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> I started a job at Oracle Labs where I ended up using their database in a project, and that kind of gave me a new perspective on all this stuff. I feel like

> I started a job at Oracle Labs where I ended up using their database in a project, and that kind of gave me a new perspective on all this stuff. I feel like a mandatory ~6 week boot camp using big boy SQL in a gigantic enterprise could go a long way to helping grow a lot of developers. HN on average seems to have grave misconceptions regarding the true value of products like Oracle, MSSQL and DB2. The whole reason you are paying money for these solutions is because you can't afford to screw with any of the other weird technical compromises. If you are using the RDBMS for a paid product and SQLite isn't a perfect fit, spending some money starts to make a lot of sense to me. If the cost of a commercial SQL provider is too much for the margins to handle, I question if the business was ever viable to begin with.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Right. I should have done such a thing years ago. And, there are free/elastically scaled commercial RDBMS that are cheap. Oracle just give them away these days in the cloud. Even if you self-host, you can run small databases (up to iirc 12GB of data) for free, which is plenty for many internal apps. The other thing that is super-unintuitive is the cost of cloud managed DBs. People like open source DBs because they see them as cheap and lacking lockin. I specced out what it costs to host a basic plain vanilla Postgres on AWS vs an Oracle DB on OCI at some point, and the latter was cheaper despite having far more features. Mostly because the Postgres didn't scale elastically and the Oracle DB did, plus AWS is just expensive. Well that was a shock. I'd always assumed a commercial RDBMS was a sort of expensive luxury, but once you decide you don't want to self-admin the DB the cost differences become irrelevant. And then there's the lockin angle. Postgres doesn't do trademark enforcement so there's a lot of databases being advertised by cloud vendors as Postgres but are actually proprietary forks. The Jepsen test the other day was a wakeup call where an AWS "postgres" database didn't offer correct transactional isolation because of bugs in the forked code. If you're using cloud offerings you can end up depending on proprietary features or performance/scaling without realizing it. So yeah. It's just all way more complex than I used to appreciate. FoundationDB is still a very nice piece of tech, and makes sense for the very specific iCloud business Apple use it for, but I'm not sure I'd try to use it if I was being paid to solve a problem fast.
jwr 2y ago
> grave misconceptions regarding the true value of products like Oracle, MSSQL and DB2 In the context of this discussion, I would offer that we are getting into "apples vs oranges" comparisons here. If you are doing custom queries for building reports where each report needs to access humongous amounts of data, SQL databases are likely a good fit. If you need a fast and yet correct distributed database (for fault tolerance) for an online app backend, where the data and query patterns are known and do not change much over time and all retrieval is done using indexes, SQL databases are not a great fit, "big boy" or not. As for "questioning if the business was ever viable to begin with", as a solo founder SaaS builder, I would humbly point you to numerous HN discussions where people are OUTRAGED at any subscriptions, and expect software to be an inexpensive one-time purchase. But that's a separate discussion.

mike_hearn 2y ago

Right. I should have done such a thing years ago. And, there are free/elastically scaled commercial RDBMS that are cheap. Oracle just give them away these days in the cloud. Even if you self-host, you can run small databases (up to iirc 12GB of data) for free, which is plenty for many internal apps. The other thing that is super-unintuitive is the cost of cloud managed DBs. People like open source DBs because they see them as cheap and lacking lockin. I specced out what it costs to host a basic plain vanilla Postgres on AWS vs an Oracle DB on OCI at some point, and the latter was cheaper despite having far more features. Mostly because the Postgres didn't scale elastically and the Oracle DB did, plus AWS is just expensive. Well that was a shock. I'd always assumed a commercial RDBMS was a sort of expensive luxury, but once you decide you don't want to self-admin the DB the cost differences become irrelevant. And then there's the lockin angle. Postgres doesn't do trademark enforcement so there's a lot of databases being advertised by cloud vendors as Postgres but are actually proprietary forks. The Jepsen test the other day was a wakeup call where an AWS "postgres" database didn't offer correct transactional isolation because of bugs in the forked code. If you're using cloud offerings you can end up depending on proprietary features or performance/scaling without realizing it. So yeah. It's just all way more complex than I used to appreciate. FoundationDB is still a very nice piece of tech, and makes sense for the very specific iCloud business Apple use it for, but I'm not sure I'd try to use it if I was being paid to solve a problem fast.

jwr 2y ago

> grave misconceptions regarding the true value of products like Oracle, MSSQL and DB2 In the context of this discussion, I would offer that we are getting into "apples vs oranges" comparisons here. If you are doing custom queries for building reports where each report needs to access humongous amounts of data, SQL databases are likely a good fit. If you need a fast and yet correct distributed database (for fault tolerance) for an online app backend, where the data and query patterns are known and do not change much over time and all retrieval is done using indexes, SQL databases are not a great fit, "big boy" or not. As for "questioning if the business was ever viable to begin with", as a solo founder SaaS builder, I would humbly point you to numerous HN discussions where people are OUTRAGED at any subscriptions, and expect software to be an inexpensive one-time purchase. But that's a separate discussion.