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Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

177 points by velodrome 11y ago

r00fus 11y ago
Article fails to identify if the sales figures are limited to database or whether they include the enterprise apps (i.e., EBS/Fusion). Regardless - the quote "Does the cloud-related business grow quickly enough to offset any long-term weakness in new software licenses? To us the answer is yes" seems to indicate that this is all sales for ORCL. Oracle relying on cloud is pitting them against some more entrenched cloud-only vendors (e.g.: Workday, Salesforce) and disrupts the business model for their main cash cows. Typical innovator's dilemma territory if that's their play.
- toyg 11y ago
  They seem to be approaching this by offering very reduced functionality on the cloud, so that "real" enterprise businesses will still buy apps to self-host (hopefully on Exa boxes). At least this is what I'm seeing in Middleware. It's long been known that Database would eventually see a decline, which is why they bought loads of products to ring-fence it (as well as attacking SAP). I just wish their support was still worth the money -- in most cases it's not. That's the real problem IMHO.
- calgoo 11y ago
  I think SAP is stealing a lot of Oracles non-db business ATM. From the last few years, all i hear is SAP hosting, SAP consultants, etc. Oracle has taken a backseat, with the only new Oracle software I have seen being their crappy hosted services. The mayor problem with using open source in the Corp. world, is that many companies put rules such as: "Any new technology product MUST have a multi million dollar company with 24/7 support available." It never made any difference that it would be cheaper to hire two or three techs to do the job, as they come from different budgets (CAPEX vs OPEX).
- pinaceae 11y ago
  Salesforce.com runs on Oracle DBs, is in fact the largest customer. Benioff was a SVP at Oracle before he founded SFDC.
rbanffy 11y ago
Is it surprising startups no longer buy as many Oracle licenses as they did in the 90's?
- DrStalker 11y ago
  It's hard to think of a situation where a new startup would use Oracle; it's a massive cost compared to alternatives and while it does offer some advantages over other DB choices those advantages are not very compelling for most uses. For example, we did some rough testing recently and found that Oracle was faster for report generation than MSSQL but we can double the processing power assigned to the MSQQL to get equivalent performance for a fraction of the cost of Oracle licensing.
  - Yeroc 11y ago
    If you're a startup selling services to large enterprises you may be forced to use Oracle because it gives your customers more confidence in your solution (assuming you're offering a service where you storing information on important assets on behalf of the enterprise).
- philippnagel 11y ago
  The average startup probably can't afford any Oracle licenses. Therefor most of them turn to a very mature FOSS eco-system.
CyberDildonics 11y ago
I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries. I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  >I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. Their existing massive install base, aggressive salesforce, and being perceived as a "safe" choice by customers is a strong position to be in.
  - bradleyankrom 11y ago
    That, and enterprise-grade product support is often a requirement.
    - kyllo 11y ago
      This. Who is going to sign a Service Level Agreement for your postgres install? Support contracts are super important for enterprise.
      - alex_anglin 11y ago
        EnterpriseDB? http://www.enterprisedb.com/ba/license-support-services-v3-0 http://www.enterprisedb.com/ba/license-support-services-v3-0
        dagw 11y ago
        The drive time from the nearest EnterpriseDB office to my office is at least 12 hours (and that is probably quite a bit below the median). To the nearest Oracle office it's a 15 minute walk. That is probably going to have some effect on the call out time for technicians.
ccvannorman 11y ago
From what I've heard about how Oracle treats their customers and the industry, this is good news. We need to move away from juggernauts who try to control things, and towards a more distributed, robust methodology.
- smlacy 11y ago
  You mean that it should be more like a Bazaar and less like a Cathedral? Wow, great idea!
meesterdude 11y ago
My reaction to this article: Mwahahaha. Although surprised it is Cassandra, and not mysql thats taking the market share. Is there some technical reason for this? I'm not intimate with what Cassandra offers.
- coolsunglasses 11y ago
  Probably because of the DataStax OLTP/OLAP/All-Singing/All-Dancing platform that uses Cassandra. MySQL alone doesn't cover the same bases.
- StevePerkins 11y ago
  Cassandra is a distributed database that easily scales more or less to infinity. As you add more nodes to a cluster, it automatically redistributes data throughout the cluster. It "just works", and that's pretty exciting. So Cassandra at the moment seems to be enjoying a bit of the hype cycle that MongoDB enjoyed 5 or 6 years ago. It's the thing that everyone wants to try out and get onto their resume at the moment. However, like all "NoSQL" databases, the trade-offs come with the usual severe limitations (e.g. no joins, no foreign keys, no transactions in the usual sense of the term, eventual consistency, etc). Curious people diving into Cassandra (or most NoSQL databases for that matter) typically have zero understanding of these trade-offs at first, and think that they will be easier to work with. It isn't, and it isn't supposed to be. It's harder to work with, and has fewer features, because that's the trade-off you're making for scalability. There's little reason to use it if you don't need to scale like that. So, curiosity and RDD ("resume-driven development") aside, I don't think there are many situations in which one would be choosing from Cassandra or MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL. If you are working with multiple terabytes or more of data, then there is seldom a good reason to consider a relational database. If you are working with less than a terabyte of data, then there is seldom a good reason to consider anything OTHER than a relational database. I just don't see much overlap in which these technologies seriously compete against each other.
  - acchow 11y ago
    > Cassandra "just works" It's hard for me to believe statements like this. At this point, I think the only things that "just work" are gravity, relativity, and modern CPUs. I recommend this talk on Scaling Pinterest http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest
bane 11y ago
Good. Now my concern is to see what database platform all the architect astronauts end of gravitating their ridiculously over-engineered solutions towards. 5 years ago, the default choice for my government clients was Oracle, Oracle, Oracle. I just finished up a year-long engagement and Oracle wasn't brought up even once.
- Spooky23 11y ago
  I've noticed a lot of MS SqlServer being thrown at larger systems.
matchagaucho 11y ago
Difficult to know if that 3% loss in new revenue wasn't offset by deferred cloud revenue.
bitwize 11y ago
Well, there's always: 1) Squeezing your enterprise customers for money. 2) Lawsuits. With the right incentives to lawyers and politicians, Oracle might be able to get Lotus v. Borland effectively reversed; then they could start licensing the use of SQL itself!
- rodgerd 11y ago
  > 2) Lawsuits. With the right incentives to lawyers and politicians, Oracle might be able to get Lotus v. Borland effectively reversed; then they could start licensing the use of SQL itself! That's what they're very close to achieving with Oracle v Google. However, I don't think Oracle would be the winner in the "Who owns SQL?" conversation.
  - logicchains 11y ago
    If that happened and IBM said to Oracle "We want 30% of your database revenue if you wish to keep using our SQL API", would there be anything Oracle could do?
    - rodgerd 11y ago
      Point out IBM's non-mainframe business depends almost entirely on Java.
dangerboysteve 11y ago
The first thing I thought when I saw the heading was. "They will just milk existing customers with higher maintenance contracts and fees". Sure enough, went to the article and the first graph shows declining sales but increasing fees.
ralmidani 11y ago
It's good that more companies are adopting free software, but most of them do not, in turn, release their core applications as free software. This indicates they do not value freedom more than they value saving money.
- sillygoose 11y ago
  Giving stuff away for free is not how business works :P
CleanCut 11y ago
This is the headline I expected to see 10 years ago.
- adventured 11y ago
  That headline was prevalent back then. Oracle responded to the threat by eating the ecosystem around them. Had they not done that, their financial picture would be drastically worse today. It's entirely plausible that Oracle would have unraveled as a major enterprise player if they hadn't acquired so much of the industry. Ellison knew what was happening, his acquisition moves were meant to guarantee Oracle's long-term survival. It was: become a monster, or eventually be eaten by one.
- jccooper 11y ago
  Judging by the graph there was a serious inflection point in 2008. Which seems about right from what I remember. So it probably should have been a headline long before now.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    The 2008 inflection would have come from the financial crisis. Lots of large firms got hit by that, and a few went under. Since the plot is of _new_ licenses, it suggests that companies weighing the benefits of Oracle vs. one of the alternatives (Postgresql, NoSQL), went with cheaper.
outside1234 11y ago
"Doesn't cost anything": This is a meme that is largely false. Any large organization will buy support for open source software which can sometimes be actually more than the cost of a database license (see Datastax and Cassandra). License, support, take your pick. It takes people to keep systems running.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- davidgerard 11y ago
  We're moving from Oracle to Postgres. From three huge Oracle instances to, pretty much, a cloud of Postgres boxes, a pair per application. Because we can. Oracle is a superlative database, but it's the polar opposite of agile. This turns out to be important.
- scriptproof 11y ago
  In the article it is said by moving from Oracle to Datastax support, the cost was down from $500 000 to $90 000. Oracle support has a cost too.
turingbook 11y ago
In China, there is a hot trend called de-IOE (to remove IBM，Oracle and EMC or other big foreign IT companies' technologies and products from IT systems) in enterprise IT. Instead, we use open sources, or cloud/ X as a Service, or local technologies. I wonder if it is the same in USA or other countries?
- acosmism 11y ago
  at the same time they block github.
  - balac 11y ago
    The government is blocking github, not those tech companies..
- logicchains 11y ago
  Is that why Go is so popular in China? The "Our well-known customers" section on the Beego framework homepage (http://beego.me/ http://beego.me/) seems to list most of the largest Chinese internet companies, for instance.
- elementai 11y ago
  There's a kind of similar trend in Russia.
capkutay 11y ago
I'm not sure if 'new sales' vs 'upgrades' is a useful metric for a company like oracle. They're already prevalent in the enterprise infrastructure of the Global 2000. Oracle's new in-memory database with columnar compression is considered an 'upgrade' to their flagship DB product.
bhahn 11y ago
“It only costs us 6 percent of revenue, and that’s nothing,” Nelson said. This seems high. Is this normal for big companies?
- ldayley 11y ago
  Wait, doesn't Ellison and/or Oracle own a huge chunk of Netsuite? Nelson is basically doing PR work for them in this quote.
  - suyash 11y ago
    Doesn't matter, there are several other tech companies that pay big bucks to Oracle for it's products and services - they are not fools.
    - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
      I think it does, just as the fact you work for Oracle should make us question the neutrality of your statement.
    - fauigerzigerk 11y ago
      Don't underestimate the gap between what is foolish for a company and what is foolish for an individual employee at an enterprise IT department. I think that IT staff of large enterprises are not foolish when they cling on to overpriced Oracle installations as that creates job security and high wages for them even if they are mediocre (not all of them are mediocre of course) Also, it may not be foolish for a large enterprise that runs on Oracle to keep doing so, because any benefits from switching could be dwarfed by the cost and risk of switching. But I think there are a lot of medium sized companies outside the tech sector for whom a decision to go with Oracle is foolish and not switching is foolish too. They're not just overpaying for Oracle licenses but also for DBAs, and they are creating a stagnant IT culture that is less likely to come up with innovative solutions for new business problems.
anaolykarpov 11y ago
I see this phrase repeated over and over: nobody got fired for chosing Oracle, ibm, or Microsoft. I wonder: did anyone got fired for chosing Postgres, Linux, or even new and risky stuff like Mongodb or nodejs? And being told at their exit interview "you should've decided to use Oracle"? I guess tech people are fired for lack of talent in hustling company politics much often than they are for chosing a technology.
- logicchains 11y ago
  I'd love to read a blog post by someone fired for not using MongoDB; I suspect the justification their employer gave for the firing decision would be quite entertaining.
- tsotha 11y ago
  It's not so much that someone will say "you should've used Oracle". It's that when your application is down for two days they'll say "you should've picked a vendor with 24 hour support and good penetration in the job market". Now, your Oracle-hosted application might go down for two days as well, but then people would shrug and say "sometimes this happens." To be fair to Oracle, though, it does seem to happen less often.
  - davidgerard 11y ago
    Oracle's database itself is superlative. It's just everything else about dealing with Oracle.
    - tsotha 11y ago
      I agree with you on both counts.
      - davidgerard 11y ago
        With our Postgres move, we worried slightly about Postgres support for the trickier bits, but (b) our Oracle support does Postgres as a sideline (a) there are less of them when you can do a PG cluster per app, and nothing actually has to play nice with anything else.
s5e 11y ago
Someone should note that Larry Ellison owns about half of Netsuite. Quite the bias towards Oracle with the last source.
nl382 11y ago
I've heard rumors Bloomberg is trying hard to dump Oracle and move to OS like MySQL or PostgreSQL. So it's interesting they published this article.
daniel_iversen 11y ago
This article is a bit sensationalist and misleading. It mainly talks about the database whereas Oracle does many other things these days (amongst other things some high value SaaS applications in the marketing space that can't be replaced by open source. Also, the article criticises their growth but come on! They're the 2nd largest enterprise software company in the world - they aren't going to have the kind of 100% YoY growth that a small startup could have. My prediction is oracle will eventually tighten down and freshen up a bit, cut some of the fat and continue to be a juggernaut for another 10 or so years at least. (Disclaimer: I liked oracle for many years and recently used to work for and still have a soft spot for them somewhere despite their challenges :) ) Sent from mobile
skc 11y ago
Wonder why Microsofts server business seems to still be going strong then.
drawkbox 11y ago
Oracle never really cared about the developer experience. Eventually that wears out whatever market lead a company might have. Oracle can be very fast and well setup but the tools to work with are not good and the general optimization now is not as needed with cheaper hardware and more horizontal systems. There are so many other options out there now. PostgreSQL is great to work with and is so good now that it just might be the leader. Oracle was late to embrace usage on cloud instances and licensing models in that environment don't do as well, that is why Microsoft created Azure and it is their new platform essentially.
- mikegioia 11y ago
  Postgres is great, but sadly it's not really in contention for being the RDBMS leader right now: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms, but it is steadily climbing.
  - TylerE 11y ago
    That's ridiculous. By that type of metric Comcast is the #1 isp.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    I need to bookmark this page for the next time I see someone say MySQL is dead and everyone uses MariaDB now.
  - bsdpython 11y ago
    Look at the YOY change - if the trend continues Postgresql will be right up there in 3-4 years
    - hitekker 11y ago
      Consider this graph: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/relational+dbms http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/relational+dbms
phd64 11y ago
Oracle Sales are far from eroding, and the opposite is true. Very misleading article and analysis, and questioning which vendor is in writers pocket? "Figures don't lie but liars do figure" According to the leading analysts, Oracle has grown software revenues by over ~2.5% in 2014 vs 2013 and Oracle has grown Database revenue as well having a world wide DBMS share above 40% with growth of over 4% in 2014. If you look at who's got the most popular database(s) in the world, by ranking, Oracle Database is ranked #1 and Oracle MySQL is ranked #2. http://db-engines.com/en/ranking http://db-engines.com/en/ranking While the article infers fewer licenses sold means Oracle is eroding, article doesn’t mention that Oracle is showing growth in software upgrades, DBAAS, and overall, growth in cloud- private, hybrid and public. The “c” in “Oracle DB 12c” stands for “cloud”. Oracle has over 400,000 customers, where over 310,000 are Database customers according to the Oracle Fact sheet http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219.... You say Oracle Database is expensive-compared to what? Its all about what level of business value you require? Oracle sells several editions of Oracle DB from Oracle Database Personal Edition that starts at $92 per named user license to Oracle Database Standard Edition One with License costing as little as US$180.00 to the Oracle Database Standard Edition version starting at $350 per User license. Not everyone requires the enterprise features of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Database&p2=OracleDatabase&p3=&p4=&p5=&intcmp=ocom_database_oracledatabase https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Database&p2=Or... Theres no such thing as free software unless you consider peoples time free, from administration, patching, management, support, upgrading, etc. You can surely download any open source Database but no ones going to support it for free. If you’re an enterprise, you're surely seeing your OPEX budgets sky-rocket, and a lot of that is due to "free" software and commodity hardware and the integration and management of a very complex, multi-vendor stack requiring armies of people to get it and keep it running.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  I won't argue that support is not a necessary cost of doing business. Of course it is. It's nice to be "free" to spin up a handful of disposable test instances of a database when doing test driven / agile type development. Oracle is difficult and arcane to create a DB instance. I had the sys admin at work help me to try to set up an instance (he insisted it was "easy"). It takes MANY steps, some of which were shown to me in tools that did not lend themselves to scripting. I have a script that can create a ready to rock PostgreSQL instance in 5 seconds, no "Mother, may I???" required to run it. Well, ready to run a schema creation / migration, but the "tablespace" and schema name with admin/app user were in and ready to go. If you are twiddling a few lines in a legacy app, this doesn't matter. If you are doing a big chunk of new development, automated regression testing data sources matter.
tuyguntn 11y ago
Here is follow up to the discussion, how do you describe your experience with each of RDBMS's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705135
Htsthbjig 11y ago
I disagree. Startups have always embraced Free software since I know of this field. What changes is when those startups become mature business, and they realize they don't need Oracle as much as "Mammoth" companies do. It is the reason a company that disrespect geeks has not a good future. When years ago I went to a geek convention and everybody had a mac, I instantly thought: Microsoft future is not good and bought Apple stock, even when people doubt about the company. It was a great decision. Oracle has this attitude of "You are shit if you don't bring me a million dollars". They are not even neutral, they are hostile to startups. But startups grow and they don't forget how Oracle treated them.
- phd64 11y ago
  Oracle doesn't care about the developer experience? Oracle doesn't care about startups? Disrespect geeks? Huh? Do you have any real justifications to these or are you just basing this on your perceptions? Why would Oracle continue driving developments in JAVA, MySQL, OpenSTACK, etc and many other open source projects if it wasn't after the developer community? And have you seen the latest Software in Silicon Cloud Development platform that’s free? https://swisdev.oracle.com https://swisdev.oracle.com And did you know that Oracle has the Oracle Database Personal Edition which is designed to provide software developers a cost effective, yet full featured Oracle Database environment on which to develop, test and run custom or packaged applications? https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:product:0::NO:RP,6:P6_LPI,P6_PROD_HIER_ID:4508888120961805719862,4509958287721805720011 https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:product:0::NO:...
  - robert_foss 11y ago
    Oracle just like Microsoft just aren't trusted by the community at large. History tells us why. And there are good reasons: [1] Oracle tells Open Document founders to leave the project [2] Oracle takes over KSplice and stops providing it for free to competitors of Oracles Linux Distribution. [3] Oracle suing to maintain the position that APIs are copyrightable. --- [1] https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101014 https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....
sybase46 11y ago
As a 15 year Sybase, SQL server and Oracle DBA. Oracle compared to the 2 mentioned requires a platoon of DBAs because of the complexities involved. We have all 3 RDBMS and 1 Sybase SQL server DBA can administer 10x what our Oracle DBA can. I'm not even including tyhe Monster OEM 12c Cloud which takes complexity to a new level to include a Gigantic resource Hog. Add cost, Human resources and Oracle is a Huge over glutton Pig!

177 points by velodrome 11y ago

Article fails to identify if the sales figures are limited to database or whether they include the enterprise apps (i.e., EBS/Fusion). Regardless - the quote "Does the cloud-related business grow quickly enough to offset any long-term weakness in new software licenses? To us the answer is yes" seems to indicate that this is all sales for ORCL. Oracle relying on cloud is pitting them against some more entrenched cloud-only vendors (e.g.: Workday, Salesforce) and disrupts the business model for their main cash cows. Typical innovator's dilemma territory if that's their play.

toyg 11y ago
They seem to be approaching this by offering very reduced functionality on the cloud, so that "real" enterprise businesses will still buy apps to self-host (hopefully on Exa boxes). At least this is what I'm seeing in Middleware. It's long been known that Database would eventually see a decline, which is why they bought loads of products to ring-fence it (as well as attacking SAP). I just wish their support was still worth the money -- in most cases it's not. That's the real problem IMHO.
calgoo 11y ago
I think SAP is stealing a lot of Oracles non-db business ATM. From the last few years, all i hear is SAP hosting, SAP consultants, etc. Oracle has taken a backseat, with the only new Oracle software I have seen being their crappy hosted services. The mayor problem with using open source in the Corp. world, is that many companies put rules such as: "Any new technology product MUST have a multi million dollar company with 24/7 support available." It never made any difference that it would be cheaper to hire two or three techs to do the job, as they come from different budgets (CAPEX vs OPEX).
pinaceae 11y ago
Salesforce.com runs on Oracle DBs, is in fact the largest customer. Benioff was a SVP at Oracle before he founded SFDC.

rbanffy 11y ago

Is it surprising startups no longer buy as many Oracle licenses as they did in the 90's?

DrStalker 11y ago
It's hard to think of a situation where a new startup would use Oracle; it's a massive cost compared to alternatives and while it does offer some advantages over other DB choices those advantages are not very compelling for most uses. For example, we did some rough testing recently and found that Oracle was faster for report generation than MSSQL but we can double the processing power assigned to the MSQQL to get equivalent performance for a fraction of the cost of Oracle licensing.
- Yeroc 11y ago
  If you're a startup selling services to large enterprises you may be forced to use Oracle because it gives your customers more confidence in your solution (assuming you're offering a service where you storing information on important assets on behalf of the enterprise).
philippnagel 11y ago
The average startup probably can't afford any Oracle licenses. Therefor most of them turn to a very mature FOSS eco-system.

CyberDildonics 11y ago

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries. I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.

hkmurakami 11y ago
>I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. Their existing massive install base, aggressive salesforce, and being perceived as a "safe" choice by customers is a strong position to be in.
- bradleyankrom 11y ago
  That, and enterprise-grade product support is often a requirement.
  - kyllo 11y ago
    This. Who is going to sign a Service Level Agreement for your postgres install? Support contracts are super important for enterprise.
    - alex_anglin 11y ago
      EnterpriseDB? http://www.enterprisedb.com/ba/license-support-services-v3-0 http://www.enterprisedb.com/ba/license-support-services-v3-0
      - dagw 11y ago
        The drive time from the nearest EnterpriseDB office to my office is at least 12 hours (and that is probably quite a bit below the median). To the nearest Oracle office it's a 15 minute walk. That is probably going to have some effect on the call out time for technicians.

ccvannorman 11y ago

From what I've heard about how Oracle treats their customers and the industry, this is good news. We need to move away from juggernauts who try to control things, and towards a more distributed, robust methodology.

smlacy 11y ago
You mean that it should be more like a Bazaar and less like a Cathedral? Wow, great idea!

meesterdude 11y ago

My reaction to this article: Mwahahaha. Although surprised it is Cassandra, and not mysql thats taking the market share. Is there some technical reason for this? I'm not intimate with what Cassandra offers.

coolsunglasses 11y ago
Probably because of the DataStax OLTP/OLAP/All-Singing/All-Dancing platform that uses Cassandra. MySQL alone doesn't cover the same bases.
StevePerkins 11y ago
Cassandra is a distributed database that easily scales more or less to infinity. As you add more nodes to a cluster, it automatically redistributes data throughout the cluster. It "just works", and that's pretty exciting. So Cassandra at the moment seems to be enjoying a bit of the hype cycle that MongoDB enjoyed 5 or 6 years ago. It's the thing that everyone wants to try out and get onto their resume at the moment. However, like all "NoSQL" databases, the trade-offs come with the usual severe limitations (e.g. no joins, no foreign keys, no transactions in the usual sense of the term, eventual consistency, etc). Curious people diving into Cassandra (or most NoSQL databases for that matter) typically have zero understanding of these trade-offs at first, and think that they will be easier to work with. It isn't, and it isn't supposed to be. It's harder to work with, and has fewer features, because that's the trade-off you're making for scalability. There's little reason to use it if you don't need to scale like that. So, curiosity and RDD ("resume-driven development") aside, I don't think there are many situations in which one would be choosing from Cassandra or MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL. If you are working with multiple terabytes or more of data, then there is seldom a good reason to consider a relational database. If you are working with less than a terabyte of data, then there is seldom a good reason to consider anything OTHER than a relational database. I just don't see much overlap in which these technologies seriously compete against each other.
- acchow 11y ago
  > Cassandra "just works" It's hard for me to believe statements like this. At this point, I think the only things that "just work" are gravity, relativity, and modern CPUs. I recommend this talk on Scaling Pinterest http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest

bane 11y ago

Good. Now my concern is to see what database platform all the architect astronauts end of gravitating their ridiculously over-engineered solutions towards. 5 years ago, the default choice for my government clients was Oracle, Oracle, Oracle. I just finished up a year-long engagement and Oracle wasn't brought up even once.

Spooky23 11y ago
I've noticed a lot of MS SqlServer being thrown at larger systems.

matchagaucho 11y ago

Difficult to know if that 3% loss in new revenue wasn't offset by deferred cloud revenue.

bitwize 11y ago

Well, there's always: 1) Squeezing your enterprise customers for money. 2) Lawsuits. With the right incentives to lawyers and politicians, Oracle might be able to get Lotus v. Borland effectively reversed; then they could start licensing the use of SQL itself!

rodgerd 11y ago
> 2) Lawsuits. With the right incentives to lawyers and politicians, Oracle might be able to get Lotus v. Borland effectively reversed; then they could start licensing the use of SQL itself! That's what they're very close to achieving with Oracle v Google. However, I don't think Oracle would be the winner in the "Who owns SQL?" conversation.
- logicchains 11y ago
  If that happened and IBM said to Oracle "We want 30% of your database revenue if you wish to keep using our SQL API", would there be anything Oracle could do?
  - rodgerd 11y ago
    Point out IBM's non-mainframe business depends almost entirely on Java.

dangerboysteve 11y ago

The first thing I thought when I saw the heading was. "They will just milk existing customers with higher maintenance contracts and fees". Sure enough, went to the article and the first graph shows declining sales but increasing fees.

ralmidani 11y ago

It's good that more companies are adopting free software, but most of them do not, in turn, release their core applications as free software. This indicates they do not value freedom more than they value saving money.

sillygoose 11y ago
Giving stuff away for free is not how business works :P

CleanCut 11y ago

This is the headline I expected to see 10 years ago.

adventured 11y ago
That headline was prevalent back then. Oracle responded to the threat by eating the ecosystem around them. Had they not done that, their financial picture would be drastically worse today. It's entirely plausible that Oracle would have unraveled as a major enterprise player if they hadn't acquired so much of the industry. Ellison knew what was happening, his acquisition moves were meant to guarantee Oracle's long-term survival. It was: become a monster, or eventually be eaten by one.
jccooper 11y ago
Judging by the graph there was a serious inflection point in 2008. Which seems about right from what I remember. So it probably should have been a headline long before now.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  The 2008 inflection would have come from the financial crisis. Lots of large firms got hit by that, and a few went under. Since the plot is of _new_ licenses, it suggests that companies weighing the benefits of Oracle vs. one of the alternatives (Postgresql, NoSQL), went with cheaper.

outside1234 11y ago

"Doesn't cost anything": This is a meme that is largely false. Any large organization will buy support for open source software which can sometimes be actually more than the cost of a database license (see Datastax and Cassandra). License, support, take your pick. It takes people to keep systems running.

deleted 11y ago
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davidgerard 11y ago
We're moving from Oracle to Postgres. From three huge Oracle instances to, pretty much, a cloud of Postgres boxes, a pair per application. Because we can. Oracle is a superlative database, but it's the polar opposite of agile. This turns out to be important.
scriptproof 11y ago
In the article it is said by moving from Oracle to Datastax support, the cost was down from $500 000 to $90 000. Oracle support has a cost too.

turingbook 11y ago

In China, there is a hot trend called de-IOE (to remove IBM，Oracle and EMC or other big foreign IT companies' technologies and products from IT systems) in enterprise IT. Instead, we use open sources, or cloud/ X as a Service, or local technologies. I wonder if it is the same in USA or other countries?

acosmism 11y ago
at the same time they block github.
- balac 11y ago
  The government is blocking github, not those tech companies..
logicchains 11y ago
Is that why Go is so popular in China? The "Our well-known customers" section on the Beego framework homepage (http://beego.me/ http://beego.me/) seems to list most of the largest Chinese internet companies, for instance.
elementai 11y ago
There's a kind of similar trend in Russia.

capkutay 11y ago

I'm not sure if 'new sales' vs 'upgrades' is a useful metric for a company like oracle. They're already prevalent in the enterprise infrastructure of the Global 2000. Oracle's new in-memory database with columnar compression is considered an 'upgrade' to their flagship DB product.

bhahn 11y ago

“It only costs us 6 percent of revenue, and that’s nothing,” Nelson said. This seems high. Is this normal for big companies?

ldayley 11y ago
Wait, doesn't Ellison and/or Oracle own a huge chunk of Netsuite? Nelson is basically doing PR work for them in this quote.
- suyash 11y ago
  Doesn't matter, there are several other tech companies that pay big bucks to Oracle for it's products and services - they are not fools.
  - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
    I think it does, just as the fact you work for Oracle should make us question the neutrality of your statement.
  - fauigerzigerk 11y ago
    Don't underestimate the gap between what is foolish for a company and what is foolish for an individual employee at an enterprise IT department. I think that IT staff of large enterprises are not foolish when they cling on to overpriced Oracle installations as that creates job security and high wages for them even if they are mediocre (not all of them are mediocre of course) Also, it may not be foolish for a large enterprise that runs on Oracle to keep doing so, because any benefits from switching could be dwarfed by the cost and risk of switching. But I think there are a lot of medium sized companies outside the tech sector for whom a decision to go with Oracle is foolish and not switching is foolish too. They're not just overpaying for Oracle licenses but also for DBAs, and they are creating a stagnant IT culture that is less likely to come up with innovative solutions for new business problems.

anaolykarpov 11y ago

I see this phrase repeated over and over: nobody got fired for chosing Oracle, ibm, or Microsoft. I wonder: did anyone got fired for chosing Postgres, Linux, or even new and risky stuff like Mongodb or nodejs? And being told at their exit interview "you should've decided to use Oracle"? I guess tech people are fired for lack of talent in hustling company politics much often than they are for chosing a technology.

logicchains 11y ago
I'd love to read a blog post by someone fired for not using MongoDB; I suspect the justification their employer gave for the firing decision would be quite entertaining.
tsotha 11y ago
It's not so much that someone will say "you should've used Oracle". It's that when your application is down for two days they'll say "you should've picked a vendor with 24 hour support and good penetration in the job market". Now, your Oracle-hosted application might go down for two days as well, but then people would shrug and say "sometimes this happens." To be fair to Oracle, though, it does seem to happen less often.
- davidgerard 11y ago
  Oracle's database itself is superlative. It's just everything else about dealing with Oracle.
  - tsotha 11y ago
    I agree with you on both counts.
    - davidgerard 11y ago
      With our Postgres move, we worried slightly about Postgres support for the trickier bits, but (b) our Oracle support does Postgres as a sideline (a) there are less of them when you can do a PG cluster per app, and nothing actually has to play nice with anything else.

s5e 11y ago

Someone should note that Larry Ellison owns about half of Netsuite. Quite the bias towards Oracle with the last source.

nl382 11y ago

I've heard rumors Bloomberg is trying hard to dump Oracle and move to OS like MySQL or PostgreSQL. So it's interesting they published this article.

daniel_iversen 11y ago

This article is a bit sensationalist and misleading. It mainly talks about the database whereas Oracle does many other things these days (amongst other things some high value SaaS applications in the marketing space that can't be replaced by open source. Also, the article criticises their growth but come on! They're the 2nd largest enterprise software company in the world - they aren't going to have the kind of 100% YoY growth that a small startup could have. My prediction is oracle will eventually tighten down and freshen up a bit, cut some of the fat and continue to be a juggernaut for another 10 or so years at least. (Disclaimer: I liked oracle for many years and recently used to work for and still have a soft spot for them somewhere despite their challenges :) ) Sent from mobile

skc 11y ago

Wonder why Microsofts server business seems to still be going strong then.

drawkbox 11y ago

Oracle never really cared about the developer experience. Eventually that wears out whatever market lead a company might have. Oracle can be very fast and well setup but the tools to work with are not good and the general optimization now is not as needed with cheaper hardware and more horizontal systems. There are so many other options out there now. PostgreSQL is great to work with and is so good now that it just might be the leader. Oracle was late to embrace usage on cloud instances and licensing models in that environment don't do as well, that is why Microsoft created Azure and it is their new platform essentially.

mikegioia 11y ago
Postgres is great, but sadly it's not really in contention for being the RDBMS leader right now: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms, but it is steadily climbing.
- TylerE 11y ago
  That's ridiculous. By that type of metric Comcast is the #1 isp.
- cwyers 11y ago
  I need to bookmark this page for the next time I see someone say MySQL is dead and everyone uses MariaDB now.
- bsdpython 11y ago
  Look at the YOY change - if the trend continues Postgresql will be right up there in 3-4 years
  - hitekker 11y ago
    Consider this graph: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/relational+dbms http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend/relational+dbms

phd64 11y ago

Oracle Sales are far from eroding, and the opposite is true. Very misleading article and analysis, and questioning which vendor is in writers pocket? "Figures don't lie but liars do figure" According to the leading analysts, Oracle has grown software revenues by over ~2.5% in 2014 vs 2013 and Oracle has grown Database revenue as well having a world wide DBMS share above 40% with growth of over 4% in 2014. If you look at who's got the most popular database(s) in the world, by ranking, Oracle Database is ranked #1 and Oracle MySQL is ranked #2. http://db-engines.com/en/ranking http://db-engines.com/en/ranking While the article infers fewer licenses sold means Oracle is eroding, article doesn’t mention that Oracle is showing growth in software upgrades, DBAAS, and overall, growth in cloud- private, hybrid and public. The “c” in “Oracle DB 12c” stands for “cloud”. Oracle has over 400,000 customers, where over 310,000 are Database customers according to the Oracle Fact sheet http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219.... You say Oracle Database is expensive-compared to what? Its all about what level of business value you require? Oracle sells several editions of Oracle DB from Oracle Database Personal Edition that starts at $92 per named user license to Oracle Database Standard Edition One with License costing as little as US$180.00 to the Oracle Database Standard Edition version starting at $350 per User license. Not everyone requires the enterprise features of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Database&p2=OracleDatabase&p3=&p4=&p5=&intcmp=ocom_database_oracledatabase https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Database&p2=Or... Theres no such thing as free software unless you consider peoples time free, from administration, patching, management, support, upgrading, etc. You can surely download any open source Database but no ones going to support it for free. If you’re an enterprise, you're surely seeing your OPEX budgets sky-rocket, and a lot of that is due to "free" software and commodity hardware and the integration and management of a very complex, multi-vendor stack requiring armies of people to get it and keep it running.

Roboprog 11y ago
I won't argue that support is not a necessary cost of doing business. Of course it is. It's nice to be "free" to spin up a handful of disposable test instances of a database when doing test driven / agile type development. Oracle is difficult and arcane to create a DB instance. I had the sys admin at work help me to try to set up an instance (he insisted it was "easy"). It takes MANY steps, some of which were shown to me in tools that did not lend themselves to scripting. I have a script that can create a ready to rock PostgreSQL instance in 5 seconds, no "Mother, may I???" required to run it. Well, ready to run a schema creation / migration, but the "tablespace" and schema name with admin/app user were in and ready to go. If you are twiddling a few lines in a legacy app, this doesn't matter. If you are doing a big chunk of new development, automated regression testing data sources matter.

tuyguntn 11y ago

Here is follow up to the discussion, how do you describe your experience with each of RDBMS's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705135

Htsthbjig 11y ago

I disagree. Startups have always embraced Free software since I know of this field. What changes is when those startups become mature business, and they realize they don't need Oracle as much as "Mammoth" companies do. It is the reason a company that disrespect geeks has not a good future. When years ago I went to a geek convention and everybody had a mac, I instantly thought: Microsoft future is not good and bought Apple stock, even when people doubt about the company. It was a great decision. Oracle has this attitude of "You are shit if you don't bring me a million dollars". They are not even neutral, they are hostile to startups. But startups grow and they don't forget how Oracle treated them.

phd64 11y ago
Oracle doesn't care about the developer experience? Oracle doesn't care about startups? Disrespect geeks? Huh? Do you have any real justifications to these or are you just basing this on your perceptions? Why would Oracle continue driving developments in JAVA, MySQL, OpenSTACK, etc and many other open source projects if it wasn't after the developer community? And have you seen the latest Software in Silicon Cloud Development platform that’s free? https://swisdev.oracle.com https://swisdev.oracle.com And did you know that Oracle has the Oracle Database Personal Edition which is designed to provide software developers a cost effective, yet full featured Oracle Database environment on which to develop, test and run custom or packaged applications? https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:product:0::NO:RP,6:P6_LPI,P6_PROD_HIER_ID:4508888120961805719862,4509958287721805720011 https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:product:0::NO:...
- robert_foss 11y ago
  Oracle just like Microsoft just aren't trusted by the community at large. History tells us why. And there are good reasons: [1] Oracle tells Open Document founders to leave the project [2] Oracle takes over KSplice and stops providing it for free to competitors of Oracles Linux Distribution. [3] Oracle suing to maintain the position that APIs are copyrightable. --- [1] https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101014 https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....

sybase46 11y ago

As a 15 year Sybase, SQL server and Oracle DBA. Oracle compared to the 2 mentioned requires a platoon of DBAs because of the complexities involved. We have all 3 RDBMS and 1 Sybase SQL server DBA can administer 10x what our Oracle DBA can. I'm not even including tyhe Monster OEM 12c Cloud which takes complexity to a new level to include a Gigantic resource Hog. Add cost, Human resources and Oracle is a Huge over glutton Pig!