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The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the

The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is. Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it, and I've never started a fresh project in Java, which they used to drive a lawsuit they had with Google). From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives. There are innumerable equal (better?), free alternatives, and most startups are founded by broke coders in bedrooms that choose those instead and stick with the devil they know. And they have an un-competitive cloud service? Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for, I'm genuinely curious.

DetroitThrow 6mo ago
Well, if you're an elected official, and you're in charge of government organizations that could be used to enrich billionaire donors by using a donor's services - Oracle fits that niche very well!
jeffbee 6mo ago
Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.
- newsoftheday 6mo ago
  I posted a response from Gemini where I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?" and it seems it disagrees with your "nobody wants their terrible cloud" view.
  - nemomarx 6mo ago
    you could post the citations?
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    Well, that clinches it.
  - 9864247888754 6mo ago
    [dead]
- silisili 6mo ago
  I use it only for the free(for now) tier. I always thought AWS console was about the worst UI/UX could get. Not to be outdone, Oracle came along and said 'hold my beer.'
- cloudfudge 6mo ago
  Oracle Cloud isn't actually "terrible cloud", but it definitely isn't geared toward smaller users like startups and individuals. It's downright hostile to casual use. But for fortune 500 companies who don't mind being in bed with Oracle, the price can be right.
post-it 6mo ago
Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind. My hunch is that big consulting firms like CGI might use it, and therefore the customers of those firms use it? But I haven't worked at any of those.
- lazide 6mo ago
  It’s a common ‘large enterprise’ dependency often due to some internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you are right.
  - rbanffy 6mo ago
    People also marry the database when a significant amount of logic is in stored procedures.
    - lazide 6mo ago
      Hard to do if it’s not present to use already?
- pydry 6mo ago
  I worked for one company that used it. Everybody on the ground hated it but the costs of migrating away were enormous because every system they relied upon was tightly coupled to every other system. It would have been a multiyear project to get off it. Their software wasn't just more expensive than using open source equivalents it was worse, too. It's just very, very sticky. At the same time the sales team wine and dine key decision makers and try to strike the fear of god in to them so they don't rock the boat.
  - InsideOutSanta 6mo ago
    We heard you're planning to migrate away from Oracle. We understand, but unfortunately, that means we have to get rid of the 75% discount we gave you, so we'll make a decade of revenue in the two years it'll take you to get rid of us. Still planning to migrate away?
arethuza 6mo ago
They acquired a lot of applications - ERP, CRM, finance - I suspect actual database licensing revenues are only a small part of their revenues these days. Years ago I had some fun integrating with Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) - which is actually a pretty impressive beast if you need consolidated financial reporting!
Hizonner 6mo ago
They make a lot of money off of the cloud services and their layered "enterprise" applications. Selling "just the database" isn't what Oracle's been about for a very long time.
bilekas 6mo ago
It's exactly as you said. The dependency on old school legacy implementations that can't be turned off. To be fair to Microslop even they had the foresight to open source .net core and even try to bring some things to the open source community. Oracle actively turned into a patent troll.
paulddraper 6mo ago
NetSuite There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.
- glenstein 6mo ago
  Truth. I don't know of a better plug and play option than Netsuite for middle to big companies.
newsoftheday 6mo ago
[flagged]
- afavour 6mo ago
  ...so what citations did it provide?
- thorncorona 6mo ago
  Did you validate anything you have posted?
- sleepybrett 6mo ago
  'percentage based growth' Sure if you have 5 customers and got 5 more, that would be 100% growth...
- api 6mo ago
  Google Cloud's bandwidth pricing is much more reasonable. That's one thing I see. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon still charge the standard big cloud absolutely ludicrous bandwidth markup, stuff like $0.08/gig. If you know what bandwidth actually costs, that's like $500/gallon gasoline. Oracle is still expensive relative to wholesale bandwidth but it's at least not absolutely insane.
imglorp 6mo ago
This feels correct. Their business model is squeezing anyone who can't migrate off their properties and suing the rest. Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?
- toomuchtodo 6mo ago
  > Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above? Short term shareholder equity gains during an over exuberant hype cycle you do not know when might repeat. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." -- Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince (symbolizing Wall Street's reckless persistence in risky lending despite signs of a market downturn) The Overvaluation Trap - https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap - December 2015 > The trap is an almost inevitable consequence of what many managers might regard as a blessing, because it occurs when the capital markets overvalue a company’s equity—and especially when stock overvaluation is common in a particular sector. In the following pages, we’ll describe the trap, show how it has played out in various industries, and suggest where it may be playing out once again. "If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Paul Newman Edit: tsunamifury wrote a prescient comment a decade ago, referencing the same hrb piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851527
- jollymonATX 6mo ago
  They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.
  - riffraff 6mo ago
    but what would be the blast radius for ZFS? Most enterprises don't seem to be running ZFS with Linux, and the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either. Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.
vasco 6mo ago
Government contracts. You get good at bidding, there's money to be made there. And those bidding processes are way more than just the tech. That's their main value prop I think. Having the bureaucratic machine to bid and win contracts.
BoredPositron 6mo ago
It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System runs all oracle in the backend.
- rbanffy 6mo ago
  Indeed. Oracle runs on z/OS as well.
jvanderbot 6mo ago
Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies. The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
- glitchc 6mo ago
  The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.
- bobthepanda 6mo ago
  Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.
  - wredcoll 6mo ago
    Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java
    - bobthepanda 6mo ago
      Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top > The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
      - burnte 6mo ago
        > Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.
    - tombert 6mo ago
      I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license. I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair. [1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.
torben-friis 6mo ago
>Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for You would use it to keep your job when your company goes with it against all technical recommendation due to the push of a higher up that wouldn't let the idea go for stupid or suspicious reasons.
gytisgreitai 6mo ago
Clearly you are in USA. It’s not how their business works and Startups are not their target. Lobbying governments across the world with questionable practices are
rockinghigh 6mo ago
Their revenue was $57.4 billion last year. Just in Q4; cloud revenue $6.7 billion, cloud infrastructure $3.0 billion, cloud application $3.7 billion, Fusion Cloud ERP $1.0 billion, NetSuite cloud ERP $1.0 billion.
mft_ 6mo ago
They sell to cash-rich organisations who are a bit clueless about technology and so can't or wouldn't want to either roll their own, or go with a better but smaller provider? e.g. I was unsurprised when I spotted that Novartis (no connection, btw) was deep in with Oracle. Big pharma, lots of money, typically-clueless-big-org-IT-leadership, etc. (LOL, Novartis also uses SAP.)
- phendrenad2 6mo ago
  I have a theory that being cash-rich creates an atmosphere of technological cluelessness, or more specifically weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of working at a top company. These executives display a unified front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition whenever said software has the smallest bug.
- vachina 6mo ago
  Precisely this. They prey on outsource-happy big orgs that have 1 million different SaaS all tied together by scotch tape (because their IT dept. is also outsourced)
- whynotmaybe 6mo ago
  And, their product have worked correctly for decades. So if you have a lot of money and don't want to take any risk you go the oracle route. It's not the best product today, but you won't have any surprise, except cost, that you can justify because it's oracle. Which is the same as using a tank to go grocery shopping because you're afraid of an accident on the way. You need everything in house to support a thank, special garage, specifically trained crew, specific fuel... And it's way harder to drive than a civic.
- elzbardico 6mo ago
  Non-tech companies have bigger fish to fry in cost optimization than IT infrastructure. For example, nobody buying, insuring and operating supertankers will care that much about Oracle licensing or even renewing a mainframe contract.
seanhunter 6mo ago
Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition. A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain features like online backups and certain replication configurations. At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case. Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues. [1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.
- wilsonnb3 6mo ago
  Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.
  - seanhunter 6mo ago
    I remember talking to one tech leader at the time who described it as "surprisingly good, for a microsoft product" which sort of summed it up. But it had similar characteristics to sybase except more so because you had to run it on an NT server (iirc) and so there was an even harder cap on the scale of hardware you could run it on, whereas you could run oracle on really top-end sparc hardware that was way more powerful than anything that ran windows.
  - wil421 6mo ago
    Depends if the director or VP liked Microsoft or not. I’ve worked at places that loved SQL Server and Microsoft server products in general. Others did not use them anywhere in their datacenter and wouldn’t have considered them. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft were very dependent on if the people in charged liked them. Not so much technical merits.
EliRivers 6mo ago
Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Marketing-Solution https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Mar... For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i. One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend. When the analysis was being conducted, the team grew concerned with the costs — both in terms of budget and disk I/O. Oracle licenses are incredibly expensive, and there would be a huge volume of CDR data written to and read from the database. Finally, it dawned on someone that the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in. In fact, a single, low-end Sun server with a few hundred megs of RAM could easily handle the CDR generation and application backend. Excited about their good news, they called up a meeting with the product managers. "We've discovered that we can deliver the product at a fraction of what our original estimates were." The managers left the room, some looking happy, others just looking incredulous. Later that day, Jason got a call from the VP of Engineering. "Jason, while I understand what you're proposing is technically valid, you have upset the marketing team." "I'm sorry... did I say something?" "It's just that they've promised the customer that our product would use Oracle 8i, and now they're going to be made liars. Can you just humor me and add Oracle 8i to the design somewhere?" "Uh..." "I have enough trouble politically as it is. I really appreciate this favor!" click After delivering the news to his team, they argued a bit on what to use Oracle for. Ultimately they delivered the final product with an Oracle database that had a single table which was used to store a handful of configuration parameters. It was the most expensive individual table Jason had ever created in his entire career.
trelane 6mo ago
Java is used a lot, but not Oracle's version. One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.
- vips7L 6mo ago
  They’re all Oracle’s version. OpenJdk is Oracle’s implementation of the JLS. They’re just not using Oracle’s build of OpenJdk.
  - pjmlp 6mo ago
    Almost all. Embedded folks with real time offerings like PTC, Aicas, microEJ,.... have their own implementations, with real time support, bare metal deployments. Folks like IBM and Azul nowadays take parts of OpenJDK, mostly standard library, and add their own runtimes instead.
mr_mitm 6mo ago
Aren't their databases behemoths that satisfy requirements (especially of regulatory nature) of large banks and such? I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup.
- chasd00 6mo ago
  > I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup. that's right, Oracle's databases are for things like Visa and Mastercard transactions and maybe the US IRS and Social Security systems of record.
faangguyindia 6mo ago
Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your services in Golang.
stego-tech 6mo ago
It's stickiness. Their biggest asset is ERP. That's how they get orgs locked in, because migrating ERP systems after deployment can take decades of work and cost multitudes more than just eating Oracle's renewal increases. Could orgs jettison them into the sun? Totally. Is it fiscally sensible? Yeah, absolutely. Can you sell that to the board? Nope. The best way to kill Oracle - because such a toxic organization absolutely deserves to fail - is to avoid building anything atop their infrastructure ever again going forward. Don't use their Java tooling, don't use their software suites, don't use their cloud services. Just don't use Oracle for anything new, and work to get the fuck off of it for anything that remains. The only reason Oracle survives is because rich dumb fucks keep giving them money.
- balderdash 6mo ago
  A while ago we were looking at migrating ERP - netsuite was a not a good price proposition and candidly feels a bit dated - but when you mapped features it was pretty impressive and for a lot of business that have some complexity (multi-entity, multi-currency, multi site mfg or inventory), there is not a whole lot of good alternatives because you can't use quicken but you definitely don't want SAP
  - stego-tech 6mo ago
    The irony is that the ERP space is ripe for innovation and disruption, but nobody wants to get into ERP because it's a goddamn nightmare. Every business runs slightly differently than everyone else, and ERP tries to be this all-encompassing monolith. I wonder if the solution to ERP isn't just targeted microservices exposing data via APIs...
    - balderdash 6mo ago
      yeah but i think that is the problem - everyone wants to customize / thinks their business is super unique, but honestly the customization is what makes ERP so painful. industry customization is important (motels are different than a small manufacturer) but for SMEs a standard solution that fits their industry is the can be implemented in a manner that's not akin to open heart surgery would be far more valuable to these firms.
saidnooneever 6mo ago
oracle is deeply embedded in enterprise and a lot of other enterprise solutions also use it. they have no value proposition for startups. likely just on existing clients and ppl who end up using stuff that requires their products.
benced 6mo ago
If you are buying GPUs today, they really are massively cheaper than other clouds.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  Until you become addicted, and then plan for the price to spike.
  - progbits 6mo ago
    If you are not yet in Oracle's clutches you have to be extremely naive or shortsighted to be using Oracle cloud. Obviously the low prices are because they have a shit product and shit reputation, and the moment they think they captured large enough audience they are going to hike them
    - kstrauser 6mo ago
      Yup. They're not offering those prices out of generosity. They're offering them because that's the most they can charge big players who understand what it means to buy from Oracle.
diogomqbm 6mo ago
i know they're also one of the AI data center providers of this era. Making partnerships with NVIDIA and helping GPUs get to market.
sellmethepen 6mo ago
There's more to it than just pure databases. They have a pretty large vertical of SaaS apps, specifically ERP. Oracle Saas (their ERP platform) is used by thousands of customers - these are systems implemented with SI's and run super critical functions like payroll, manufacturing, etc really hard to rip out once they're put in place. This has been fueling their growth for some time, and seems like OCI is picking up now from a pure infra POV. But yeah I don't think I'd ever use any Oracle components voluntarily or at the very least find ways to have exit paths
- balderdash 6mo ago
  on this point the netsuite ecosystem is huge and there are not that many options for SME's that are too big/complex for inacct or quicken (even campfire/rillet etc) but don't want to get anywhere near SAP, Infor, IFS, oracle (not netsuite).
  - drillsteps5 6mo ago
    Oracle has also owned JD Edwards since early 2000s which is in many large legacy companies (I think a lot of them are still in mainframes).
- x0x0 6mo ago
  Yeah, many of these comments are extremely misinformed. Oracle has been an application software vendor for a long time. For example, Oracle sell Opera. Opera manages hotels, both individual and chains. And integrates with their amusement park management software. People complain about them, but software like that is much closer to an sdk than a finished product. It is generally customized for each buyer for their needs. And the quality of the customization is more on the buyer than on Oracle. Oracle have a giant suite of these products for POS, guest experiences, amusement parks, hospitality, marketing (b2b and b2c), etc. And companies buy from Oracle because they're not good at making software and because you do leverage some economies of scale.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    Enterprise software as an SDK with a demo is a perfect way of explaining it - I'll have to remember that. Jira, installed fresh, is nice. Jira after it implements your enterprise disfunction, is a new level of hell Dante couldn't've dreamed of.
ventana 6mo ago
I assume you would use Oracle Cloud if, for whatever reason possibly related to legal or competition, you cannot use AWS, or GCP, or Azure. It's hard for me to imagine a startup that needs cloud and would onboard to Oracle Cloud and not to any of the top 3 providers instead.
drillsteps5 6mo ago
Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for 20+ years. Oracle the company specializes in acquiring software, integrating it in their ecosystem, selling the installations, and living off the recurring licensing fees (NetSuite is one example).
- cloudfudge 6mo ago
  The focus not being the DB for 20 years is mostly true, with the exception that all of their applications are well-served by having a very scalable and very bulletproof database in-house.
daneel_w 6mo ago
From small-scale use over the course of several years, I've found their "cloud" (OCI) to be a solid and well-planned product. Additionally, I've experienced not one single outage or hiccup so far (Stockholm region).
amiga386 6mo ago
> Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle Oracle buys smaller enterprise companies with rich customers that were already using Oracle DB, or makes them rely on it, then cashes in on licensing. So for example, they bought Micros (most EFTPOS terminals in the world are powered by them, I think), they bought Cerner (big supplier of IT to healthcare companies), they bought PeopleSoft. If your big company isn't using SAP, it's probably using that. Mundane but essential things for large businesses: CRM, ERP, payroll/HR. So that's what you'd use Oracle for. Or perhaps you wouldn't use Oracle, then Oracle would buy your IT supplier and either you have to change your IT supplier (costing you millions) or congrats you're an Oracle customer now.
- bequanna 6mo ago
  It sounds like you don't use Oracle, Oracle uses you.
- oogali 6mo ago
  Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them. For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1]. Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly. EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release: > Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries. Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core. Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013. 1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-tekelec-032513.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-te... 2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07-Verizon-Syracuse-NY-Utica-NY-Oracle-STP-LT-Switch-Retirement-Notice.pdf https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07... 3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-markets/vps/ind-letters/2023-11/IL23-0824.pdf https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-market... 4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-wins-sbc-signaling-deal https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-win... 5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view
ralphc 6mo ago
I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."
MattGaiser 6mo ago
Many organizations are extremely low capacity. I am aware of a company that has merely a few hundred gigabytes of data and is stuck on Oracle.
rwmj 6mo ago
I actually sat through an Oracle sales presentation around 1999 (I was the product engineer, along with company executives) and honestly it sounded pretty good. At the time we were using Lotus Notes for a database so even pencil and paper would have been better. Oracle absolutely was the market leader and there was no doubt about its technical chops. Oracle Parallel Server could run active-active across two sites separated by many miles of fibre, which was a remarkable thing to do back then. Oracle came back with a quote that was so far outside what our company could afford that we went with Informix (not a cheap database). Pretty lucky escape. A year or two later I ported the whole stack to PostgreSQL and it worked absolutely fine since we didn't have that much scale. Unfortunately when I left the guy who took over was a huge Informix fan so he deleted all the PG code and went back.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  Oracle was (and I assume is) able to provide "hardware" level support for their software, if you paid enough and your database was shitting itself at 2 AM, they'd have engineers on the phone and maybe on the plane to get you back up and running. For smaller companies and businesses? Not needed. For big multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap.
cool_dude85 6mo ago
I think the big use case for Oracle products are for businesses that are not in the IT space. A lot of reasons for this, a big one is the breadth of Oracle's products is very solid and, similar to Microsoft, you can be sold on Oracle solving all your database needs across your business: HR, asset management, customer relationship stuff, your actual business, all with a single vendor. Non-IT management will be told that it all integrates seamlessly, you don't need to hire IT staff dealing with software from 10 different vendors, just the one. For instance, I work in the utility industry. They offer specialized utility-specific software for managing data from our meters, our customer and billing system, asset management, HR, accounting, reporting from all these systems. Even more specialized stuff exists that we don'tbuy. No doubt if you had a different use case, Oracle would sell us on their ability to handle it. I think this is the model they follow. They are not trying to sell to startups, tech platforms, software companies, etc. They are trying to sell to your bank.
TheGRS 6mo ago
Totally agreed looking at them from a development and cutting-edge viewpoint. They own what was once very competitive platforms and languages, which they still support. They have largely transitioned into rent seekers. From the investment standpoint they still have a lot of value to siphon from, but its all rent seeking behavior, its not producing new ecosystems like them or Sun did in the past. Long-term blue chip play. Though all the Paramount stuff is loosely coupled to them now, so tough to say if its a good long-term play anymore.
mbloom1915 6mo ago
yeah... their "value prop" is keeping monoliths trapped and embedded in their systems with customizations out the wazoo. slow, painful death
willio58 6mo ago
> From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives. This is basically it. You wouldn’t want to use oracle for anything, and they know that. What they also know, very very well, is that they can get their fingers into high-dollar orgs and shmooze people that have little knowledge on the matter to lock themselves into basically never ending contracts for garbage products. Oracle is a perfect distillation of capitalism in that way.
tchalla 6mo ago
The answer to your question lies in Oracle 10K.
mghackerlady 6mo ago
maybeeee SPARC based Solaris? Probably not a major usecase nowadays (Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun) but it seems to be limping along
- andyjohnson0 6mo ago
  > Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun My recollection is that they also qanted Sun's storage hardware products, to sell alongside their existing DB software.
  - mghackerlady 6mo ago
    that was also a reason, but you can't convince me Oracle wasn't primarily in it for Java
elif 6mo ago
They aren't a database company. They are a full spectrum B2B SaaS contract company. They make far more by up selling services than they do from databases total. Half of their stack will run on whatever db you want.
lateforwork 6mo ago
Oracle database has unparalleled scalability. Ask someone who works at Microsoft SQL Server division what their bug database looks like. They will tell you that a single SQL Server instance cannot scale to the entire SQL Server division. Oracle on the other hand has a single database for the entire company. No other database is this scalable. But Oracle is not just a database company. Oracle started as a database company, but today they are more an applications company than a database company. They have ERP back-office applications (finance, operations, HR), and CRM front-office applications (sales, marketing, service). Oracle bought a large number of applications software companies such as Seibel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, NetSuite and Cerner to become this big. Of course Oracle is also a major cloud services provider and provide AI superclusters, and GPU instances from NVIDIA and AMD (context for today's layoffs).
- kpil 6mo ago
  I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers. Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.
  - topspin 6mo ago
    The original question does discount the capability of Oracle's database too much, as only something "golf executives" buy. When you have a large problem that is best solved with a relational model, Oracle delivers and can indeed be worth all the money and license hell involved.
jjav 6mo ago
In a world of continuous change, at least we can always rely on oracle being consistently evil.
roncesvalles 6mo ago
Also, their inability to make a NewSQL DB rivaling Spanner or Cockroach (they basically just had to clone one of these or acquire Cockroach) puts them out of any serious competition for the future of databases. Their "Oracle Autonomous DB" ain't it.
yxhuvud 6mo ago
You are missing the business model - buy has-been platforms and frameworks and charge big bucks for maintenance. Customers eventually manage to migrate off you, but it is fine cause you buy some other has-been stack and then overcharge for that.
bdangubic 6mo ago
moat
elorant 6mo ago
Support, that's what you'd use them for. Something breaks and your team can't figure it out? You make a phone call and someone will be there in a jiffy to work things out. And if he can't either they'll fly a whole team from a different city or even a different country until they solve it.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
outside2344 6mo ago
They do own some vertically integrated products like PeopleSoft that use these lower level foundational pieces. But I agree, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would use Oracle outside of golf and sailing bribes.
temporallobe 6mo ago
Oracle is used for mission-critical legacy applications, which is common in the federal government IT space. Replacing with OSS is a nontrivial undertaking, but it is happening. For the most part, replacing Oracle’s Java with OpenJDK is relatively painless, but some agencies preferred the licensed version because it includes support. Replacing a database, however, is a much scarier task, even when you have experienced and competent DBAs.
xtracto 6mo ago
I just read a tech "policy" document of one of the largest packaged food makers in Mexico. They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support. There are A Lot of businesses thar are happy to burn cash for a false sense of security. They don't know better.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  > They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support. Hahahahaha. Yes, by all means, call IBM or Oracle and ask them to compensate you for downtime. Support, sure, of a sort. If you throw enough money at them, you'll get an answer from them in an arbitrarily short time frame.
pjmlp 6mo ago
Cool stuff like distributed transactions, the database as OS with raw disks, the database as application platform with APEX. Then again, I guess I am one of those folks that enjoys cool toys, that only big corporations pay for.
ModernMech 6mo ago
I have a cousin who owns a business that decided to contract with Oracle, and as he described this my first thought was “why tf would you ever sign an agreement with Oracle, don’t you know about them?” But as he described the whole dealings (for some SEO product, I’m not sure of the specifics) it became clear to me they bamboozled him, gave him a bait and switch, and left him on the hook for a huge bill he never thought he’d have to pay. So to answer your question I don’t think there is a value prop, I think it’s actually a giant grift.
vector_spaces 6mo ago
The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful. But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in North America. Their database product is very far from their only LOB.
s_dev 6mo ago
Oracle run a huge % of the worlds POS devices.
russellbeattie 6mo ago
If you're a massive organization and have need for a mission critical database that cannot fail for any reason, with massive scale and scalability, security, reliability, high availability, high throughput, etc., and you want instant expertise available to solve any DB problems, then you're not using Postgres, a cloud database or rolling your own noSQL solution. I'm talking about huge, billion dollar institutions like banks, financial services, governments, logistics, manufacturing, software, etc. These are the companies run by the "golf executives" who want guaranteed database dependability and are willing to pay for it. In this case, you'll use Oracle or IBM DB2. For example, if you're TikTok dealing with billions of interactions, or Boeing, maintaining critical databases of millions of parts, you'll be totally willing to spend huge amounts of money to make sure your data is rock solid, even if it's overpriced (Apparently, Microsoft is one of Oracle's biggest customers of all companies!)
SlightlyLeftPad 6mo ago
If you want to build a system of monolith services and be locked into a 30 year old waterfall development model, then Oracle is for you. I’ve had this argument with several DBAs. They always claim “Oracle is the most performant,” while quite possibly true technically, they also tend to run a single massive instance that inevitably leads to a complete failure of the site under heavy load. Oracle is often designed to be the single point of failure. I believe that is by design. The same problems can be solved with modern event driven architectures, better caching, horizontal dynamic scaling, etc.
- nocommandline 6mo ago
  > and be locked into a 30 year old waterfall development model, Oracle switched from Waterfall development model to sprint years ago. They also switched from yearly to quarterly releases (for their Apps) which means they deliver a lot of features in a year.
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    > They also switched from yearly to quarterly releases (for their Apps) which means they deliver a lot of features in a year. Without commenting on whether this is true of Oracle, that conclusion doesn't inherently follow from the given. If I'm driving 60 miles per hour, then recalculate it in miles per minute, that doesn't actually mean I'm going faster. Oracle could easily be delivering 1/8 a year's worth of features in 1/4 a year due to release process overhead for all I'd know.
- exidy 6mo ago
  I had to explain this to some slightly younger colleagues recently. It's hard to believe now, but in ye olde days hardware was not as cheap and abundant as it is now. So you invested heavily in your database servers and to justify the hardware and software cost, ran as many workloads as possible on it to spread the pain. This is also the same incentives that resulted in many classic architectures from 80s and 90s relying heavily on stored procedures. It was the only place where certain data could be crunched in a performant way. Middleware servers lacked the CPU and memory to crunch large datasets, and the network was more of a performance bottleneck.
bsder 6mo ago
> I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is. Legal blame transfer. Oracle has every single compliance checkbox you need for any certification you can name. So, if your end customer (generally BigCorp or BigGovt) wants "NitWit Certification v4007", you call up the Oracle sales rep, get a quote, and pass the cost along with a significant markup.
xz_tie 6mo ago
[dead]
ab_testing 6mo ago
I think saying that Oracle is a provider of database software is something that you hear from old technical folks who have not used Oracle since the 90s. In fact Oracle's revenue from database software is very tiny. Much of their revenue comes from enterprise and cloud software. If you are a publicly traded company who needs to report audited financial results every quarter to shareholders, there are less than 10 ERP software in world for that and Oracle owns 5 of those - Fusion, PeopleSoft, Netsuite, JDE and EBS. Also, in the last decade a big chunk of their revenue comes from cloud services where these enterprises move away from their physical hardware and onto the cloud. Here also, Oracle provides one of the most generous free limits compared to GCP, AWS and Azure. Also they provide some unique options that I have not seen in any other clouds like Bring Your Own License where you can keep running your old enterprise databases in the cloud with just paying for the compute . Few years back they also bought out Cerner which was the largest EHR company at that time and it pushed their head count by 28000. They grew their headcount massively during covid like any other software company and simultaneously took on too much debt to build datacenters. But with rising cost of these capex builds, they are in consolidation mode and reducing headcounts just like other companies.
sellmesoap 6mo ago
The technology is irrelevant, at one point in my career I worked for a ~200 person co. that was aquried by another massive (20,000+ seat) company who was even less useful than Oracle; trying to figure out the rough mechanics of why such a useless tower of people is built and maintained, I realized the magic: big juicy government contracts!

DetroitThrow 6mo ago

Well, if you're an elected official, and you're in charge of government organizations that could be used to enrich billionaire donors by using a donor's services - Oracle fits that niche very well!

jeffbee 6mo ago

Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.

newsoftheday 6mo ago
I posted a response from Gemini where I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?" and it seems it disagrees with your "nobody wants their terrible cloud" view.
- nemomarx 6mo ago
  you could post the citations?
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  Well, that clinches it.
- 9864247888754 6mo ago
  [dead]
silisili 6mo ago
I use it only for the free(for now) tier. I always thought AWS console was about the worst UI/UX could get. Not to be outdone, Oracle came along and said 'hold my beer.'
cloudfudge 6mo ago
Oracle Cloud isn't actually "terrible cloud", but it definitely isn't geared toward smaller users like startups and individuals. It's downright hostile to casual use. But for fortune 500 companies who don't mind being in bed with Oracle, the price can be right.

post-it 6mo ago

Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind. My hunch is that big consulting firms like CGI might use it, and therefore the customers of those firms use it? But I haven't worked at any of those.

lazide 6mo ago
It’s a common ‘large enterprise’ dependency often due to some internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you are right.
- rbanffy 6mo ago
  People also marry the database when a significant amount of logic is in stored procedures.
  - lazide 6mo ago
    Hard to do if it’s not present to use already?
pydry 6mo ago
I worked for one company that used it. Everybody on the ground hated it but the costs of migrating away were enormous because every system they relied upon was tightly coupled to every other system. It would have been a multiyear project to get off it. Their software wasn't just more expensive than using open source equivalents it was worse, too. It's just very, very sticky. At the same time the sales team wine and dine key decision makers and try to strike the fear of god in to them so they don't rock the boat.
- InsideOutSanta 6mo ago
  We heard you're planning to migrate away from Oracle. We understand, but unfortunately, that means we have to get rid of the 75% discount we gave you, so we'll make a decade of revenue in the two years it'll take you to get rid of us. Still planning to migrate away?

arethuza 6mo ago

They acquired a lot of applications - ERP, CRM, finance - I suspect actual database licensing revenues are only a small part of their revenues these days. Years ago I had some fun integrating with Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) - which is actually a pretty impressive beast if you need consolidated financial reporting!

Hizonner 6mo ago

They make a lot of money off of the cloud services and their layered "enterprise" applications. Selling "just the database" isn't what Oracle's been about for a very long time.

bilekas 6mo ago

It's exactly as you said. The dependency on old school legacy implementations that can't be turned off. To be fair to Microslop even they had the foresight to open source .net core and even try to bring some things to the open source community. Oracle actively turned into a patent troll.

paulddraper 6mo ago

NetSuite There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.

glenstein 6mo ago
Truth. I don't know of a better plug and play option than Netsuite for middle to big companies.

newsoftheday 6mo ago

[flagged]

afavour 6mo ago
...so what citations did it provide?
thorncorona 6mo ago
Did you validate anything you have posted?
sleepybrett 6mo ago
'percentage based growth' Sure if you have 5 customers and got 5 more, that would be 100% growth...
api 6mo ago
Google Cloud's bandwidth pricing is much more reasonable. That's one thing I see. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon still charge the standard big cloud absolutely ludicrous bandwidth markup, stuff like $0.08/gig. If you know what bandwidth actually costs, that's like $500/gallon gasoline. Oracle is still expensive relative to wholesale bandwidth but it's at least not absolutely insane.

imglorp 6mo ago

This feels correct. Their business model is squeezing anyone who can't migrate off their properties and suing the rest. Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?

toomuchtodo 6mo ago
> Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above? Short term shareholder equity gains during an over exuberant hype cycle you do not know when might repeat. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." -- Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince (symbolizing Wall Street's reckless persistence in risky lending despite signs of a market downturn) The Overvaluation Trap - https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap - December 2015 > The trap is an almost inevitable consequence of what many managers might regard as a blessing, because it occurs when the capital markets overvalue a company’s equity—and especially when stock overvaluation is common in a particular sector. In the following pages, we’ll describe the trap, show how it has played out in various industries, and suggest where it may be playing out once again. "If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Paul Newman Edit: tsunamifury wrote a prescient comment a decade ago, referencing the same hrb piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851527
jollymonATX 6mo ago
They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.
- riffraff 6mo ago
  but what would be the blast radius for ZFS? Most enterprises don't seem to be running ZFS with Linux, and the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either. Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.

vasco 6mo ago

Government contracts. You get good at bidding, there's money to be made there. And those bidding processes are way more than just the tech. That's their main value prop I think. Having the bureaucratic machine to bid and win contracts.

BoredPositron 6mo ago

It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System runs all oracle in the backend.

rbanffy 6mo ago
Indeed. Oracle runs on z/OS as well.

jvanderbot 6mo ago

Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies. The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

glitchc 6mo ago
The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.
bobthepanda 6mo ago
Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.
- wredcoll 6mo ago
  Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java
  - bobthepanda 6mo ago
    Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top > The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.
    - burnte 6mo ago
      > Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license. I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair. [1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.

torben-friis 6mo ago

>Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for You would use it to keep your job when your company goes with it against all technical recommendation due to the push of a higher up that wouldn't let the idea go for stupid or suspicious reasons.

gytisgreitai 6mo ago

Clearly you are in USA. It’s not how their business works and Startups are not their target. Lobbying governments across the world with questionable practices are

rockinghigh 6mo ago

Their revenue was $57.4 billion last year. Just in Q4; cloud revenue $6.7 billion, cloud infrastructure $3.0 billion, cloud application $3.7 billion, Fusion Cloud ERP $1.0 billion, NetSuite cloud ERP $1.0 billion.

mft_ 6mo ago

They sell to cash-rich organisations who are a bit clueless about technology and so can't or wouldn't want to either roll their own, or go with a better but smaller provider? e.g. I was unsurprised when I spotted that Novartis (no connection, btw) was deep in with Oracle. Big pharma, lots of money, typically-clueless-big-org-IT-leadership, etc. (LOL, Novartis also uses SAP.)

phendrenad2 6mo ago
I have a theory that being cash-rich creates an atmosphere of technological cluelessness, or more specifically weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of working at a top company. These executives display a unified front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition whenever said software has the smallest bug.
vachina 6mo ago
Precisely this. They prey on outsource-happy big orgs that have 1 million different SaaS all tied together by scotch tape (because their IT dept. is also outsourced)
whynotmaybe 6mo ago
And, their product have worked correctly for decades. So if you have a lot of money and don't want to take any risk you go the oracle route. It's not the best product today, but you won't have any surprise, except cost, that you can justify because it's oracle. Which is the same as using a tank to go grocery shopping because you're afraid of an accident on the way. You need everything in house to support a thank, special garage, specifically trained crew, specific fuel... And it's way harder to drive than a civic.
elzbardico 6mo ago
Non-tech companies have bigger fish to fry in cost optimization than IT infrastructure. For example, nobody buying, insuring and operating supertankers will care that much about Oracle licensing or even renewing a mainframe contract.

seanhunter 6mo ago

Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition. A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain features like online backups and certain replication configurations. At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case. Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues. [1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.

wilsonnb3 6mo ago
Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.
- seanhunter 6mo ago
  I remember talking to one tech leader at the time who described it as "surprisingly good, for a microsoft product" which sort of summed it up. But it had similar characteristics to sybase except more so because you had to run it on an NT server (iirc) and so there was an even harder cap on the scale of hardware you could run it on, whereas you could run oracle on really top-end sparc hardware that was way more powerful than anything that ran windows.
- wil421 6mo ago
  Depends if the director or VP liked Microsoft or not. I’ve worked at places that loved SQL Server and Microsoft server products in general. Others did not use them anywhere in their datacenter and wouldn’t have considered them. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft were very dependent on if the people in charged liked them. Not so much technical merits.

EliRivers 6mo ago

Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Marketing-Solution https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Mar... For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i. One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend. When the analysis was being conducted, the team grew concerned with the costs — both in terms of budget and disk I/O. Oracle licenses are incredibly expensive, and there would be a huge volume of CDR data written to and read from the database. Finally, it dawned on someone that the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in. In fact, a single, low-end Sun server with a few hundred megs of RAM could easily handle the CDR generation and application backend. Excited about their good news, they called up a meeting with the product managers. "We've discovered that we can deliver the product at a fraction of what our original estimates were." The managers left the room, some looking happy, others just looking incredulous. Later that day, Jason got a call from the VP of Engineering. "Jason, while I understand what you're proposing is technically valid, you have upset the marketing team." "I'm sorry... did I say something?" "It's just that they've promised the customer that our product would use Oracle 8i, and now they're going to be made liars. Can you just humor me and add Oracle 8i to the design somewhere?" "Uh..." "I have enough trouble politically as it is. I really appreciate this favor!" click After delivering the news to his team, they argued a bit on what to use Oracle for. Ultimately they delivered the final product with an Oracle database that had a single table which was used to store a handful of configuration parameters. It was the most expensive individual table Jason had ever created in his entire career.

trelane 6mo ago

Java is used a lot, but not Oracle's version. One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.

vips7L 6mo ago
They’re all Oracle’s version. OpenJdk is Oracle’s implementation of the JLS. They’re just not using Oracle’s build of OpenJdk.
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  Almost all. Embedded folks with real time offerings like PTC, Aicas, microEJ,.... have their own implementations, with real time support, bare metal deployments. Folks like IBM and Azul nowadays take parts of OpenJDK, mostly standard library, and add their own runtimes instead.

mr_mitm 6mo ago

Aren't their databases behemoths that satisfy requirements (especially of regulatory nature) of large banks and such? I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup.

chasd00 6mo ago
> I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup. that's right, Oracle's databases are for things like Visa and Mastercard transactions and maybe the US IRS and Social Security systems of record.

faangguyindia 6mo ago

Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your services in Golang.

stego-tech 6mo ago

It's stickiness. Their biggest asset is ERP. That's how they get orgs locked in, because migrating ERP systems after deployment can take decades of work and cost multitudes more than just eating Oracle's renewal increases. Could orgs jettison them into the sun? Totally. Is it fiscally sensible? Yeah, absolutely. Can you sell that to the board? Nope. The best way to kill Oracle - because such a toxic organization absolutely deserves to fail - is to avoid building anything atop their infrastructure ever again going forward. Don't use their Java tooling, don't use their software suites, don't use their cloud services. Just don't use Oracle for anything new, and work to get the fuck off of it for anything that remains. The only reason Oracle survives is because rich dumb fucks keep giving them money.

balderdash 6mo ago
A while ago we were looking at migrating ERP - netsuite was a not a good price proposition and candidly feels a bit dated - but when you mapped features it was pretty impressive and for a lot of business that have some complexity (multi-entity, multi-currency, multi site mfg or inventory), there is not a whole lot of good alternatives because you can't use quicken but you definitely don't want SAP
- stego-tech 6mo ago
  The irony is that the ERP space is ripe for innovation and disruption, but nobody wants to get into ERP because it's a goddamn nightmare. Every business runs slightly differently than everyone else, and ERP tries to be this all-encompassing monolith. I wonder if the solution to ERP isn't just targeted microservices exposing data via APIs...
  - balderdash 6mo ago
    yeah but i think that is the problem - everyone wants to customize / thinks their business is super unique, but honestly the customization is what makes ERP so painful. industry customization is important (motels are different than a small manufacturer) but for SMEs a standard solution that fits their industry is the can be implemented in a manner that's not akin to open heart surgery would be far more valuable to these firms.

saidnooneever 6mo ago

oracle is deeply embedded in enterprise and a lot of other enterprise solutions also use it. they have no value proposition for startups. likely just on existing clients and ppl who end up using stuff that requires their products.

benced 6mo ago

If you are buying GPUs today, they really are massively cheaper than other clouds.

kstrauser 6mo ago
Until you become addicted, and then plan for the price to spike.
- progbits 6mo ago
  If you are not yet in Oracle's clutches you have to be extremely naive or shortsighted to be using Oracle cloud. Obviously the low prices are because they have a shit product and shit reputation, and the moment they think they captured large enough audience they are going to hike them
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    Yup. They're not offering those prices out of generosity. They're offering them because that's the most they can charge big players who understand what it means to buy from Oracle.

diogomqbm 6mo ago

i know they're also one of the AI data center providers of this era. Making partnerships with NVIDIA and helping GPUs get to market.

sellmethepen 6mo ago

There's more to it than just pure databases. They have a pretty large vertical of SaaS apps, specifically ERP. Oracle Saas (their ERP platform) is used by thousands of customers - these are systems implemented with SI's and run super critical functions like payroll, manufacturing, etc really hard to rip out once they're put in place. This has been fueling their growth for some time, and seems like OCI is picking up now from a pure infra POV. But yeah I don't think I'd ever use any Oracle components voluntarily or at the very least find ways to have exit paths

balderdash 6mo ago
on this point the netsuite ecosystem is huge and there are not that many options for SME's that are too big/complex for inacct or quicken (even campfire/rillet etc) but don't want to get anywhere near SAP, Infor, IFS, oracle (not netsuite).
- drillsteps5 6mo ago
  Oracle has also owned JD Edwards since early 2000s which is in many large legacy companies (I think a lot of them are still in mainframes).
x0x0 6mo ago
Yeah, many of these comments are extremely misinformed. Oracle has been an application software vendor for a long time. For example, Oracle sell Opera. Opera manages hotels, both individual and chains. And integrates with their amusement park management software. People complain about them, but software like that is much closer to an sdk than a finished product. It is generally customized for each buyer for their needs. And the quality of the customization is more on the buyer than on Oracle. Oracle have a giant suite of these products for POS, guest experiences, amusement parks, hospitality, marketing (b2b and b2c), etc. And companies buy from Oracle because they're not good at making software and because you do leverage some economies of scale.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  Enterprise software as an SDK with a demo is a perfect way of explaining it - I'll have to remember that. Jira, installed fresh, is nice. Jira after it implements your enterprise disfunction, is a new level of hell Dante couldn't've dreamed of.

ventana 6mo ago

I assume you would use Oracle Cloud if, for whatever reason possibly related to legal or competition, you cannot use AWS, or GCP, or Azure. It's hard for me to imagine a startup that needs cloud and would onboard to Oracle Cloud and not to any of the top 3 providers instead.

drillsteps5 6mo ago

Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for 20+ years. Oracle the company specializes in acquiring software, integrating it in their ecosystem, selling the installations, and living off the recurring licensing fees (NetSuite is one example).

cloudfudge 6mo ago
The focus not being the DB for 20 years is mostly true, with the exception that all of their applications are well-served by having a very scalable and very bulletproof database in-house.

daneel_w 6mo ago

From small-scale use over the course of several years, I've found their "cloud" (OCI) to be a solid and well-planned product. Additionally, I've experienced not one single outage or hiccup so far (Stockholm region).

amiga386 6mo ago

> Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle Oracle buys smaller enterprise companies with rich customers that were already using Oracle DB, or makes them rely on it, then cashes in on licensing. So for example, they bought Micros (most EFTPOS terminals in the world are powered by them, I think), they bought Cerner (big supplier of IT to healthcare companies), they bought PeopleSoft. If your big company isn't using SAP, it's probably using that. Mundane but essential things for large businesses: CRM, ERP, payroll/HR. So that's what you'd use Oracle for. Or perhaps you wouldn't use Oracle, then Oracle would buy your IT supplier and either you have to change your IT supplier (costing you millions) or congrats you're an Oracle customer now.

bequanna 6mo ago
It sounds like you don't use Oracle, Oracle uses you.
oogali 6mo ago
Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them. For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1]. Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly. EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release: > Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries. Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core. Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013. 1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-tekelec-032513.html https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-te... 2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07-Verizon-Syracuse-NY-Utica-NY-Oracle-STP-LT-Switch-Retirement-Notice.pdf https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07... 3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-markets/vps/ind-letters/2023-11/IL23-0824.pdf https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-market... 4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-wins-sbc-signaling-deal https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-win... 5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view

ralphc 6mo ago

I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."

MattGaiser 6mo ago

Many organizations are extremely low capacity. I am aware of a company that has merely a few hundred gigabytes of data and is stuck on Oracle.

rwmj 6mo ago

I actually sat through an Oracle sales presentation around 1999 (I was the product engineer, along with company executives) and honestly it sounded pretty good. At the time we were using Lotus Notes for a database so even pencil and paper would have been better. Oracle absolutely was the market leader and there was no doubt about its technical chops. Oracle Parallel Server could run active-active across two sites separated by many miles of fibre, which was a remarkable thing to do back then. Oracle came back with a quote that was so far outside what our company could afford that we went with Informix (not a cheap database). Pretty lucky escape. A year or two later I ported the whole stack to PostgreSQL and it worked absolutely fine since we didn't have that much scale. Unfortunately when I left the guy who took over was a huge Informix fan so he deleted all the PG code and went back.

bombcar 6mo ago
Oracle was (and I assume is) able to provide "hardware" level support for their software, if you paid enough and your database was shitting itself at 2 AM, they'd have engineers on the phone and maybe on the plane to get you back up and running. For smaller companies and businesses? Not needed. For big multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap.

cool_dude85 6mo ago

I think the big use case for Oracle products are for businesses that are not in the IT space. A lot of reasons for this, a big one is the breadth of Oracle's products is very solid and, similar to Microsoft, you can be sold on Oracle solving all your database needs across your business: HR, asset management, customer relationship stuff, your actual business, all with a single vendor. Non-IT management will be told that it all integrates seamlessly, you don't need to hire IT staff dealing with software from 10 different vendors, just the one. For instance, I work in the utility industry. They offer specialized utility-specific software for managing data from our meters, our customer and billing system, asset management, HR, accounting, reporting from all these systems. Even more specialized stuff exists that we don'tbuy. No doubt if you had a different use case, Oracle would sell us on their ability to handle it. I think this is the model they follow. They are not trying to sell to startups, tech platforms, software companies, etc. They are trying to sell to your bank.

TheGRS 6mo ago

Totally agreed looking at them from a development and cutting-edge viewpoint. They own what was once very competitive platforms and languages, which they still support. They have largely transitioned into rent seekers. From the investment standpoint they still have a lot of value to siphon from, but its all rent seeking behavior, its not producing new ecosystems like them or Sun did in the past. Long-term blue chip play. Though all the Paramount stuff is loosely coupled to them now, so tough to say if its a good long-term play anymore.

mbloom1915 6mo ago

yeah... their "value prop" is keeping monoliths trapped and embedded in their systems with customizations out the wazoo. slow, painful death

willio58 6mo ago

> From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives. This is basically it. You wouldn’t want to use oracle for anything, and they know that. What they also know, very very well, is that they can get their fingers into high-dollar orgs and shmooze people that have little knowledge on the matter to lock themselves into basically never ending contracts for garbage products. Oracle is a perfect distillation of capitalism in that way.

tchalla 6mo ago

The answer to your question lies in Oracle 10K.

mghackerlady 6mo ago

maybeeee SPARC based Solaris? Probably not a major usecase nowadays (Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun) but it seems to be limping along

andyjohnson0 6mo ago
> Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun My recollection is that they also qanted Sun's storage hardware products, to sell alongside their existing DB software.
- mghackerlady 6mo ago
  that was also a reason, but you can't convince me Oracle wasn't primarily in it for Java

elif 6mo ago

They aren't a database company. They are a full spectrum B2B SaaS contract company. They make far more by up selling services than they do from databases total. Half of their stack will run on whatever db you want.

lateforwork 6mo ago

Oracle database has unparalleled scalability. Ask someone who works at Microsoft SQL Server division what their bug database looks like. They will tell you that a single SQL Server instance cannot scale to the entire SQL Server division. Oracle on the other hand has a single database for the entire company. No other database is this scalable. But Oracle is not just a database company. Oracle started as a database company, but today they are more an applications company than a database company. They have ERP back-office applications (finance, operations, HR), and CRM front-office applications (sales, marketing, service). Oracle bought a large number of applications software companies such as Seibel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, NetSuite and Cerner to become this big. Of course Oracle is also a major cloud services provider and provide AI superclusters, and GPU instances from NVIDIA and AMD (context for today's layoffs).

kpil 6mo ago
I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers. Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.
- topspin 6mo ago
  The original question does discount the capability of Oracle's database too much, as only something "golf executives" buy. When you have a large problem that is best solved with a relational model, Oracle delivers and can indeed be worth all the money and license hell involved.

jjav 6mo ago

In a world of continuous change, at least we can always rely on oracle being consistently evil.

roncesvalles 6mo ago

Also, their inability to make a NewSQL DB rivaling Spanner or Cockroach (they basically just had to clone one of these or acquire Cockroach) puts them out of any serious competition for the future of databases. Their "Oracle Autonomous DB" ain't it.

yxhuvud 6mo ago

You are missing the business model - buy has-been platforms and frameworks and charge big bucks for maintenance. Customers eventually manage to migrate off you, but it is fine cause you buy some other has-been stack and then overcharge for that.

bdangubic 6mo ago

moat

elorant 6mo ago

Support, that's what you'd use them for. Something breaks and your team can't figure it out? You make a phone call and someone will be there in a jiffy to work things out. And if he can't either they'll fly a whole team from a different city or even a different country until they solve it.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

outside2344 6mo ago

They do own some vertically integrated products like PeopleSoft that use these lower level foundational pieces. But I agree, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would use Oracle outside of golf and sailing bribes.

temporallobe 6mo ago

Oracle is used for mission-critical legacy applications, which is common in the federal government IT space. Replacing with OSS is a nontrivial undertaking, but it is happening. For the most part, replacing Oracle’s Java with OpenJDK is relatively painless, but some agencies preferred the licensed version because it includes support. Replacing a database, however, is a much scarier task, even when you have experienced and competent DBAs.

xtracto 6mo ago

I just read a tech "policy" document of one of the largest packaged food makers in Mexico. They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support. There are A Lot of businesses thar are happy to burn cash for a false sense of security. They don't know better.

kstrauser 6mo ago
> They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support. Hahahahaha. Yes, by all means, call IBM or Oracle and ask them to compensate you for downtime. Support, sure, of a sort. If you throw enough money at them, you'll get an answer from them in an arbitrarily short time frame.

pjmlp 6mo ago

Cool stuff like distributed transactions, the database as OS with raw disks, the database as application platform with APEX. Then again, I guess I am one of those folks that enjoys cool toys, that only big corporations pay for.

ModernMech 6mo ago

I have a cousin who owns a business that decided to contract with Oracle, and as he described this my first thought was “why tf would you ever sign an agreement with Oracle, don’t you know about them?” But as he described the whole dealings (for some SEO product, I’m not sure of the specifics) it became clear to me they bamboozled him, gave him a bait and switch, and left him on the hook for a huge bill he never thought he’d have to pay. So to answer your question I don’t think there is a value prop, I think it’s actually a giant grift.

vector_spaces 6mo ago

The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful. But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in North America. Their database product is very far from their only LOB.

s_dev 6mo ago

Oracle run a huge % of the worlds POS devices.

russellbeattie 6mo ago

If you're a massive organization and have need for a mission critical database that cannot fail for any reason, with massive scale and scalability, security, reliability, high availability, high throughput, etc., and you want instant expertise available to solve any DB problems, then you're not using Postgres, a cloud database or rolling your own noSQL solution. I'm talking about huge, billion dollar institutions like banks, financial services, governments, logistics, manufacturing, software, etc. These are the companies run by the "golf executives" who want guaranteed database dependability and are willing to pay for it. In this case, you'll use Oracle or IBM DB2. For example, if you're TikTok dealing with billions of interactions, or Boeing, maintaining critical databases of millions of parts, you'll be totally willing to spend huge amounts of money to make sure your data is rock solid, even if it's overpriced (Apparently, Microsoft is one of Oracle's biggest customers of all companies!)

SlightlyLeftPad 6mo ago

If you want to build a system of monolith services and be locked into a 30 year old waterfall development model, then Oracle is for you. I’ve had this argument with several DBAs. They always claim “Oracle is the most performant,” while quite possibly true technically, they also tend to run a single massive instance that inevitably leads to a complete failure of the site under heavy load. Oracle is often designed to be the single point of failure. I believe that is by design. The same problems can be solved with modern event driven architectures, better caching, horizontal dynamic scaling, etc.

nocommandline 6mo ago
> and be locked into a 30 year old waterfall development model, Oracle switched from Waterfall development model to sprint years ago. They also switched from yearly to quarterly releases (for their Apps) which means they deliver a lot of features in a year.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  > They also switched from yearly to quarterly releases (for their Apps) which means they deliver a lot of features in a year. Without commenting on whether this is true of Oracle, that conclusion doesn't inherently follow from the given. If I'm driving 60 miles per hour, then recalculate it in miles per minute, that doesn't actually mean I'm going faster. Oracle could easily be delivering 1/8 a year's worth of features in 1/4 a year due to release process overhead for all I'd know.
exidy 6mo ago
I had to explain this to some slightly younger colleagues recently. It's hard to believe now, but in ye olde days hardware was not as cheap and abundant as it is now. So you invested heavily in your database servers and to justify the hardware and software cost, ran as many workloads as possible on it to spread the pain. This is also the same incentives that resulted in many classic architectures from 80s and 90s relying heavily on stored procedures. It was the only place where certain data could be crunched in a performant way. Middleware servers lacked the CPU and memory to crunch large datasets, and the network was more of a performance bottleneck.

bsder 6mo ago

> I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is. Legal blame transfer. Oracle has every single compliance checkbox you need for any certification you can name. So, if your end customer (generally BigCorp or BigGovt) wants "NitWit Certification v4007", you call up the Oracle sales rep, get a quote, and pass the cost along with a significant markup.

xz_tie 6mo ago

[dead]

ab_testing 6mo ago

I think saying that Oracle is a provider of database software is something that you hear from old technical folks who have not used Oracle since the 90s. In fact Oracle's revenue from database software is very tiny. Much of their revenue comes from enterprise and cloud software. If you are a publicly traded company who needs to report audited financial results every quarter to shareholders, there are less than 10 ERP software in world for that and Oracle owns 5 of those - Fusion, PeopleSoft, Netsuite, JDE and EBS. Also, in the last decade a big chunk of their revenue comes from cloud services where these enterprises move away from their physical hardware and onto the cloud. Here also, Oracle provides one of the most generous free limits compared to GCP, AWS and Azure. Also they provide some unique options that I have not seen in any other clouds like Bring Your Own License where you can keep running your old enterprise databases in the cloud with just paying for the compute . Few years back they also bought out Cerner which was the largest EHR company at that time and it pushed their head count by 28000. They grew their headcount massively during covid like any other software company and simultaneously took on too much debt to build datacenters. But with rising cost of these capex builds, they are in consolidation mode and reducing headcounts just like other companies.

sellmesoap 6mo ago

The technology is irrelevant, at one point in my career I worked for a ~200 person co. that was aquried by another massive (20,000+ seat) company who was even less useful than Oracle; trying to figure out the rough mechanics of why such a useless tower of people is built and maintained, I realized the magic: big juicy government contracts!