I never understood why anyone picks Oracle at this point. There are so many alternative options that are vastly cheaper, much easier to maintain, and aren’t owned by a company that has a habit of suing their customers.
I doubt many people are picking it these days. But someone did 20 years ago. And now you’re stuck with the headache.
My company switched to Oracle in the last two years. It has gone as horribly as you would imagine it would. The solution we had in place before wasn’t great but Oracle is far worse in every way.
Let’s run it on VMware while we’re at it
Don’t forget to integrate with SAP and Salesforce
Now that is sold by a reputable company I would 100% trust!
Do you want stable pricing, transparent licensing, and a company that invests in improving the product?
Me neither! That’s why I buy Broadcom.
Literally this.
Twice a year I fill in as DBA when our lady graybeard Oracle DBA takes vacation. This month is one of those times. Yay me.
For my org, it’s just the massive in-house developed line-of-business application that’s tightly coupled to Oracle that keeps us chained to it. It’s technical debt from top to bottom, and has been accumulating steadily since the early 2010s, but no one seems willing to start replacing it.
The new projects typically go with Postgres, MariaDB, or if all else fails, MSSQL. But the Oracle monster in the closet isn’t likely to leave any time soon.
Around the turn of the century I built a “middleware” layer for an Oracle to MySQL bridge which enabled legacy systems to keep running while modern and open source tooling could be built.
The biggest challenge was moving from columnar to row based data … that and compiling Solaris tools using Oracle libraries.
Oracle is like sendmail, user friendly, just very picky whom it makes friends with.
I’m getting flashbacks to debugging an Oracle connection file.
We had an application with tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL code.
We also had the boss who demanded “database agnostic” development. So we had to write the whole thing a second time in T-SQL.
I’m so happy I switched jobs. But I guess I learned a lot in that time.
Get two juniors, unlimited Claude credits, and you’ll have the problem solved in a month flat
/s
I’ve never picked Oracle, but I think their sales pitch is basically to make a good upfront offer with tons of credits which you can’t ignore. The credits expire in like 3 years or something which seems long, and when you’re chasing quarterly profits, cutting your provider cost by 60% helps you look like you made things more profitable. They’re banking on vendor lock in and inertia to keep you in after the credits run out and then they can squeeze you for money.
Oracle is the choice if you need a high performance RDBMS capable of processing extreme amounts of data at extreme io rates. Nothing comes close for enterprise level applications. THAT SAID, it requires a special kind of individual to be able to get the most out of it. Even better if that person knows of the existence, value, and use of the many undocumented v$ tables, etc.
Once you can migrate most of your data out of an RDBMS, you options open up significantly.
For smaller projects. Oracle makes no sense, unless the expectation is vast and rapid growth.
EDIT: Oracle is the most evil corporation in tech. Those who know, know.
I’m not even sure that’s close to true anymore. Like, the biggest companies in the world, when they need to use a relational database, typically go for something “not oracle”.
Wikipedia gets more traffic than most enterprises and they use mariadb. They don’t even really do it in the weird ways that AWS does, where they use it as a bizarre caching layer.
It’s kinda like how for the longest time “mainframes” were the go-to computer for enterprise applications with extreme IO needs. You probably wouldn’t recommend someone go talk to IBM if they need to process a lot of records in this day and age unless they were already neck deep in cobol, the go-to language for enterprise applications.
Our clients are some of those “biggest companies in the world” (US and Europe). Sadly, Oracle is very much so in it.
processing extreme amounts of data at extreme io rates
For anybody trying to take that seriously, keep in mind that the Oracle’s query planner is absolutely shit, the write performance can go to shit depending on the contents of your transactions, any advanced transaction insulation also destroys performance, and single-machine performance is completely shit, the extreme numbers are all on scalability and when compared to other (unpatched on the case of Postgres) ACID databases.
Also, it’s not clear if those claims are still real, because you can only run Oracle databases if you sign a contract saying you won’t compare it to other systems.
you can only run Oracle databases if you sign a contract saying you won’t compare it to other systems
lol, now that’s a policy that speaks to being confident in their product!
The usual whataboutism people reply with every time I point this is that Microsoft does the same.
What is correct, Microsoft does the same :)
How would you know … unless you compared them?
Lawsuits incoming!
Well, the stuff in my post is obvious enough that you don’t need to actually look for it.
My first experience with Oracle was taking out all the government services from my state because I passed a DBA a script that inserted too much data in a transaction…
Also, it’s not clear if those claims are still real, because you can only run Oracle databases if you sign a contract saying you won’t compare it to other systems.
What the hell?? That can’t possibly be legal/enforceable, can it?
No idea.
Oracle is known to throw millions into lawsuits with no fundaments at all, and I’m not aware of anybody that published a comparison involving their database recently. Those two may be related, or not, IDK.
10M rows of PL/SQL procedures.
Pretty sure we had a deal with them years ago where we were required to use oracle products for everything. So that’s how we ended up with so many of out apps running on oracle DBs.
This is it. I used to work for a consultancy that specialised in Oracle products. Turns out if you want an ERP or HCM, running Oracle EBS with a DB backend on Oracle…running on Oracle Linux…on Oracle Linux KVM hypervisors (where CPU pinning is a recognised and allowed tactic - unlike Oracle on other hypervisors)…it turns out, might be competitively priced.
It’s a total lock in. Also, I get the impression that it’s almost always up to what the Finance team is used to/familiar with. They decide the finance app - then everything else follows as above due to the financials…which they are in charge of.
I know a guy who migrated workloads off PostgreSQL Enterprise back to Oracle as the performance and availability just wasn’t good enough. I don’t know enough about DBs to query that much, but he did it.
I had a job interview for a Senior Linux Engineer, the interview was via MS Teams, I mentioned that MS Teams does not have Linux support (at the time) and requested to have the interview over any other service. They replied asking me to use Windows for the interview, as that was the OS my work laptop would use. I politely replied that I was no longer interested.
Sounds like a great way to select out all decent Linux Engineers.
Reminds me of the FBI struggling to find hackers who shave and don’t smoke weed.
Same, but me they told “it should work in the browser”
Hilariously, my work laptop is a windows machine, and it’s fully managed. I’ve never gotten the teams app to work. No mic, no audio, no connection, etc. eventually I just ran it through Firefox and magically, all these problems went away!
What a clown show.
it did, but this interview was before the pandemic and the work market was a lot better, I was able to dismiss interviews just like that
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Also they still do background checks for fake job postings and any data gathered during that is sold without consent.
Background check company NPD leaked 2.9 billion records once because of this.
I used to work for Cisco … or so I’m told. What happened was that my original small-ish company (25 US employees and 100 offshore employees) was acquired by a larger company (about 1000 employees mostly in Scandinavia) that made network equipment and was a minor competitor of Cisco. My original company provided programmer consultants (like me) to various companies and was acquired by the Scandinavian company because they had written a client-customizable Skype clone app that clients were actually unable to customize to their satisfaction.
I had a fun couple of years customizing this app using a language and framework I had no experience with, while battling with the Scandinavian programmers who hated me and everything I stood for and not only refused to help me but actively sabotaged everything I was doing. Fortunately, these custom versions were for various ISPs and cable companies who offered them as free come-ons to their customers and they were never actually used by anybody. Also I worked remote from home the entire time, which my cats appreciated.
Then the new company was allegedly acquired by Cisco. I got a new work laptop in the mail, but never visited any kind of Cisco office in person and was never assigned any tasks whatsoever. After six months my manager called me and said that I and everyone else from the original small company was being laid off. I laughed and said of course we were. He was shocked that I was so accepting of it and surprised that I seemed to have known it was coming; apparently my co-workers didn’t think doing fucking nothing for six months was a bad sign. I did actually get a severance package for the first and only time in my career. However, it was almost to the penny equal to the value of the unemployment I could have collected, but the severance meant I wasn’t eligible for unemployment. Oh well, saved me the hassle of pretending to look for another job.
It was pretty clear that Cisco bought my second company just to dispose of a minor competitor.
Later I learned that my mother thought I had been working for Sysco (the food services conglomerate) the entire time. I had to go back and check my emails to see if that had actually been the case.
If I never have to review another spreadsheet of Cisco SKUs at the end of the year ill be happy.
I WISH! Am on the job hunt and no recruiters hahaha But kinda also for the better. I have noticed that when i apply myself i get sometimes invited to interviews but never with recruiters or they sold my skills bigger than they are
