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Your boss has heard of Larry Ellison and figures if he's so rich he must be doing something right. (Or your boss's boss, or whatever, depending on the size of

by Vivtek 15y ago

Your boss has heard of Larry Ellison and figures if he's so rich he must be doing something right. (Or your boss's boss, or whatever, depending on the size of your company.)

tibbon 15y ago
That's about what it seems to come down to. I have yet to hear a compelling technical argument for Oracle aside from vague mentions like, "It's what an enterprise uses" or "It's so strong it could run X" But then I find that companies with huge datasets like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc... don't use it. And I go back to scratching my head.
- bmelton 15y ago
  There are two reasons most people use Oracle. In some cases, they have a product that requires it, and doesn't support anything else. If this product happens to be unique in the industry or core to their business, they will generally happily pay the Oracle tax and be done with it. The other good reason is that Oracle hires some of the very best sales people in the world, and nobody is selling postgres, mySQL, etc to the same extent. There's a huge difference between being a 'technically better' product and being able to convince a PHB of that. Also, Oracle tends to support damn near everything, and damn near everything (Enterprisey) supports Oracle. It's the 'safe' choice if you can afford it.
  - tibbon 15y ago
    What does Oracle do that a programmer wouldn't write as compatible with other databases? Just trying to figure out why a product wouldn't be written to work with more things.
    - bmelton 15y ago
      Lots of things, really. They don't have a real 'limit' capability that I've found that works in any way like mySQL's. To mimic MySQL's "SELECT last_name FROM employees LIMIT 50,50" you have to do something like this: SELECT last_name FROM (SELECT last_name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY last_name) R FROM employees) WHERE R BETWEEN 51 and 100; Aside from that, it's general operational differences and variations from the SQL spec on a pretty grand scale. The flip side to that though is that most serious Enterprise companies are generally using Oracle already anyway, so it's safe to target Oracle or MS-SQL and know that almost all of your customers will have one or both.
- hello_moto 15y ago
  Some of those companies are using Oracle for certain apps: Oracle at Facebook: http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/08/tim-campos-dreamforce-comments/ http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/08/tim-campos-dreamforce-comm... Correct me if I'm wrong, Amazon (the retail online store) was using Oracle in the past. I don't know what DB they're using now. Ditto with eBay.

by Vivtek 15y ago

Your boss has heard of Larry Ellison and figures if he's so rich he must be doing something right. (Or your boss's boss, or whatever, depending on the size of your company.)

tibbon 15y ago

That's about what it seems to come down to. I have yet to hear a compelling technical argument for Oracle aside from vague mentions like, "It's what an enterprise uses" or "It's so strong it could run X" But then I find that companies with huge datasets like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc... don't use it. And I go back to scratching my head.

bmelton 15y ago
There are two reasons most people use Oracle. In some cases, they have a product that requires it, and doesn't support anything else. If this product happens to be unique in the industry or core to their business, they will generally happily pay the Oracle tax and be done with it. The other good reason is that Oracle hires some of the very best sales people in the world, and nobody is selling postgres, mySQL, etc to the same extent. There's a huge difference between being a 'technically better' product and being able to convince a PHB of that. Also, Oracle tends to support damn near everything, and damn near everything (Enterprisey) supports Oracle. It's the 'safe' choice if you can afford it.
- tibbon 15y ago
  What does Oracle do that a programmer wouldn't write as compatible with other databases? Just trying to figure out why a product wouldn't be written to work with more things.
  - bmelton 15y ago
    Lots of things, really. They don't have a real 'limit' capability that I've found that works in any way like mySQL's. To mimic MySQL's "SELECT last_name FROM employees LIMIT 50,50" you have to do something like this: SELECT last_name FROM (SELECT last_name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY last_name) R FROM employees) WHERE R BETWEEN 51 and 100; Aside from that, it's general operational differences and variations from the SQL spec on a pretty grand scale. The flip side to that though is that most serious Enterprise companies are generally using Oracle already anyway, so it's safe to target Oracle or MS-SQL and know that almost all of your customers will have one or both.
hello_moto 15y ago
Some of those companies are using Oracle for certain apps: Oracle at Facebook: http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/08/tim-campos-dreamforce-comments/ http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/08/tim-campos-dreamforce-comm... Correct me if I'm wrong, Amazon (the retail online store) was using Oracle in the past. I don't know what DB they're using now. Ditto with eBay.