5 ms·

We could sum up the post as: "I don't like Oracle DB because: - "Takes up more space - "Is slower to start/stop/init - "Is not free - "Has bugs" Umm... Su

We could sum up the post as: "I don't like Oracle DB because: - "Takes up more space - "Is slower to start/stop/init - "Is not free - "Has bugs" Umm... Sure, Oracle's slower to start/stop. Sure, it takes up more space. So what though? And then, "it has a lot of bugs and that causes downtime." Would be great to list some examples. All software has bugs. Why is this on the front page? Does it have any value what so ever other than "someone found a free alternative to Oracle DB"..?

pstuart 6y ago
You took time to criticize the post for being upvoted despite not being deep enough / giving enough examples. It's likely upvoted because most of us in the industry have no love for Oracle and confirmation of that bias feels good. Turnabout is fair play: Why don't you give some examples of why a startup doing a greenfield project should use Oracle today?
- BossingAround 6y ago
  I am not in favor of Oracle. I don't care about Oracle. That said, the original post is meaningless and yet on front page. That is what I'm writing against. If all it takes for HNews to upvote an article is hatred of a company, that's a sad state to be in. Might as well get my free upvote with a simple isoraclestillshit.com website, eh?
  - pstuart 6y ago
    It's a combination of hate of Oracle and love of Postgres; there were nuggets that validated those feelings. Upvoting is both "I agree" and mark that in my voting history for if I ever want to see that page again. Yes, this instance was not super deep but the fact is that it resonated with enough participants to get there. So the literal answer to your complaint is: it was a collective "because I felt like it". Your complaint is not without some merit but also borders on "get off my lawn!". I've seen plenty of front page posts that I don't think are worthy of being there but, hey, different strokes for different folks.
- abraae 6y ago
  Data point of 1 - we use Oracle in our greenfield platform (in 2018). My reasoning: - our engineers already know Oracle (this is absolutely reason #1). We don't need to get into religious wars about software, just to write good code quickly. - Oracle is cheap enough for our needs. The price of an oracle RDS instance is immaterial in the grand scheme of things. We are saas so our customers will never be installing our software. - noone ever got fired for buying Oracle. When our customers security teams grill us, running on Oracle and Java ticks one box on their spreadsheet. Same is true if we get acquired. - Oracle is hugely scalable. Even if/when we get super big and successful, we won't need to change our database - there's always a bigger Oracle instance. - Oracle is insanely reliable. In my career I've never seen data loss on Oracle that was not caused by human error. I totally trust that that will be the case going forward as well. - as a company, oracle's not going away. I'm sure some of these apply to postgres as well - but your question wasn't "which is better", which is a much harder question to answer.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    I can't say that I saw data loss caused by Oracle. But I saw plenty of cases where Oracle required manual intervention to be able to start up after something gone wrong. I never understood why Oracle does not self heal, because those interventions were obvious. I don't have much production experience with other databases, so I can't comment about that, but it was sometimes as simple as power loss which caused Oracle failing to start until you run some mumbo jumbo from sysdba.
  - pstuart 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply. #1 is absolutely understandable. The others I'd be happy to argue but there's no point in that :-)

pstuart 6y ago

You took time to criticize the post for being upvoted despite not being deep enough / giving enough examples. It's likely upvoted because most of us in the industry have no love for Oracle and confirmation of that bias feels good. Turnabout is fair play: Why don't you give some examples of why a startup doing a greenfield project should use Oracle today?

BossingAround 6y ago
I am not in favor of Oracle. I don't care about Oracle. That said, the original post is meaningless and yet on front page. That is what I'm writing against. If all it takes for HNews to upvote an article is hatred of a company, that's a sad state to be in. Might as well get my free upvote with a simple isoraclestillshit.com website, eh?
- pstuart 6y ago
  It's a combination of hate of Oracle and love of Postgres; there were nuggets that validated those feelings. Upvoting is both "I agree" and mark that in my voting history for if I ever want to see that page again. Yes, this instance was not super deep but the fact is that it resonated with enough participants to get there. So the literal answer to your complaint is: it was a collective "because I felt like it". Your complaint is not without some merit but also borders on "get off my lawn!". I've seen plenty of front page posts that I don't think are worthy of being there but, hey, different strokes for different folks.
abraae 6y ago
Data point of 1 - we use Oracle in our greenfield platform (in 2018). My reasoning: - our engineers already know Oracle (this is absolutely reason #1). We don't need to get into religious wars about software, just to write good code quickly. - Oracle is cheap enough for our needs. The price of an oracle RDS instance is immaterial in the grand scheme of things. We are saas so our customers will never be installing our software. - noone ever got fired for buying Oracle. When our customers security teams grill us, running on Oracle and Java ticks one box on their spreadsheet. Same is true if we get acquired. - Oracle is hugely scalable. Even if/when we get super big and successful, we won't need to change our database - there's always a bigger Oracle instance. - Oracle is insanely reliable. In my career I've never seen data loss on Oracle that was not caused by human error. I totally trust that that will be the case going forward as well. - as a company, oracle's not going away. I'm sure some of these apply to postgres as well - but your question wasn't "which is better", which is a much harder question to answer.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  I can't say that I saw data loss caused by Oracle. But I saw plenty of cases where Oracle required manual intervention to be able to start up after something gone wrong. I never understood why Oracle does not self heal, because those interventions were obvious. I don't have much production experience with other databases, so I can't comment about that, but it was sometimes as simple as power loss which caused Oracle failing to start until you run some mumbo jumbo from sysdba.
- pstuart 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply. #1 is absolutely understandable. The others I'd be happy to argue but there's no point in that :-)