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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.