6 ms·

Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals

27 points by mitmads 14y ago

therealarmen 14y ago
Congratulations to Datastax's PR team, they did a wonderful job getting this reporter to pit them against almighty Oracle. In reality Oracle will die from a thousand cuts, not just NoSQL but other cheaper (and more reliable) alternatives such as SQL Server, Postgres, etc.
- ramanujan 14y ago
  Datastax, Datastax. Must have appeared 20 times in the piece. I'm sure they are a great company but Oracle's real problem is Postgres (and, to a lesser extent, SQLite and the various MySQL forks). Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs to sidetrack development for a few years like they did with MySQL.
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs There's no single Postgres dev, it's been community-driven from the start and the various postgres companies mostly provide support. So there's nobody to pay $1bn to really. If you look at the contributors page[0], out of 6 "core devs" there are 5 different companies, with EnterpriseDB being "overrepresented" at 2 core from the company, plus a pair of "major contributors" out of a truckload. And these people are probably Postgres devs first and foremost. Not Tom Lane or Josh Berkus, but even if Oracle bought out EnterpriseDB they might just cash in and work on Postgres from an other company. [0] http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
  - mbesto 14y ago
    MySQL is a very very small drop in the ocean that is Oracle. Competing with Postgres is a non-issue for them. Oracle's big problem is SAP.[1] [1]http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applications/sap-well-be-no-2-database-player-by-2015/232300472 http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applica...
- Toshio 14y ago
  Somehow - sql server and - reliable don't really belong in the same sentence.
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    Do you have any citations or information to indicate that? My understanding from the sqlserver DBAs that I know that the platform is rock solid. Have you heard otherwise? Genuinely interested.
    - Toshio 14y ago
      I've seen several sql server shops with severe performance problems where the in-house DBAs had no clue what had hit them. Different DB engines deal with multi-version read consistency in different ways, Postgres does a defensive copy-on-update, Oracle falls back on rollback segments; unfortunately sql server escalates page locks to table-wide locks, and then performance goes downhill from there. If your friends don't experience any problems, I would venture to guess they must be running small databases, or databases where the workload is 90% reads 10% writes.
      - kogir 14y ago
        Having actually deployed and used SQL Server extensively, I know how it handles "multi-version read consistency": As I tell it to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx In addition to setting a database level default, you can even have it behave differently per connection. Snapshot isolation will never lock, period. SQL Server is actually quite capable, and has the fantastic tooling that cheaper alternatives like PostgreSQL lack.
        Toshio 14y ago
        Care to say how big your database is, and what your workload looks like (reads vs. writes)?
    - EwanToo 14y ago
chris_wot 14y ago
This is what happens with companies who get too slow to innovate. Oracles best days are behind them, I feel.
- ebiester 14y ago
  I don't even know if it's that Oracle has slowed, but rather their product has become too complex for them to sustainably innovate. They tried acquiring other options for the low end, but it hasn't worked. (Berkeley DB is theirs, for example.) That said, there will always been a need for the product Oracle provides in the largest of companies. NoSQL isn't going to be running reports on the fortune 500 anytime in the next two decades, and neither is Postgres, as much as I like it. Death by a thousand cuts will probably still be profitable for decades.
  - taligent 14y ago
    I work for an enterprise company (10K employees) and you are spot on. Oracle will forever dominant HR, Payroll, SCM, Billing, FM etc type systems where more often than not they have custom software on top of it that has been built exclusively for Oracle. There is simply no good reason to switch. If anything the threat to Oracle will come from hosted apps e.g. Salesforce. But what I've been seeing in our company is MongoDB dominating front end web apps and Datastax/Cassandra for more of the big data, analytics type workloads. Oracle should be far more concerned with Amazon Web Services.
    - ams6110 14y ago
      If you can drop in a NoSQL backend replacement for Oracle in your application, you never needed Oracle to begin with.
    - benbataille 14y ago
      I think your analysis is spot on. Big companies don't want to house large IT infrastructure anymore. It seems too costly in the long run and benefits are difficult to explain to the board. Consequently, you already see companies moving what was before considered core infrastructure to the cloud and the trend is probably going to increase. Deploying a VM on EC2 or Azure is easy, quick and cheap enough considering you don't have to house as many talents as before in the IT department. As companies move to cloud based services, they don't deal with databases anymore, the people providing the solution (we don't even talk about software anymore, that's the current level of abstraction) does. Problem is amongst the cloud based service providers, few are Oracle shop. That's the reason Oracle is now trying to position itself in the cloud through acquisitions (like Nebula today). Unfortunately, they are a bit late to the game.
taligent 14y ago
Actually I suspect the reason Datastax is growing is less because of Cassandra but more because they are one of the only cohesive enterprise class database, analytics and search platforms around. Having Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr in a tightly coupled, well supported package is pretty compelling.
- 3pt14159 14y ago
  See an article about that would actually be compelling, instead of inspiring nerd rage when citing Datastax (founded in 2010) for the coming downfall of Oracle.
Vivtek 14y ago
It couldn't happen to nicer people... After my last upgrade of the Java virtual machine on my laptop, I found the installer had kindly installed the Ask toolbar on all my browsers, too. It left me with quite the bad taste in my mouth.
kaffiene 14y ago
The sooner Oracle dies and hands Java over to someone less evil, the better.
nodata 14y ago
Oracle isn't a database company anymore.
- wereHamster 14y ago
  A law firm perhaps?
  - arethuza 14y ago
    Applications and services.
    - alexkus 14y ago
      Along with their own database and operating system a la IBM. It's a good model to be spread over multiple segments: hardware/software/services. Bad quarters in one segment are usually covered by good quarters in another.
lominming 14y ago
This is obviously a PR article. Oracle is not just a database company anymore. Comparing Oracle to a 100 people company does not make much sense either.
gizzlon 14y ago
As much as I dislike Oracle, this article is pure crap. It's only general speculation with no information or value. Then it starts talking about Datastax like they are the ones causing these (made up?) problems for Orcale.
account_taken 14y ago
All I can say is DBase IV. If you don't innovate, you will get replaced. They're trying to do too much. Stick to your bread and butter.
OGinparadise 14y ago
Unless I made a mistake, Datastax was mentioned 11 times in an article about the "bleeding" of Oracle. Now Oracle has a gazillion other competitors so I am wondering. Considering how ethical Techcruch is...let's not say it.
pavs 14y ago
This is nothing but a PR piece by Datastax, from TC.

27 points by mitmads 14y ago

Congratulations to Datastax's PR team, they did a wonderful job getting this reporter to pit them against almighty Oracle. In reality Oracle will die from a thousand cuts, not just NoSQL but other cheaper (and more reliable) alternatives such as SQL Server, Postgres, etc.

ramanujan 14y ago
Datastax, Datastax. Must have appeared 20 times in the piece. I'm sure they are a great company but Oracle's real problem is Postgres (and, to a lesser extent, SQLite and the various MySQL forks). Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs to sidetrack development for a few years like they did with MySQL.
- masklinn 14y ago
  > Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs There's no single Postgres dev, it's been community-driven from the start and the various postgres companies mostly provide support. So there's nobody to pay $1bn to really. If you look at the contributors page[0], out of 6 "core devs" there are 5 different companies, with EnterpriseDB being "overrepresented" at 2 core from the company, plus a pair of "major contributors" out of a truckload. And these people are probably Postgres devs first and foremost. Not Tom Lane or Josh Berkus, but even if Oracle bought out EnterpriseDB they might just cash in and work on Postgres from an other company. [0] http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/ http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
- mbesto 14y ago
  MySQL is a very very small drop in the ocean that is Oracle. Competing with Postgres is a non-issue for them. Oracle's big problem is SAP.[1] [1]http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applications/sap-well-be-no-2-database-player-by-2015/232300472 http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applica...
Toshio 14y ago
Somehow - sql server and - reliable don't really belong in the same sentence.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  Do you have any citations or information to indicate that? My understanding from the sqlserver DBAs that I know that the platform is rock solid. Have you heard otherwise? Genuinely interested.
  - Toshio 14y ago
    I've seen several sql server shops with severe performance problems where the in-house DBAs had no clue what had hit them. Different DB engines deal with multi-version read consistency in different ways, Postgres does a defensive copy-on-update, Oracle falls back on rollback segments; unfortunately sql server escalates page locks to table-wide locks, and then performance goes downhill from there. If your friends don't experience any problems, I would venture to guess they must be running small databases, or databases where the workload is 90% reads 10% writes.
    - kogir 14y ago
      Having actually deployed and used SQL Server extensively, I know how it handles "multi-version read consistency": As I tell it to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173763.aspx In addition to setting a database level default, you can even have it behave differently per connection. Snapshot isolation will never lock, period. SQL Server is actually quite capable, and has the fantastic tooling that cheaper alternatives like PostgreSQL lack.
      - Toshio 14y ago
        Care to say how big your database is, and what your workload looks like (reads vs. writes)?
  - EwanToo 14y ago

chris_wot 14y ago

This is what happens with companies who get too slow to innovate. Oracles best days are behind them, I feel.

ebiester 14y ago
I don't even know if it's that Oracle has slowed, but rather their product has become too complex for them to sustainably innovate. They tried acquiring other options for the low end, but it hasn't worked. (Berkeley DB is theirs, for example.) That said, there will always been a need for the product Oracle provides in the largest of companies. NoSQL isn't going to be running reports on the fortune 500 anytime in the next two decades, and neither is Postgres, as much as I like it. Death by a thousand cuts will probably still be profitable for decades.
- taligent 14y ago
  I work for an enterprise company (10K employees) and you are spot on. Oracle will forever dominant HR, Payroll, SCM, Billing, FM etc type systems where more often than not they have custom software on top of it that has been built exclusively for Oracle. There is simply no good reason to switch. If anything the threat to Oracle will come from hosted apps e.g. Salesforce. But what I've been seeing in our company is MongoDB dominating front end web apps and Datastax/Cassandra for more of the big data, analytics type workloads. Oracle should be far more concerned with Amazon Web Services.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    If you can drop in a NoSQL backend replacement for Oracle in your application, you never needed Oracle to begin with.
  - benbataille 14y ago
    I think your analysis is spot on. Big companies don't want to house large IT infrastructure anymore. It seems too costly in the long run and benefits are difficult to explain to the board. Consequently, you already see companies moving what was before considered core infrastructure to the cloud and the trend is probably going to increase. Deploying a VM on EC2 or Azure is easy, quick and cheap enough considering you don't have to house as many talents as before in the IT department. As companies move to cloud based services, they don't deal with databases anymore, the people providing the solution (we don't even talk about software anymore, that's the current level of abstraction) does. Problem is amongst the cloud based service providers, few are Oracle shop. That's the reason Oracle is now trying to position itself in the cloud through acquisitions (like Nebula today). Unfortunately, they are a bit late to the game.

taligent 14y ago

Actually I suspect the reason Datastax is growing is less because of Cassandra but more because they are one of the only cohesive enterprise class database, analytics and search platforms around. Having Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr in a tightly coupled, well supported package is pretty compelling.

3pt14159 14y ago
See an article about that would actually be compelling, instead of inspiring nerd rage when citing Datastax (founded in 2010) for the coming downfall of Oracle.

Vivtek 14y ago

It couldn't happen to nicer people... After my last upgrade of the Java virtual machine on my laptop, I found the installer had kindly installed the Ask toolbar on all my browsers, too. It left me with quite the bad taste in my mouth.

kaffiene 14y ago

The sooner Oracle dies and hands Java over to someone less evil, the better.

nodata 14y ago

Oracle isn't a database company anymore.

wereHamster 14y ago
A law firm perhaps?
- arethuza 14y ago
  Applications and services.
  - alexkus 14y ago
    Along with their own database and operating system a la IBM. It's a good model to be spread over multiple segments: hardware/software/services. Bad quarters in one segment are usually covered by good quarters in another.

lominming 14y ago

This is obviously a PR article. Oracle is not just a database company anymore. Comparing Oracle to a 100 people company does not make much sense either.

gizzlon 14y ago

As much as I dislike Oracle, this article is pure crap. It's only general speculation with no information or value. Then it starts talking about Datastax like they are the ones causing these (made up?) problems for Orcale.

account_taken 14y ago

All I can say is DBase IV. If you don't innovate, you will get replaced. They're trying to do too much. Stick to your bread and butter.

OGinparadise 14y ago

Unless I made a mistake, Datastax was mentioned 11 times in an article about the "bleeding" of Oracle. Now Oracle has a gazillion other competitors so I am wondering. Considering how ethical Techcruch is...let's not say it.

pavs 14y ago

This is nothing but a PR piece by Datastax, from TC.