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Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information

Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information execs. When I worked at a megacorp as a dev, I had near zero say in such purchase decisions. I had to work with what I was given. Thankfully I work for a much smaller shop now. Better pay and much better decision autonomy.

reactordev 1y ago
This is exactly right - they say the right things, to the right people, over the right sized bribe rib.
forinti 1y ago
Devs get Oracle's best side. They don't know how lucky they are. PL/SQL is a fine language and Oracle throws everything and the kitchen sink into the APIs available inside the database. As a sysadmin/dba I get to handle the nasty side of Oracle: the bugs, the patches that fail, the redundant tools, the wordy documentation that always feels like a never-ending advert.
- vkazanov 1y ago
  When I was young and beautiful and naive I enjoyed playing with setting things up, even though my main focus was on backend dev. Like, setup postgres, tweak settings to performance, that kind of thing. So I was the first one to get the "figure out on site installation steps" task to share with client admin. Our small company was building enterprises things for large clients. And one of them wanted Oracle on Windows server. They also wanted a failover setup. How hard could that be? Now I hate Oracle. I hate Oracle consultants. I despise the ignorance. My favourite bit was Oracle uninstall procedure. I had like 4 pages printed just for this case. Oracle bad. Postgres good.
- hahn-kev 1y ago
  The problem is that putting code into your database has all the problems of data migration with no testability. It's really hard to write tests and debug code compared to a proper language.
  - aaronbaugher 1y ago
    I took over support for a small ISP after the previous sysadmin died unexpectedly. He was a big fan of putting code in the PostgreSQL database, which I had never done before. That was fun to figure out and debug issues.
  - branko_d 1y ago
    Haven’t worked with Oracle in over a decade, but SQL Server’s tooling is actually quite decent in that regard. You can attach the Visual Studio debugger to a T-SQL stored procedure, set breakpoints, step, inspect variables etc. There are rough edges, but it’s good enough to be useful. Automated tests of T-SQL stored procedures are also possible. There are couple of ways you could do that, but in our case we just write “unit” tests in C# which call the procedures. This integrates nicely into Visual Studio’s Test Explorer, is debuggable etc. You can even step through a C# test, and then just “step into” T-SQL being called from there! There are valid reasons for not putting business logic into stored procedures, but “not being a proper language” is probably not one of them, at least in the case of T-SQL. Then again, there are also reasons for using stored procedures. Everything is a tradeoff…
jasode 1y ago
>Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information execs. That is only partially true. Oracle has a wide portfolio of a bunch of products and the "wine & dine the execs" is the sales cycle for software like ERP Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Health (Cerner). E.g. it's the hospital CFO & CIO that are the true "customers" of Oracle Health and not the frontline doctors and nurses that use it. However, for the Oracle RDBMS database ... it was often the developers that chose it over competitors such as IBM DB2, Sybase, Informix, MS SQL Server. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of us devs did a "bake off" with various databases and Oracle often won on technical merit. E.g. Oracle had true row-level locking but MS SQL Server before v6.5 was page-level locking. And the open source alternatives of MySQL and PostgreSQL at that early timeframe were not mature enough to compete with advanced Oracle features such as Parallel Query Execution and Recovery from a Standby database. E.g. the C Language programmer Shel Kaphan at Amazon chose Oracle in 1994: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jpcharles_in-1994-amazons-first-employee-shel-kaphan-activity-7003267991937179649-BhDe https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jpcharles_in-1994-amazons-fir... (that anecdote cited this deep link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3qIWN-ZIPk&t=1h11m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3qIWN-ZIPk&t=1h11m56s) It took Amazon 25 years to finally migrate off of all Oracle databases: https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+shuts+off+last+oracle+database+2019 https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+shuts+off+last+oracle... So young devs today who aren't aware of history will wonder why Amazon ever got locked into Oracle in the first place?!? It was because in 1994, Oracle db was a very reasonable technical choice for devs to make.
- abirch 1y ago
  I’d take oracle over MS SQL any day. That said I’d take PostgreSQL over oracle any day.
  - deskamess 1y ago
    Curious if that is from recent experience? I used Oracle decades ago but these days it's all SQL Server.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Steaks and strippers!
- InDubioProRubio 1y ago
  Miss`d Steaks were made!
cduzz 1y ago
Oracle is in the small family of companies that have a business model of "you give us money and we solve _all_ your problems." So it's likely that, for a specific task, the oracle solution is crap, but oracle has crap for everything so the oracle sales droid can sell a "one throat to choke, one check to write" policy to a company that likely has technology problems but produces a "not technology" product. Amazon's moving into this space and their crap is even stickier than oracle's...
anonymousiam 1y ago
The same could also be said about Microsoft.

reactordev 1y ago

This is exactly right - they say the right things, to the right people, over the right sized bribe rib.

forinti 1y ago

Devs get Oracle's best side. They don't know how lucky they are. PL/SQL is a fine language and Oracle throws everything and the kitchen sink into the APIs available inside the database. As a sysadmin/dba I get to handle the nasty side of Oracle: the bugs, the patches that fail, the redundant tools, the wordy documentation that always feels like a never-ending advert.

vkazanov 1y ago
When I was young and beautiful and naive I enjoyed playing with setting things up, even though my main focus was on backend dev. Like, setup postgres, tweak settings to performance, that kind of thing. So I was the first one to get the "figure out on site installation steps" task to share with client admin. Our small company was building enterprises things for large clients. And one of them wanted Oracle on Windows server. They also wanted a failover setup. How hard could that be? Now I hate Oracle. I hate Oracle consultants. I despise the ignorance. My favourite bit was Oracle uninstall procedure. I had like 4 pages printed just for this case. Oracle bad. Postgres good.
hahn-kev 1y ago
The problem is that putting code into your database has all the problems of data migration with no testability. It's really hard to write tests and debug code compared to a proper language.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  I took over support for a small ISP after the previous sysadmin died unexpectedly. He was a big fan of putting code in the PostgreSQL database, which I had never done before. That was fun to figure out and debug issues.
- branko_d 1y ago
  Haven’t worked with Oracle in over a decade, but SQL Server’s tooling is actually quite decent in that regard. You can attach the Visual Studio debugger to a T-SQL stored procedure, set breakpoints, step, inspect variables etc. There are rough edges, but it’s good enough to be useful. Automated tests of T-SQL stored procedures are also possible. There are couple of ways you could do that, but in our case we just write “unit” tests in C# which call the procedures. This integrates nicely into Visual Studio’s Test Explorer, is debuggable etc. You can even step through a C# test, and then just “step into” T-SQL being called from there! There are valid reasons for not putting business logic into stored procedures, but “not being a proper language” is probably not one of them, at least in the case of T-SQL. Then again, there are also reasons for using stored procedures. Everything is a tradeoff…

jasode 1y ago

>Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information execs. That is only partially true. Oracle has a wide portfolio of a bunch of products and the "wine & dine the execs" is the sales cycle for software like ERP Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Health (Cerner). E.g. it's the hospital CFO & CIO that are the true "customers" of Oracle Health and not the frontline doctors and nurses that use it. However, for the Oracle RDBMS database ... it was often the developers that chose it over competitors such as IBM DB2, Sybase, Informix, MS SQL Server. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of us devs did a "bake off" with various databases and Oracle often won on technical merit. E.g. Oracle had true row-level locking but MS SQL Server before v6.5 was page-level locking. And the open source alternatives of MySQL and PostgreSQL at that early timeframe were not mature enough to compete with advanced Oracle features such as Parallel Query Execution and Recovery from a Standby database. E.g. the C Language programmer Shel Kaphan at Amazon chose Oracle in 1994: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jpcharles_in-1994-amazons-first-employee-shel-kaphan-activity-7003267991937179649-BhDe https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jpcharles_in-1994-amazons-fir... (that anecdote cited this deep link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3qIWN-ZIPk&t=1h11m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3qIWN-ZIPk&t=1h11m56s) It took Amazon 25 years to finally migrate off of all Oracle databases: https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+shuts+off+last+oracle+database+2019 https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+shuts+off+last+oracle... So young devs today who aren't aware of history will wonder why Amazon ever got locked into Oracle in the first place?!? It was because in 1994, Oracle db was a very reasonable technical choice for devs to make.

abirch 1y ago
I’d take oracle over MS SQL any day. That said I’d take PostgreSQL over oracle any day.
- deskamess 1y ago
  Curious if that is from recent experience? I used Oracle decades ago but these days it's all SQL Server.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

Steaks and strippers!

InDubioProRubio 1y ago
Miss`d Steaks were made!

cduzz 1y ago

Oracle is in the small family of companies that have a business model of "you give us money and we solve _all_ your problems." So it's likely that, for a specific task, the oracle solution is crap, but oracle has crap for everything so the oracle sales droid can sell a "one throat to choke, one check to write" policy to a company that likely has technology problems but produces a "not technology" product. Amazon's moving into this space and their crap is even stickier than oracle's...

anonymousiam 1y ago

The same could also be said about Microsoft.