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Interview via MS Teams? How about NO. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 121 points 1 month ago (7 children)

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.

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  • [–] 133 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    I doubt many people are picking it these days. But someone did 20 years ago. And now you're stuck with the headache.

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  • [–] 46 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 31 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Let's run it on VMware while we're at it

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  • [–] 73 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Oracle sponsors our university to teach their flavour of SQL (Oracle SQL, not MySQL) with their management software rather than any of the competitors, free or otherwise. One of the DBA teachers once told me that there are enough differences between Oracle and other flavours that the knowledge isn't immediately transferrable, so when students graduate, all they know is Oracle, and they perpetuate the cycle.

    This is obviously an unfair anti-competitive practice, but crimes are only illegal if someone enforces the law.

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  • [–] 42 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Microsoft has similar practices, and I would be very surprised if other business software companies like IBM or SAP don't do the same wherever possible.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago

    That strategy is very common. Canva gives students free access and focuses on being student-friendly so that they won't bother to use any of the tools used in the real world. Now, those students tell their managers about how much easier it is (it just has less options and looks shinier) and how they can't understand anything else and companies start paying for licenses.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 month ago

    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.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 month ago

    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.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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!

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    The usual whataboutism people reply with every time I point this is that Microsoft does the same.

    What is correct, Microsoft does the same :)

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    How would you know ... unless you compared them?

    Lawsuits incoming!

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    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...

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    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.

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