.
radicalbyte 6y ago
How can they prove that he downloaded the software? What if someone else did?
aidos 6y ago
Are these benchmarks? Installation time (30m to create a dB! That can’t be right?!) doesn’t really feel like it falls under that umbrella.
- pas 6y ago
  No, that's about right. Oracle DB is seriously that bad.
  - aidos 6y ago
    But 2hrs to install!?! What world are we living in? Actually, I seem to recall it taking an age to install last time I dealt with it (2008).
    - miahi 6y ago
      Yes, it can take that long. They actually forgot to add some tasks, like prerequisite changes in the OS settings and packages (for Linux). And a cluster setup can take way longer (as you need networking setup, DNS setup, OS users, shared storage and so on). And after that you have to setup a way for it to automatically start (if it's not a cluster but a standalone db). But they also cheated a bit, as you can install a DB without containers and it takes less time and less disk space. If it's on Windows... it's easier to install a standalone DB, but way stranger to install a cluster. About 5 years ago I actually participated in a project where we had to install a cluster on Windows, and it took 5 days for 2 guys from Oracle (and they were not paid by the hour). They produced a document describing the steps (so the install could be reproduced) and it contained things like "and now add the Windows system registry key [...] and set it to [...]" (and I could not find any kind of documentation on what that key did on the whole Internet, but without it the install failed) or "now unzip the patch file, but do not follow the patch notes (to copy the a.dll from the root of the archive) but take the a.dll from the X subfolder" (for which there was no mention in the documentation). Up until that point I thought the Linux cluster setup was hard, this changed the whole perspective :).
    - int_19h 6y ago
      This is "enterprise".
nojito 6y ago
Because benchmarks are largely worthless and just serve as internet forum arguments or mailing list fodder.
- raziel2p 6y ago
  Normally I would agree... But 27 seconds to 30 minutes to create an empty database?!
  - Delk 6y ago
    In most scenarios involving databases you would probably be much more interested in run-time performance and scalability than in setup time. It's an interesting point of information, but a more relevant benchmark to support choice of technology would need to involve data access and manipulation using some kind of a workload that resembles an actual application.
znpy 6y ago
Remember kids: Oracle has no customers, only hostages!
jpalomaki 6y ago
Maybe one justified reason is that proper benchmarking can be hard. Especially running fair benchmarks between competing complex products. At some point some big database vendors were showing full-page ads in prominent industry publications comparing database X to Y. This kind of clause in license may make publishing misleading performance figures a bit harder.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I do agree that benchmarking is hard, especially for databases that have so many knobs and buttons to tweak things to suit particular workloads. I think DB makers should take it as an opportunity to make inroads into developer communities, explaining how to configure and optimise, maybe even work together to create a standard test harness. Rather threatening to bankrupt anyone that talks about their database...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

parhamn 6y ago

What are the damage claims for something like this, if any? Surely neither side would want to litigate this.

mothsonasloth 6y ago
Not damage claims. You are going against Larry Ellison, who is the boogey man of enterprise software. The guy can spend money on a buying a Russian Mig29 fighter plane. I am sure he can throw some money to make someones life a misery because he can.
jojobas 6y ago
I'd love EFF to take this on and publish all the discovery findings.
dwheeler 6y ago
Oracle may very well want to litigate it. I doubt they care about the optics. This is the well-known DeWitt clause, so named because Oracle crafted it to squelch database research being performed by Dr. David DeWitt. I believe these clauses should be clearly ruled as illegal, but to my knowledge they still persist. Details here: https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html
- amenod 6y ago
  If they decide to litigate, they might learn what a Streisand effect[0] is. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
  - scott_w 6y ago
    > I doubt they care about the optics. I’ve never dealt with Oracle myself, yet even I’ve known about their reputation since before I joined the software industry.
    - amenod 6y ago
      Yes, but this looks like they are scared of benchmarks. Weird, right? :)
      - scott_w 6y ago
        I recall Intel having similar clauses (for ICC?) so I don’t think it’s that strange for certain parts of the industry.
      - dwheeler 6y ago
        They aren't scared of benchmarks, because they've rendered benchmarks about their products illegal unless they like the results.
  - dwheeler 6y ago
    I highly doubt Oracle cares about the Steisand effect. Oracle has long been lampooned for its lawyers, e.g., this old Bonkers World cartoon: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts , and people have been complaining about the DeWitt clause since around 1982. I think the Streisand effect is not going to work in this case. The kind of people who decide to write Oracle multi-hundred-million dollar checks don't seem to care about this, because they have kept paying money for decades. So there's no reason for Oracle to care about it. The clause was added specifically at the direction of Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison is co-founder, executive chairman and chief technology officer (CTO) of Oracle, and the sixth richest person in the world... he has no reason to care what people think about these contracts, because no matter what he's still rich. The courts don't care about the Streisand effect either; they're used to people being unhappy about some of their rulings. And if there was going to a Streisand effect, you'd think it'd have already happened in the last 38 years. Don't get me wrong, I loathe the DeWitt clause (as does DeWitt). Making the truth illegal, which is what this does, hurts all of society. But a Streisand effect will not get you there. What's needed is a court ruling or law that strikes such clauses down. I'd much rather see a world where people can freely compare different products. I like Oracle's VirtualBox, for example; that thing can compete on its own merits. But that's my point; products should be able to compete on their own merits, instead of having legal clauses that prevent honest comparisons.
hindsightbias 6y ago
Larry loved those full banner Exadata claims against competitors in your airport terminal. A week later, they’d be gone after HP/Dell/IBM/Cisco sent the lawyers to contest. Larry would just rotate the banner, mission accomplished, no fine with a retraction. Since competitors make bank selling Oracle solutions and can’t publish a bmark w/o his permission he doesn’t need to litigate. It’s his ocean.

rantwasp 6y ago

people have known this things for quite a while (ie as as far as perf goes oracle is not worth it) and there is a reason why oracle includes that in the license. also, this comparison would not register as a proper “benchmark” as it’s not even close to how you would perform a proper benchmark. it’s more of a data point. on top of that there is the optics of suing a guy that wrote an email over some insane provision in your license. probably not worth it. and probably that provision is there to stop competitors from doing an apples to apples comparison and publishing the results that show how much oracle sucks. as a closing thought: i’ve never heard about anyone starting a new project and even considering oracle as a db for it. it’s mostly locked in people that have to put up with this stuff. legacy code is a bee

aidos 6y ago
I was once subjected to the oracle dB for an ill fated social network project. They purchased 2 servers and oracle licences for 8 cores along with coldfusion licences and then it turned out that a special driver was required to allow them to talk to each other - I managed to find one from a company in germany that only cost a couple of grand. But hey, they were going to be big and only enterprise solutions were on the table - despite my suggestions. I’m not sure how much it all cost to get started in the end, but it was a lot of cash before development even started. Aside from that, it was not a fun experience developing for it. I mean, for the most part a relation dB is a relational dB, but there was something about working with oracle that just felt broken compared to postgres.
- rantwasp 6y ago
  if you think this is ridiculous you should see how it’s licensed for cloud instances and the shenanigans played around “virtual” cores.
  - josephcsible 6y ago
    For anyone unaware of the details of this, here's the gist of it: if you run Oracle in a VM, you need to pay for Oracle licenses for every CPU of every host in the entire VM cluster, even if you know for sure it will never run on most of them.

GordonS 6y ago

> You may not: <<list of things you cannot do>> I mean... does anyone here think this is in any way reasonable? Is this even legal?

phoe-krk 6y ago
In one of the Star Wars movies, there was a hooded and cloaked figure who, in response to that very same question, said, "I will make it legal." There's no proof that figure wasn't Larry Ellison. /s
- GordonS 6y ago
  I can't argue with that. I suppose regardless of how ridiculous it is, Oracle has very deep pockets and is infamously litigious, and the US legal system doesn't help - given that, I doubt legality really matters...
  - ethbro 6y ago
    You can't sue someone for violating ToS... right? At worst, you can refuse to do business with them and revoke any current contracts. You'd have to sue under actual law, which would presumably be libel, which is (in)famously hard to prove in the US [1]. If he had a good faith belief that what he reported was true, that case goes nowhere. Indeed, in lieu of a signed and dated note declaring his knowledge that his benchmarks are (a) false and (b) shared in an attempt to harm Oracle, that case goes nowhere. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
    - jojobas 6y ago
      You could sue for damages arising from breach of contract I guess. And in the US you don't always have to substantiate your damages.
    - Reelin 6y ago
      As far as I understand it you are correct about ToS not generally having much in the way of teeth in the US. But once you download a piece of software you're no longer dealing with the ToS but rather a license granted to you under copyright law. Those do have (arguably too many) teeth in the US.

airstrike 6y ago

> any program benchmark tests Don't think installation size or length of time taken to set up the program really qualify as a "program benchmark test", so he should be fine

phoe-krk 6y ago
Why not? Installation time and disk size are two values that may be important for some customers, and measuring those might therefore be considered benchmarks.
- airstrike 6y ago
  He did not run a "program benchmark test". Terms are meant to be specific
ric2b 6y ago
Would you want to argue about that in court?
- airstrike 6y ago
  Absolutely. Seems like a clear cut case. There was no program running benchmarks here

jojobas 6y ago

Chances are, he lives in a country where essentially saying "by purchasing our product you agree not to tell anyone how bad it is" is unenforceable. That might even include US.

phoe-krk 6y ago
The fact that something is unenforceable is a poor way of stopping rich lawyer-based companies, such as Oracle, from attempting to enforce it nonetheless.
- jojobas 6y ago
  Not all countries allow the "sue to bankruptcy" litigation model. I'd truly love to see this unfold in Germany, for example. They typically award costs to the winner too.
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    While you're likely correct that this wouldn't work in Germany as in a situation like this Oracle would've to pay their layers, the defendants lawyer as well as the courts costs if they repeal too often... There are other avenues for them to ruin his live, which I can imagine them taking. I.e not extending his employers licence or making them pay even more. Oracle loves to make examples and ain't pulling their punches
    - jojobas 6y ago
      Surely discrimination on a public license offer would not be considered funny in Germany either?
    - to11mtm 6y ago
      I mean it probably would be a protracted battle, but one that a person would likely be able to win in the EU. The most classic example I can think of was the McLibel case; one of the critical points in that being overturned was the gross disparity in legal resources of each side was considered a violation of the defendant's rights.

brightball 6y ago

SQL Server has the same thing if I’m not mistaken. There’s a big reddit benchmark post that goes out of its way not to say SQL Server in the benchmark just for that reason.

jrockway 6y ago

People are scared of corporations, but they don't really have much ability to damage you. They can't cause physical harm to your body. They can't take away your loved ones. All they can do is take some money. You started life with $0, so you can probably make it all back. It would be inconvenient, but not an existential crisis. The likeliest outcome is that nothing will happen. The second most likely outcome is that they will say "don't do that again". People in this thread have a lot of speculation as to how evil Oracle is, but I haven't really seen them go out of their way to ruin people's lives. They sued Google over the range check function because they wanted a percentage of Android, not because they wanted to make Larry Page's life miserable. Legal action costs money, a lot of money, and even companies we think of as evil don't go out of their way to expose themselves to lawsuits. More scary to me than evil corporations are people that spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt to encourage others to self-censor where they are afraid to speak out themselves. Everyone knows about Oracle's benchmark clause. Everyone knows that you personally would never even think of violating it. The author of this post sees it differently, and on a forum called "Hacker News", we should celebrate the risk he's taking, not spread fear about what could happen in the worst case.

bmn__ 6y ago
> It would be inconvenient, but not an existential crisis. Don't generalise from your life; you only have to take care of yourself and Ayaya. A majority of people are deeply committed to a relationship/family/tribe, where losing all one's money definitely constitutes a crisis.
- jrockway 6y ago
  Hey now, leave my Ayaya out of this. Here is my point -- the potential losses are bounded. They can't unteach you what you've learned in 30 years of work, so you can probably earn income even after losing the biggest lawsuit EvilCorp can muster. Or go work at Starbucks if you are somehow banned from using computers, which is not really something that can happen for violating a software EULA. Compare this to driving to work -- you could get in a car accident that leaves you with a permanent brain injury. You'd never work again. You'd never recognize your family again. It's a big downside! And yet we drive. Furthermore, I would be a little surprised to be reading "Extreme Car News" and seeing the first comment say "wow, you shouldn't modify your car to have that kind of acceleration, you could die!" People are aware of the risk, as they are experts in the field, and we are here to learn what we can from their experience without taking the risk ourselves. It therefore surprises me that everyone on a forum called "Hacker News" is speculating about the worst case outcome for writing a single mailing list post. The discussion has devolved into a trainwreck of "look at what could happen to that guy, I'm glad that's not me," which I think is pretty nasty to the author of the mailing list post, and kind of against the hacker spirit. He took a risk. Let's learn what we can.

radicalbyte 6y ago

How can they prove that he downloaded the software? What if someone else did?

aidos 6y ago

Are these benchmarks? Installation time (30m to create a dB! That can’t be right?!) doesn’t really feel like it falls under that umbrella.

pas 6y ago
No, that's about right. Oracle DB is seriously that bad.
- aidos 6y ago
  But 2hrs to install!?! What world are we living in? Actually, I seem to recall it taking an age to install last time I dealt with it (2008).
  - miahi 6y ago
    Yes, it can take that long. They actually forgot to add some tasks, like prerequisite changes in the OS settings and packages (for Linux). And a cluster setup can take way longer (as you need networking setup, DNS setup, OS users, shared storage and so on). And after that you have to setup a way for it to automatically start (if it's not a cluster but a standalone db). But they also cheated a bit, as you can install a DB without containers and it takes less time and less disk space. If it's on Windows... it's easier to install a standalone DB, but way stranger to install a cluster. About 5 years ago I actually participated in a project where we had to install a cluster on Windows, and it took 5 days for 2 guys from Oracle (and they were not paid by the hour). They produced a document describing the steps (so the install could be reproduced) and it contained things like "and now add the Windows system registry key [...] and set it to [...]" (and I could not find any kind of documentation on what that key did on the whole Internet, but without it the install failed) or "now unzip the patch file, but do not follow the patch notes (to copy the a.dll from the root of the archive) but take the a.dll from the X subfolder" (for which there was no mention in the documentation). Up until that point I thought the Linux cluster setup was hard, this changed the whole perspective :).
  - int_19h 6y ago
    This is "enterprise".

nojito 6y ago

Because benchmarks are largely worthless and just serve as internet forum arguments or mailing list fodder.

raziel2p 6y ago
Normally I would agree... But 27 seconds to 30 minutes to create an empty database?!
- Delk 6y ago
  In most scenarios involving databases you would probably be much more interested in run-time performance and scalability than in setup time. It's an interesting point of information, but a more relevant benchmark to support choice of technology would need to involve data access and manipulation using some kind of a workload that resembles an actual application.

znpy 6y ago

Remember kids: Oracle has no customers, only hostages!

jpalomaki 6y ago

Maybe one justified reason is that proper benchmarking can be hard. Especially running fair benchmarks between competing complex products. At some point some big database vendors were showing full-page ads in prominent industry publications comparing database X to Y. This kind of clause in license may make publishing misleading performance figures a bit harder.

GordonS 6y ago
I do agree that benchmarking is hard, especially for databases that have so many knobs and buttons to tweak things to suit particular workloads. I think DB makers should take it as an opportunity to make inroads into developer communities, explaining how to configure and optimise, maybe even work together to create a standard test harness. Rather threatening to bankrupt anyone that talks about their database...