3 ms·

Just curious for the older devs on here, how seminal was Oracle in 80/90s? I feel he was actually a good dev but his career as a ruthless sales person and corpo

by lvl155 2y ago

Just curious for the older devs on here, how seminal was Oracle in 80/90s? I feel he was actually a good dev but his career as a ruthless sales person and corporate tactician overshadows whatever accomplishments he had as a database developer.

jordanb 2y ago
My career started in the 2000s. Oracle was already a bit of a cancer then. It was Oracle or MS SQL for "real" databases. There were technologies that had been exciting in the 90s but were already choked out by the duopoly like InterBase and Foxpro. There were "greybeard" DBAs who were all smug Oracle guys. My impression then was that Oracle didn't invent anything but had dominated through better funding and ruthless expansion. Administrating a Oracle DB at scale was really hard but that created armys of loyal DBAs protecting their hard-won skills.
- twasold 2y ago
  What ever happened to foxpro?
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    Fox Software was acquired by Microsoft in 1992. Development was finally discontinued in 2007.
  - kjs3 2y ago
    Bought by Microsoft who gradually nudged users to move to Access or SQLServer until they could quietly take it out back a shoot it in the head about 20 years ago.
  - webnrrd2k 2y ago
    My vague memory of it is that MS discontinued it because it detracted from their plans with MS Access on the low-end, and MS SQL Server on the high end. I think, maybe, that it may not have fit in with Visual Basic very well.
- chasd00 2y ago
  yeah if you remember way back then the whole concept of ORMs came about to make changing a RDBMS backend feasible. I'm not sure the plug/play RDBMS dream was ever 100% realized but that whole wing of webdev tech was driven by the desire to avoid Oracle's extortion based licensing.
6stringmerc 2y ago
Oracle systems made job applications an incredibly arduous process by mandating a person re-enter dozens of fields of information for every different employer running the system. Basically you had to create an account and profile for every single job because every company had their own Oracle implementation. I recall the torture well.
gadders 2y ago
In the 90s, the only two databases you really heard about (at least in my industry, banking) were Sybase and Oracle. Where is Sybase now? I'm not a dba, but Oracle was effectively the default, and it worked reliably and did what you needed it to do. I think maybe Sybase was faster in certain circumstances.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Sybase was bought by SAP in 2010.
  - gadders 2y ago
    Fair enough. I don't think I heard anyone mention it after the millenium though, other than "It's legacy, get rid."
hcayless 2y ago
I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.
- kagakuninja 2y ago
  In the late '80s, I was in the Air Force. Directive from the top was that all military projects should standardize on Oracle DB, "because it is portable", and projects should use AT&T mini computers (wat?) They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes. We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.
kjs3 2y ago
Oracle was a pretty big player in those days. And I don't think most people even remember Larry was a developer...his legacy will certainly be as a ruthless businessman with a penchant for take-no-prisoners sales and ruthless license enforcement.
georgemcbay 2y ago
51 year old software developer here and through my entire career Oracle was seen among the developers I know as something you'd sometimes be forced to use because a non-technical person at your company agreed to pay so much for a license that it would be too publicly embarrassing not to use it. It wasn't seen as an inherently bad piece of technology, it was just massive overkill (too expensive, too high maintenance) for a lot of the solutions it ended up being used for because of the effectiveness of Oracle's sales organization.

by lvl155 2y ago

jordanb 2y ago

My career started in the 2000s. Oracle was already a bit of a cancer then. It was Oracle or MS SQL for "real" databases. There were technologies that had been exciting in the 90s but were already choked out by the duopoly like InterBase and Foxpro. There were "greybeard" DBAs who were all smug Oracle guys. My impression then was that Oracle didn't invent anything but had dominated through better funding and ruthless expansion. Administrating a Oracle DB at scale was really hard but that created armys of loyal DBAs protecting their hard-won skills.

twasold 2y ago
What ever happened to foxpro?
- pfdietz 2y ago
  Fox Software was acquired by Microsoft in 1992. Development was finally discontinued in 2007.
- kjs3 2y ago
  Bought by Microsoft who gradually nudged users to move to Access or SQLServer until they could quietly take it out back a shoot it in the head about 20 years ago.
- webnrrd2k 2y ago
  My vague memory of it is that MS discontinued it because it detracted from their plans with MS Access on the low-end, and MS SQL Server on the high end. I think, maybe, that it may not have fit in with Visual Basic very well.
chasd00 2y ago
yeah if you remember way back then the whole concept of ORMs came about to make changing a RDBMS backend feasible. I'm not sure the plug/play RDBMS dream was ever 100% realized but that whole wing of webdev tech was driven by the desire to avoid Oracle's extortion based licensing.

6stringmerc 2y ago

Oracle systems made job applications an incredibly arduous process by mandating a person re-enter dozens of fields of information for every different employer running the system. Basically you had to create an account and profile for every single job because every company had their own Oracle implementation. I recall the torture well.

gadders 2y ago

In the 90s, the only two databases you really heard about (at least in my industry, banking) were Sybase and Oracle. Where is Sybase now? I'm not a dba, but Oracle was effectively the default, and it worked reliably and did what you needed it to do. I think maybe Sybase was faster in certain circumstances.

pfdietz 2y ago
Sybase was bought by SAP in 2010.
- gadders 2y ago
  Fair enough. I don't think I heard anyone mention it after the millenium though, other than "It's legacy, get rid."

hcayless 2y ago

I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.

kagakuninja 2y ago
In the late '80s, I was in the Air Force. Directive from the top was that all military projects should standardize on Oracle DB, "because it is portable", and projects should use AT&T mini computers (wat?) They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes. We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.

kjs3 2y ago

Oracle was a pretty big player in those days. And I don't think most people even remember Larry was a developer...his legacy will certainly be as a ruthless businessman with a penchant for take-no-prisoners sales and ruthless license enforcement.

georgemcbay 2y ago

51 year old software developer here and through my entire career Oracle was seen among the developers I know as something you'd sometimes be forced to use because a non-technical person at your company agreed to pay so much for a license that it would be too publicly embarrassing not to use it. It wasn't seen as an inherently bad piece of technology, it was just massive overkill (too expensive, too high maintenance) for a lot of the solutions it ended up being used for because of the effectiveness of Oracle's sales organization.