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That people continue to use ORACLE products is one of those misteries I can not understand for much thought that I put into it.

dijit 2y ago
There have been many times where I have tried to warn people on HN not to get into bed with Oracle.[0][1][2][3] But people have a hard time resisting free stuff. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883
- StressedDev 2y ago
  You had a bad experience with Oracle and I get that. They didn't treat you well. However, not everyone has a bad experience with them and a lot of companies make mistakes and treat customers poorly. The question is not did it happen, the question is how often does it happen and how does the organization handle it. If Oracle has millions of customers and you are the only one they harmed, they are probably doing great. If your experience is a rare occurrence (say it occurs to 1% or 0.5% of customers), then everyone should avoid Oracle because they don't know if or when they will be the next victim. In the OP's case, I have several comments: - Companies should always be able to explain why an account was closed. If the person violated a policy, the exact line or paragraph of the policy should be given to the customer along with a detailed explanation of how the customer violated the policy. - Companies should always notify customers when they close an account or when a customer is violating the terms of service. These notices should clearly explain what the customer did and should explain how they violated a policy. - Companies should expect their automated systems and employees to make mistakes. They should rectify mistakes when they are found. I think Oracle treated dijit and the OP horribly. I think Oracle should do a root cause analysis to determine why they misbehaved, fix the problem, reinstate the account (assuming the OP is telling the truth), and publicly apologize. Internally, Oracle should learn from this and fix their processes and communications.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - dijit 2y ago
    There are so many cases where Oracle have acted in bad faith that I don’t think defending them is the right move. “Don’t anthropomorphise the lawnmower”. Let us not forget that they bankrupted the second largest city in the UK, it’s hardly an isolated incident. They are exactly as evil as people say, I know its hard to reason, there’s always shades of grey after all, but I know of know of no other consistently one-dimensional company.
    - jaggederest 2y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > However, not everyone has a bad experience with them Examples? I know several large companies that spent tens of millions to get _away_ from Oracle.
  - Retric 2y ago
    > not everyone has a bad experience with them You don’t stay in business for long while burning every single bridge. The standards for acceptable behavior from a supplier / business partner are a little higher than just doesn’t fuck over every single contract.
    - belter 2y ago
      Broadcom enters the room....
      - numbsafari 2y ago
        Oracle is holding the door from the inside, smiling widely.
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
Seriously, it's the most abusive company on earth.
joshuaissac 2y ago
To be fair, shutting things down without notice is not something Oracle is known for. Usually, they just increase prices by a lot once the customer is locked in.
- echelon 2y ago
  You definitely don't want to be on Oracle cloud then. Stay far away from Stargate.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
Honestly, I have never been in a position to see their salespeople so I have to assume they must be wining and dining the bosses first, because in my little corner of the universe, every single like entity uses them to some degree. I personally do not understand it.
yawndex 2y ago
The price of "free" is very tempting. I guess the cost of the servers they offer is having to put up with idiotic requirements like "CPU utilization for the 95th percentile [must be more] than 20%" [1], or they'll shut off your server. I use one of these servers for hosting some non-critical things, but nothing that I run there is particularly CPU intensive, so I was just forced to set up a cronjob that periodically spikes the CPU to 100% for a few minutes. [1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
In general, I agree but there's a lot of people "locked-in" to using their products so once a poor decision has been made, it's costly to move away from them. I signed up a personal Oracle Cloud account to make use of their always-free tier of VMs. I was lucky to be able to get 4 of the VM.Standard.A1.Flex instances which have been running fine for a couple of years now. I've heard various tales of people on the free tier getting instances/accounts deleted for having idle instances, but presumably my backup of them is enough to stop them from being registered as idle (I've got a couple of websites running on them too, but they're just for my use).
malux85 2y ago
The cold hard truth of the world is that things are not evaluated solely meritoriously by everyone. Oracle know this, in fact, they rely on it. If they are trying to win a big corporate contract you know a good way to get it? : The dude who has an enormous amount of say is head of I.T. at EnormousBeanFactory, the world’s largest supplier of canned beans. Is it a sexy industry? Nope, but they do 3 billion a year in beans. This dude is in his mid 50s, bald, out of shape, big glasses, and is likely very single. He has a comfortable wage but he’s not rich. He hasn’t gotten laid in 20 years. Send in the energetic and charismatic Oracle salesman, instantly invite this guy for all expenses trip to Aspen to discuss the deal, but don’t make it obvious, a few 5 star lunches locally first. When in Aspen make sure this guy has the time of his life, got it? Here’s 20k expense account, this guy is going to have a weekend he is not going to forget. Do I need to spell out the details for you? Once he’s back at his job and had a few days to recover then land the fish while the memories are still fresh, as long as your product MINIMALLY functions, they’ll sign. Of course I personally think this is atrocious way of doing business, but I am wise enough to not let my rosy ideals prevent me from seeing the reality of the world, so there it is. That’s why “people continue to use ORACLE” products.
- dijit 2y ago
  People will think that this is ridiculous, but I can tell you from experience that this is exactly what happens. You are often relying on the altruism of the C-levels to care about people more than the “vibes” that sales people can give off, which just happens to be helped by expensive lunches, trips, invitations to shows with VIP seats, and being welcomed with beaming smiles and open arms like a celebrity at their HQ. Obviously its not just Oracle that does this, all the large companies do it- even the ones you think have crappy support like Google. These are hard things to turn down, and if you think you can you’re probably wrong.
StressedDev 2y ago
People probably continue to use Oracle products because Oracle makes a lot of good and useful products. Oracle is typically not criticized for its products, its criticized for its high prices and price increases.
- snailmailstare 2y ago
  You could only mean the database? The stuff I am familiar with was good before they bought it and is better somewhere else despite all their work to choke options with IP law.
  - StressedDev 2y ago
    OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? How do they compare to their competitors? Why don't people leave Oracle if it is so bad? Remember, people can and do move platforms all of the time. A good example is how the cloud took off despite the huge amount of work it takes to move things to the cloud. My main point is saying one of the largest software companies in the world is "bad" or "makes things worse" says nothing. You need to give specific examples. Also, it's hard to believe that Oracle never gets anything right. Really? Everyone of their thousands of employees does bad work? All of their products are "bad" and have no good points? That does not pass the laugh test.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? Java.
      - mardifoufs 2y ago
        In what way? I'm actually curious.
    - protimewaster 2y ago
      I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java. It's prolly gonna be hard to find any specific metrics to show that, though. But I remember everyone thinking that all of the Sun offerings had gotten worse after the acquisition. And OpenSolaris got axed altogether, of course. And Java had a series of security embarrassments.
bastardoperator 2y ago
I find it interesting that Tiktok went with Oracle given their history with the CIA.
- 7thpower 2y ago
  I think it was more that Oracle was willing to take the political risk and had a lot of incentive to land a large, high visibility client that could help them build economies of scale and would come with a tier 1 JV partner. There is a lot of upside for Oracle based on their position relative to others and Ellison does not have to manage his political capital the same way non-founder CEOs do (he made this move long before Trump’s second term).
- NewJazz 2y ago
  There was political pressure. Still there.
jeroenhd 2y ago
They have an excellent free tier for experimenting with some higher power ARM servers. As long as you're ready to give up when they decide they don't like you any more, that's a pretty cool deal. Just don't ever build anything with their hardware or software that you'd like to keep. Edit: Java is usually pretty good, too. At least the open source stuff. Maybe stuff like GraalVM too but they had that locked down in licenses for a while and I don't trust Oracle at all.
- 7thpower 2y ago
  Sadly, I have been unable to secure one of those higher power free servers. I’ve been trying for a couple weeks now. That was literally the only reason I was willing to give Oracle a shot.
- Daviey 2y ago
  I've been trying to sign up to them for over a year, and it keeps failing. Support tickets remain unanswered.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    They don't do support for free tiers, and their free tier is often overbooked, so from what I can tell they just silently drop people? Seems like terrible business to me, but so does most of what Oracle does.
- crayonista 2y ago
  Yeah, I have a free-tier ARM VM, and it's great as a remote Nix builder for aarch64. If I lost it, I'd just have to do building locally.
  - pvo50555 2y ago
    When did you manage to get that? I tried signing up for the ARM server several times but it always says it's unavailable at the moment in my region (East - Toronto) and I should try a different region... however you can't switch regions after you set up your account. I talked to their support and they said it's unavailable for the foreseeable future... choose a different configuration. Are people still able to provision those instances in other regions? If so, which one(s)? I'm just using the legacy free one for now, the 2GHz AMD with 0.5GB RAM.
marcosdumay 2y ago
It's cheap. And its free tier is really large. And after that stops applying, you have spent a huge amount of work managing your software around their idiosyncrasies. So doing the same for another supplier looks like a huge (probably unsurmountable) task.
belter 2y ago
This as been posted here in at least 60 occasions...But clearly not enough times..: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982
diyseguy 2y ago
Why do people want to pay for Oracle when PostgreSQL and MySQL are free and work well?
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Mistake +mystery = mistery
- rdtsc 2y ago
  And it’s only one “t” away from “misery” ;-)
Artoooooor 2y ago
If you have big system using specifics of their databases, switching can be expensive. Maybe good in long term, but risky.
fluidcruft 2y ago
Are there even any other options if you're running EPIC?
hulitu 2y ago
People never learn. The same issues are with PayPal and Stripe. Also people do not seem to grasp that "the cloud" is "someone else's computer". Only when their accounts are swiftly terminated, they start crying for help on HN.

dijit 2y ago

There have been many times where I have tried to warn people on HN not to get into bed with Oracle.[0][1][2][3] But people have a hard time resisting free stuff. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33199750 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38075210 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359 [3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883

StressedDev 2y ago
You had a bad experience with Oracle and I get that. They didn't treat you well. However, not everyone has a bad experience with them and a lot of companies make mistakes and treat customers poorly. The question is not did it happen, the question is how often does it happen and how does the organization handle it. If Oracle has millions of customers and you are the only one they harmed, they are probably doing great. If your experience is a rare occurrence (say it occurs to 1% or 0.5% of customers), then everyone should avoid Oracle because they don't know if or when they will be the next victim. In the OP's case, I have several comments: - Companies should always be able to explain why an account was closed. If the person violated a policy, the exact line or paragraph of the policy should be given to the customer along with a detailed explanation of how the customer violated the policy. - Companies should always notify customers when they close an account or when a customer is violating the terms of service. These notices should clearly explain what the customer did and should explain how they violated a policy. - Companies should expect their automated systems and employees to make mistakes. They should rectify mistakes when they are found. I think Oracle treated dijit and the OP horribly. I think Oracle should do a root cause analysis to determine why they misbehaved, fix the problem, reinstate the account (assuming the OP is telling the truth), and publicly apologize. Internally, Oracle should learn from this and fix their processes and communications.
- talldayo 2y ago
  [flagged]
- dijit 2y ago
  There are so many cases where Oracle have acted in bad faith that I don’t think defending them is the right move. “Don’t anthropomorphise the lawnmower”. Let us not forget that they bankrupted the second largest city in the UK, it’s hardly an isolated incident. They are exactly as evil as people say, I know its hard to reason, there’s always shades of grey after all, but I know of know of no other consistently one-dimensional company.
  - jaggederest 2y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
- cyberax 2y ago
  > However, not everyone has a bad experience with them Examples? I know several large companies that spent tens of millions to get _away_ from Oracle.
- Retric 2y ago
  > not everyone has a bad experience with them You don’t stay in business for long while burning every single bridge. The standards for acceptable behavior from a supplier / business partner are a little higher than just doesn’t fuck over every single contract.
  - belter 2y ago
    Broadcom enters the room....
    - numbsafari 2y ago
      Oracle is holding the door from the inside, smiling widely.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

Seriously, it's the most abusive company on earth.

joshuaissac 2y ago

To be fair, shutting things down without notice is not something Oracle is known for. Usually, they just increase prices by a lot once the customer is locked in.

echelon 2y ago
You definitely don't want to be on Oracle cloud then. Stay far away from Stargate.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago

Honestly, I have never been in a position to see their salespeople so I have to assume they must be wining and dining the bosses first, because in my little corner of the universe, every single like entity uses them to some degree. I personally do not understand it.

yawndex 2y ago

The price of "free" is very tempting. I guess the cost of the servers they offer is having to put up with idiotic requirements like "CPU utilization for the 95th percentile [must be more] than 20%" [1], or they'll shut off your server. I use one of these servers for hosting some non-critical things, but nothing that I run there is particularly CPU intensive, so I was just forced to set up a cronjob that periodically spikes the CPU to 100% for a few minutes. [1] https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

ndsipa_pomu 2y ago

In general, I agree but there's a lot of people "locked-in" to using their products so once a poor decision has been made, it's costly to move away from them. I signed up a personal Oracle Cloud account to make use of their always-free tier of VMs. I was lucky to be able to get 4 of the VM.Standard.A1.Flex instances which have been running fine for a couple of years now. I've heard various tales of people on the free tier getting instances/accounts deleted for having idle instances, but presumably my backup of them is enough to stop them from being registered as idle (I've got a couple of websites running on them too, but they're just for my use).

malux85 2y ago

The cold hard truth of the world is that things are not evaluated solely meritoriously by everyone. Oracle know this, in fact, they rely on it. If they are trying to win a big corporate contract you know a good way to get it? : The dude who has an enormous amount of say is head of I.T. at EnormousBeanFactory, the world’s largest supplier of canned beans. Is it a sexy industry? Nope, but they do 3 billion a year in beans. This dude is in his mid 50s, bald, out of shape, big glasses, and is likely very single. He has a comfortable wage but he’s not rich. He hasn’t gotten laid in 20 years. Send in the energetic and charismatic Oracle salesman, instantly invite this guy for all expenses trip to Aspen to discuss the deal, but don’t make it obvious, a few 5 star lunches locally first. When in Aspen make sure this guy has the time of his life, got it? Here’s 20k expense account, this guy is going to have a weekend he is not going to forget. Do I need to spell out the details for you? Once he’s back at his job and had a few days to recover then land the fish while the memories are still fresh, as long as your product MINIMALLY functions, they’ll sign. Of course I personally think this is atrocious way of doing business, but I am wise enough to not let my rosy ideals prevent me from seeing the reality of the world, so there it is. That’s why “people continue to use ORACLE” products.

dijit 2y ago
People will think that this is ridiculous, but I can tell you from experience that this is exactly what happens. You are often relying on the altruism of the C-levels to care about people more than the “vibes” that sales people can give off, which just happens to be helped by expensive lunches, trips, invitations to shows with VIP seats, and being welcomed with beaming smiles and open arms like a celebrity at their HQ. Obviously its not just Oracle that does this, all the large companies do it- even the ones you think have crappy support like Google. These are hard things to turn down, and if you think you can you’re probably wrong.

StressedDev 2y ago

People probably continue to use Oracle products because Oracle makes a lot of good and useful products. Oracle is typically not criticized for its products, its criticized for its high prices and price increases.

snailmailstare 2y ago
You could only mean the database? The stuff I am familiar with was good before they bought it and is better somewhere else despite all their work to choke options with IP law.
- StressedDev 2y ago
  OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? How do they compare to their competitors? Why don't people leave Oracle if it is so bad? Remember, people can and do move platforms all of the time. A good example is how the cloud took off despite the huge amount of work it takes to move things to the cloud. My main point is saying one of the largest software companies in the world is "bad" or "makes things worse" says nothing. You need to give specific examples. Also, it's hard to believe that Oracle never gets anything right. Really? Everyone of their thousands of employees does bad work? All of their products are "bad" and have no good points? That does not pass the laugh test.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    > OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? Java.
    - mardifoufs 2y ago
      In what way? I'm actually curious.
  - protimewaster 2y ago
    I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java. It's prolly gonna be hard to find any specific metrics to show that, though. But I remember everyone thinking that all of the Sun offerings had gotten worse after the acquisition. And OpenSolaris got axed altogether, of course. And Java had a series of security embarrassments.

bastardoperator 2y ago

I find it interesting that Tiktok went with Oracle given their history with the CIA.

7thpower 2y ago
I think it was more that Oracle was willing to take the political risk and had a lot of incentive to land a large, high visibility client that could help them build economies of scale and would come with a tier 1 JV partner. There is a lot of upside for Oracle based on their position relative to others and Ellison does not have to manage his political capital the same way non-founder CEOs do (he made this move long before Trump’s second term).
NewJazz 2y ago
There was political pressure. Still there.

jeroenhd 2y ago

They have an excellent free tier for experimenting with some higher power ARM servers. As long as you're ready to give up when they decide they don't like you any more, that's a pretty cool deal. Just don't ever build anything with their hardware or software that you'd like to keep. Edit: Java is usually pretty good, too. At least the open source stuff. Maybe stuff like GraalVM too but they had that locked down in licenses for a while and I don't trust Oracle at all.

7thpower 2y ago
Sadly, I have been unable to secure one of those higher power free servers. I’ve been trying for a couple weeks now. That was literally the only reason I was willing to give Oracle a shot.
Daviey 2y ago
I've been trying to sign up to them for over a year, and it keeps failing. Support tickets remain unanswered.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  They don't do support for free tiers, and their free tier is often overbooked, so from what I can tell they just silently drop people? Seems like terrible business to me, but so does most of what Oracle does.
crayonista 2y ago
Yeah, I have a free-tier ARM VM, and it's great as a remote Nix builder for aarch64. If I lost it, I'd just have to do building locally.
- pvo50555 2y ago
  When did you manage to get that? I tried signing up for the ARM server several times but it always says it's unavailable at the moment in my region (East - Toronto) and I should try a different region... however you can't switch regions after you set up your account. I talked to their support and they said it's unavailable for the foreseeable future... choose a different configuration. Are people still able to provision those instances in other regions? If so, which one(s)? I'm just using the legacy free one for now, the 2GHz AMD with 0.5GB RAM.

marcosdumay 2y ago

It's cheap. And its free tier is really large. And after that stops applying, you have spent a huge amount of work managing your software around their idiosyncrasies. So doing the same for another supplier looks like a huge (probably unsurmountable) task.

belter 2y ago

This as been posted here in at least 60 occasions...But clearly not enough times..: https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982 https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=1982

diyseguy 2y ago

Why do people want to pay for Oracle when PostgreSQL and MySQL are free and work well?

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Mistake +mystery = mistery

rdtsc 2y ago
And it’s only one “t” away from “misery” ;-)

Artoooooor 2y ago

If you have big system using specifics of their databases, switching can be expensive. Maybe good in long term, but risky.

fluidcruft 2y ago

Are there even any other options if you're running EPIC?

hulitu 2y ago

People never learn. The same issues are with PayPal and Stripe. Also people do not seem to grasp that "the cloud" is "someone else's computer". Only when their accounts are swiftly terminated, they start crying for help on HN.