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I can't speak for HN but I don't hate Oracle. The engineering is top notch. It's the "screw the customer" attitude of the sales dept that no doubt emanates from

I can't speak for HN but I don't hate Oracle. The engineering is top notch. It's the "screw the customer" attitude of the sales dept that no doubt emanates from the guy at the top that annoys me no end.

BossingAround 5y ago
> The engineering is top notch Is it? Can you give me an example of the top notch engineering from "modern" Oracle? I mean this as a genuine question, I am not that familiar with recent work coming out of Oracle.
- xyzzy123 5y ago
  graalvm is extremely impressive.
- pas 5y ago
  JVM G1 GC is pretty amazing. Sure, Shenandoah (started at RedHat) is even more brutally mindblowing, but it has a constant overhead (and maybe obviously, maybe not, but it builds on the already existing pretty good GC infrastructure in the JVM). So at least it seems the Hotspot Group is left mostly alone to do their high quality work.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fragmede 5y ago
  Can you give more parameters for what something needs to qualify for your definition of "modern"? The database harkens back to when computers were new. There's a ton of money that goes into continued development of it, and is vertically integrated, including custom hardware and the software to run it. It's extremely expensive hardware - they still sell SPARC servers, running Solaris if that's what you want (but they do also support a custom Linux kernel for their hardware). It's such a high end niche that there's only a handful of companies that can even run the benchmark competitively because it just costs so much in hardware to play at that level, which makes it very opaque unless you're fluent in a lot of terms, some of them proprietary, others not. Eg https://blogs.oracle.com/exadata/post/exadata-uses-persistent-memory-for-fast-transactions https://blogs.oracle.com/exadata/post/exadata-uses-persisten... it's an absolutely fascinating journey into getting better SQL performance that involves some really high end shit, and (like kubernetes) most of the people out there just don't play in the same league. Which isn't a judgement against them and their needs, but it costs a lot of resources to wring microseconds more performance from a multi-million dollar machine. An AWS EC2 cloud VM, this ain't.
  - partido3619463 5y ago
    > It's such a high end niche that there's only a handful of companies that can even run the benchmark competitively Alternatively, you don’t see benchmarks because Oracle’s licensing bans posting benchmarks - https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-why-you-rarely-see-database-benchmarks/ https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...
  - jen20 5y ago
    > Can you give more parameters for what something needs to qualify for your definition of "modern"? The ability to tolerate machine failure with zero downtime and zero data loss.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
LittlePeter 5y ago
> The engineering is top notch. Do you still think so after reading this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
- stareatgoats 5y ago
  Read it, and well sure it is a challenge to work on an old codebase, and you need to jump through a few hoops that you don't need in pristine projects. Something tells me this guy wasn't able/willing to make the effort. (Could be a language problem, naming a "bug" a "bag" for example, u and a are not even close on the keyboard).
  - samhw 5y ago
    > (Could be a language problem, naming a "bug" a "bag" for example, u and a are not even close on the keyboard). I think this is reading far too much into nothing. He writes 'bug' correctly about 5 times. I'm not an expert in psycholinguistics, but I suspect there's a phenomenon where you can mangle your internal pronunciation of the word and hit the wrong vowel.
    - stareatgoats 5y ago
      > I think this is reading far too much into nothing. Could be. I could have left that somewhat tenuous side note out, my argument doesn't rest on it.
  - aiisjustanif 5y ago
    Though I agree that old codebases are a particular challenge, picking on word confusion is unnecessary. Even if minutiae is important in a legacy codebase. Dyslexia is a real thing. So are linters thankfully.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
After I patched my third trivial bug in the Oracle InstantClient libraries when Oracle couldn't/wouldn't, that was the last straw for me. They have some impressive capabilities but I don't think it's because their engineering is great; I think it's because enough money can solve any problem.

BossingAround 5y ago

> The engineering is top notch Is it? Can you give me an example of the top notch engineering from "modern" Oracle? I mean this as a genuine question, I am not that familiar with recent work coming out of Oracle.

xyzzy123 5y ago
graalvm is extremely impressive.
pas 5y ago
JVM G1 GC is pretty amazing. Sure, Shenandoah (started at RedHat) is even more brutally mindblowing, but it has a constant overhead (and maybe obviously, maybe not, but it builds on the already existing pretty good GC infrastructure in the JVM). So at least it seems the Hotspot Group is left mostly alone to do their high quality work.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fragmede 5y ago
Can you give more parameters for what something needs to qualify for your definition of "modern"? The database harkens back to when computers were new. There's a ton of money that goes into continued development of it, and is vertically integrated, including custom hardware and the software to run it. It's extremely expensive hardware - they still sell SPARC servers, running Solaris if that's what you want (but they do also support a custom Linux kernel for their hardware). It's such a high end niche that there's only a handful of companies that can even run the benchmark competitively because it just costs so much in hardware to play at that level, which makes it very opaque unless you're fluent in a lot of terms, some of them proprietary, others not. Eg https://blogs.oracle.com/exadata/post/exadata-uses-persistent-memory-for-fast-transactions https://blogs.oracle.com/exadata/post/exadata-uses-persisten... it's an absolutely fascinating journey into getting better SQL performance that involves some really high end shit, and (like kubernetes) most of the people out there just don't play in the same league. Which isn't a judgement against them and their needs, but it costs a lot of resources to wring microseconds more performance from a multi-million dollar machine. An AWS EC2 cloud VM, this ain't.
- partido3619463 5y ago
  > It's such a high end niche that there's only a handful of companies that can even run the benchmark competitively Alternatively, you don’t see benchmarks because Oracle’s licensing bans posting benchmarks - https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-why-you-rarely-see-database-benchmarks/ https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2018/05/the-dewitt-clause-...
- jen20 5y ago
  > Can you give more parameters for what something needs to qualify for your definition of "modern"? The ability to tolerate machine failure with zero downtime and zero data loss.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

LittlePeter 5y ago

> The engineering is top notch. Do you still think so after reading this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

stareatgoats 5y ago
Read it, and well sure it is a challenge to work on an old codebase, and you need to jump through a few hoops that you don't need in pristine projects. Something tells me this guy wasn't able/willing to make the effort. (Could be a language problem, naming a "bug" a "bag" for example, u and a are not even close on the keyboard).
- samhw 5y ago
  > (Could be a language problem, naming a "bug" a "bag" for example, u and a are not even close on the keyboard). I think this is reading far too much into nothing. He writes 'bug' correctly about 5 times. I'm not an expert in psycholinguistics, but I suspect there's a phenomenon where you can mangle your internal pronunciation of the word and hit the wrong vowel.
  - stareatgoats 5y ago
    > I think this is reading far too much into nothing. Could be. I could have left that somewhat tenuous side note out, my argument doesn't rest on it.
- aiisjustanif 5y ago
  Though I agree that old codebases are a particular challenge, picking on word confusion is unnecessary. Even if minutiae is important in a legacy codebase. Dyslexia is a real thing. So are linters thankfully.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

After I patched my third trivial bug in the Oracle InstantClient libraries when Oracle couldn't/wouldn't, that was the last straw for me. They have some impressive capabilities but I don't think it's because their engineering is great; I think it's because enough money can solve any problem.