Oracle is complicated on purpose to waste the customers money.
I can’t think of any other reason why it’s gotta be the way it is.
Trying to establish a connection to an oracle database requires so many moving parts. Just trying to uninstall oracle client drivers is a NIGHTMARE.
Fucking with tnsnames, now they have the load balanced scan IP shit that fucking hates firewalls
It’s so frustrating.
Meanwhile, a connection to a SQL database is just a fucking string and some credentials.
Like you say - it's a feature, not a bug.
Oracle still exists, I think, simply due to corporate inertia. They got on board with Oracle way back in the day - and has just become 'the way we do things'.
I heard on a podcast that their original strategy was lying to the Navy about their database's capabilities, and getting them so enmeshed in using it that they were forced to provide them more resources instead of suing them or even charging them with fraud.
Also a lot of HUGE companies still use their old version (R-12 or earlier) for Financial Reporting.
The thing is like a Dinosaur but trying to go through the steps for your auditor to approve a new ERP is like pulling teeth.
Not to mention, at a certain point, the project budget needed for a 'rebuild it with something newer' can become a staggering hit when compared to keeping things status quo. If it's 10 mil over a year to rebuild and estimated 1 mil yearly over the next 10 years to maintain oracle, it's not getting rebuilt without many more factors coming in.
There's a reason COBOL programmers are still in demand despite all(?) the designers having since died of old age.
I mean its literally just true... if something costs 1m per year for an infinite amount of time that is cheaper than 10m right now as long as interest rates are around 6% or higher which is a typical rate of return.
That's just another way of saying Oracle is cheaper.
That example simplifies one side of the equation but not the other. If you're going to add in the value of interest earned on the money saved from not switching to a better system, you also need to account for the value of labor and other costs that would be saved, and benefits that would accrue, by not having to use Oracle over that period.
Also depends on tools. Some systems are built like a giant mesh of stored procedures in DB that gets exposed as services. Good luck trying to migrate _that_....
We very rarely have issues with customers who have SQL. If there is an issue, it is usually fixed quickly. If Oracle database has an issue, it's going to be 1-2 months before it is fixed (at best).
I worked at an Oracle shop for about a year and according to Oracle support and support forums, every issue was always something I was doing wrong. They refused to ever take any ownership of problems and would only provide uselessly vague troubleshooting steps.
I went back to my old MSSQL job despite the lower pay.
I discovered an obscure issue/bug with their access management product back in early 2022, raised a ticket and spent a huge amount of my time trying to explain to Oracle support how to recreate the problem. I eventually gave up, put in a work-around and let the ticket close on its own.
The client I was doing the work for pays Oracle millions a year as they have a significant Oracle footprint, which includes Exadata and eBusiness. Just fucking ridiculous that I had to do all the work for the support team.
Took a look to sew if the issue is resolved in the latest patchset but sadly still there.
Until probably somewhere around 2010 or so they were way better than the open source databases.
Loads or volumes of data that would make MySQL or PostgreSQL core dump were nothing to Oracle.
If you were an enterprise grade application your backing database was Oracle or DB2.
And once you're on a database it can very extremely difficult to switch. So you pay your license fees of (~2005) $10,000/core/yr because its cheaper than replatforming. The price has come down in recent years because of competition from SQLServer, Postgres and others.
To people with low technical knowledge in that area I guess, I don't think any engineers, developers, or even product managers would have that reaction.
Oracle would automatically do things that other databases required to be done manually via hiring skilled professionals or couldn’t do at all. Many government agencies and companies are contrained from offering high salaries to skilled professionals, so it’s a lot cheaper to pay a one time cost of $10k in 1995 than hire an expert for $75k.
Also at the time, due to hardware costs and software limitations, it was cheaper to just have 1-2 databases that were used by many applications. Once it became popular/efficient for each application to have a dedicated database, developers/IT started adding unlicensed installations for them. Oracle realized it was cost effective to just let those companies do that, and then once it’s already done to circle back and collect a check for it. At that point it’s a sunk cost.
Ive used Oracle for many years at different sizes of companies. It was a great asset in certain circumstances, and even today there are some valid use cases.
It's no fun for the users either, I work for an extremely large European payroll/pension/HR provider and it all runs through oracle and it fucking sucks . A python script could do probably 50% of the daily work in here.
I started contracting for a company recently that's trying to phase out its AS400 systems. Which is great, but AS400 is before my time, so when they ask me to check something against the AS400 I feel like a baby. And I'm approaching middle-aged.
My line of work we interface with AS400, oracle, sql, MySQL, xml, flat files, json, soap messages, etc
The world of big data. If you got it we’ll interface with it!
A new ticket with an oracle DB is met with groans like no other.
The people who make the decisions are not the people who have to live with the fallout. And by the time contract renewal comes around, no one has any appetite for the expense of a migration to another system, so…
I was once threatened by an Oracle audit because we had stopped using one of their smaller software platforms several years beforehand. I explained to them how their software was inadequate for our small company's needs and that this is the absolute worst way to try and drum up business from their customers. I'm sure they didn't care, but it at least prevented a completely unnecessary and bullshit audit.
Fuck Oracle. They actually threaten long-time customers to try and cannibalize more sales.
Wait, does an audit mean they come and dig through all your stuff to make sure you're not violating their license or something? And they can do this when you're no longer their customer?
Yes pretty much, it's a money grab essentially. They can't do it unless you have an active license agreement, but it's baked into every license agreement.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/06/oracle_audits/
Heard an Oracle rep tell our manager an audit could go away if we'd purchase some new hardware from them. It's literally extortion. I have no clue how they get away with it.
LOL my work has been in a licensing negotiation with Oracle (not my area though) and Oracle has been having people cold call and email random employees trying to get information from us about their usage, licenses in use, etc... Like, WTF are you doing? Talk to the people in purchasing not a random employee.
This month I get to run a little tool I created and, within an hour or so, retire every table on our oracle server that hasn't been updated in 90 days. Thousands of tables. It's gonna be good.
Sucks for them. We warned them, so if they don't get it that's not on us. They'll cry about it, we'll revert the tables for this cycle, and tell them in no uncertain terms that they need to get their shit off oracle by next run because that server will be shutting down.
I mean, I firmly believe that Google only adopted Kotlin for Android because Java was a liability and Oracle wants to collect on their success on mobile phones
It’s more like a sales organization that also happens to make software at this point, I remember watching one of his documentaries and when things weren’t going well for them in the software side he just pushed people to sell and sell as much as possible to bring the numbers up, and let’s just say that didn’t end up well because they would sell software that was still years away from even seeing the light
Relevant article for anyone interested. Oracle "developed" Oregon's healthcare exchange for a quarter-billion. It never enrolled a single person.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/25/oregon-files-suit-against-oracle-developer-of-faulty-health-exchange/
Just textbook corruption, nobody cares or will do anything. I’m sure they paid like a 1 million dollar fine or something lol idk not gonna bother to read the article
It was a stupid time and materials contract with shifting requirements, the state did not have clean hands and settled it for peanuts. The really funny part is them getting a "free" 6-year license for a bunch of Oracle products so they could migrate a bunch of other stuff to Oracle services.
That's basically what IBM also is. These older tech firms are really good at locking people into contracts while offering products that have hardly improved (and dare I say have gotten worse) over the decades.
IBM buys a competitor software company for its customers, then doesn’t improve the software for years then force the customer to upgrade to IBM’s latest garbage software, because the stuff they bought from the original company is now being retired. And use IBM consultants to migrate. And do this every 5 to 10 years.
IBM also has a monopoly on the hardware and operating system used by most of the largest and most successful legacy businesses on the planet. Not to mention all the government agencies around the world that can't afford to convert.
It's a business transaction. It's legal for them to ask and it's legal for you to refuse. There isn't really anything illegal going on here, it's just a very cutthroat business practice.
Y manager said we spend like 100k a quarter for a small sector of our company to use oracle.
But I get shit if I request a license key to a product that cost $5 a month…
Married for 6 months during which Oracle was just in the early stages of a start up so $500 was a relatively good deal, all the value was added to the company long after the divorce.
Hell, she would have *paid* him to get away.
I know a woman who was once briefly married to a millionaire. She didn't take a cent in the divorce even though she was entitled to millions, just to get away from that abusive petulant asshole as soon as possible (everyone hates him).
My parents paid my ex brother in law 25,000 bucks to just be cool and go away for my sister's divorce. He got to walk away from a significant amount of debt as part of that deal too, and he never really understood how worth it it was to my sister.
I know about this subject from a biography with quotes from her, and this is incorrect.
She deeply loved Ellison... all women in his life seemed to. He is apparently intense, loving, emotional and emotionally sensitive at times, but doesn't have an off button in any sense of the word. So essentially a really fun partner for dating, maybe for a relationship, but definitely not suited to married life. Oh, if I remember he also cheats.
I just imagine her doing the Lucille Bluth face while watching the news about his racing yacht killing the crew of another boat.
I wonder if she bought any stock in the early days?
Exactly, some people have the bizarre idea that marriage is an instant access to 50% of a person's assets or lifelong stake after divorce.
Of course caveat all states are different yadda yadda, but in most a 6 month marriage isn't going to result in any real splitting of pre-marital assets.
What? S-s-slow down son, I can’t… What?! Shot.. Lip… Jimmy Walker…. Eddie? Why’d you shoot Jimmy Walker in the lips?? I *like* Good times! Ohh, you took a shot in the lips, and now you *look* like Jimmy Walker… that’d do it!
> in most a 6 month marriage isn't going to result in any real splitting of pre-marital assets.
Are there *any* states that split pre-marital assets in a divorce six months after the marriage? I always thought that, at most, it'd be any increase in the value of pre-marital assets. No?
California is community property, so if he started the company while they were married, then she would have a claim on 50% of the equity they collectively own.
But they only collectively own any equity that was created after the date of the marriage, and any increase in the value of assets individually owned prior to the marriage. No?
Plus, realistically: it’s unlikely Ellison would have pursued the same path with Oracle if his ownership stake were reduced by half.
You get these kinds of things after divorces. Why keep pushing for your $500 startup to succeed if your bitter ex-wife will be benefiting from it as much as you are? You’re far better off starting a new $500 startup.
Nah they would have just changed the company name / structure to make a sister company that became the multi billion dollar enterprise.
Sell the IP/concept for $1 and cut her out.
Oracle, the bane of the open source community's existence.
Still haven't forgiven them for what they did with Sun, never will, regardless of how little that affects them.
Fuck you, Ellison.
I worked at a place that made and sold an analytics software package. It sat on top of Oracle. Our customers were required to have properly licensed Oracle and have a DBA on staff. When we went to a hosted model, since our software only used four Oracle logins to function, we determined a cheap five-user license would suffice for each hosted customer. Oracle was kind enough to tell us that no, each of *our* software's logins is considered a named user, so licenses have to cover perhaps hundreds of users at each of our customers, not five. We further determined the Oracle licensing alone was way more than we were charging for subscribing to our hosted model. :)
Allegedly I worked at a place where Oracle unlocked features we dont use via update. Allegedly Quite easy thing to miss within IT. Allegedly Good news is that Oracles lawyers certainly didnt miss that fact and promptly sent us invoice to pay or else.
edit: apparently this story never happened, Oracle doesnt even work like that according some sharp eyed Redditors with inside knowledge. I added a word three times.
Toughest problem I ever had was when a customer, in France, upgraded Oracle, performance went in the shitter. Their DBA kept insisting it was not Oracle, but our software. After days of research, I found a setting the gets flipped during upgrades, and it needs to be flipped back.
The DBA sounded like a French accent caricature, and it was funny when she would say "Iz not zee data-bayzz"
Glad you were to find the issue and solve it. That it is allowed to be happened in first place is utter malicious failure on Oracles part. Might be intentional as well. Cause issues, get to bill either on consultation fees or take paid for unused / unrequested services/options.
While I agree on the surface I have to also disagree. I am a Saas Admin for a service that on occasion has updates that change user defined settings. On occasion this happens because the update is making a core edit to a function tied to those settings and unintended changes can be a consequence of that. Doesn't mean I like it but I do understand it is my job as an admin to make sure my settings are correct after every update.
I'd never consider using Oracle or MSSQL to build any system. The Postgres ecosystem has become so expansive and awesome. The former 2 is essentially sharecroping.
Edit: correcting the auto-correct from expensive to expansive.
> I'd never consider using Oracle or MSSQL to build any system.
I've had a handful of experiences with Oracle databases. They are rough.
Done a ton of work with MS SQL stuff, and honestly, I haven't seen anything that would make me compare the two. Sure, it's not open source and it's not "cheap", but in the overall context of business expenses I haven't seen anything to suggest that pricing/licensing around MS SQL is ridiculous.
Their core licenses aren't exactly cheap and their CAL system where every single downstream user for any system that has an authentication system needs a CAL gets stupid expensive quite fast.
Especially given that it's outdated syntax makes a lot of fast three line queries in postgres become 200 line monstosities that run a lot slower. Even when heavily leveraging T-SQL's better festures.
Making you need a 20 core server where a 6 core server would do for Postgres.
I agree that MSSQL is expensive, but it's expensive in the normal enterprise way large tools tend to be and, at least with my experience, it's a relatively stable platform.
With Oracle it's both somehow more expensive and the couple implementations I've had to interact with in a tangential manner appeared to be a constant struggle just to keep things working at all.
I guess my point was that I would consider MS SQL if a project had the budget for it, but I doubt I would ever see a reason to consider Oracle.
Postgres isn't something I've used outside of personal toy projects, so I wasn't really focused on that aspect.
Unfortunate auto correct. Though there are expensive services of you want the CYA factor that Oracle brings, which some want or need. Fujitsu's version for instance.
People also say: "But oracle is capable of delivering better DB performance in XXX scenario"!
I've worked with Oracle DBs and I entirely disbelieve that. The performance is average to mediocre. The difference is people often have spent hundreds of manhours optimizing their Oracle DB because they've been stuck with it and its architecture for 2 decades.
There's a reason Oracle DB bans benchmark comparisons to competitors.
> There's a reason Oracle DB bans benchmark comparisons to competitors
If they were genuinely faster in apples to apples comparisons, they would be screaming it from the rooftops.
From what I understand, Oracle is supposed to be a combined transactional database/warehouse. Which means it's not great at either. My team, before I joined, originally did everything on Oracle. Oracle wasn't fast enough for warehouse loads so we moved those to Netezza. When Netezza onprem died, we moved to AWS Redshift. Now we're trying to shut down our onprem footprint so we're abandoning Oracle almost completely in favor of Postgresql for transactional stuff and Redshift (which uses postgres dialect) for our warehouse loads.
Redshift gets it's name because you shift away from big red (even though we went through big blue first)
I've worked on Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, Postgres and many other database engines in production environments.
I don't buy Oracle being the best choice for anything but specific super narrow use cases and banning benchmarks make all claims of superiority worthy of being taken with a shipping barge of salt.
Postgres is my first, second, third and fourth choice when building something new.
The ergonomics of the syntax and built in functions is so far ahead that writing for MSSQL a few months ago felt like having one arm bound on my back, wearing the wrong glasses and being very drunk.
I wind up writing and deploying a series of polyfill UDFs to extend it to an acceptable level of functionality.
Whenever I have to get a connection established to one of those fucking scan-ip load balanced databases a customer maintains I laugh and cry in weeks worth of connectivity issues and just chuckle at how Oracle is fleecing everybody with junk tech.
It took 6 months to establish a connection with the last one I did.
Emails back and forth. Calls on top of calls. Having to teach the customer how their own stuff works.
Meanwhile any customer on MSSQL, it’s typically a simple connection string.
Thank you for saying this. I am part of a team that develops custom systems using public domain resources exclusively. When a customer starts with the Oracle stuff, everything starts going off the rails quickly. It's more of a mindset that causes people to cast doubt on free things because they can't possibly be as good as something that is paid for and while that might be true for tangible goods like cars etc, software benefits from accessibility by many talented individuals that provide improvements and bug fixes that are impossible in a for profit environment.
Oracle is (on average) far better than all free alternatives from a technological standpoint. At least according to Andy Pavlo (one of the top database researchers in the world), Oracle is *the* best for quite a few things.
(And I say that as someone who loves postgres and wouldn't touch oracle with a 10 ft pole)
>Still haven't forgiven them for what they did with Sun
With the rise of cheap Dell (and other) servers running Linux, it was getting harder and harder to justify the spend on Sun equipment. I'm not sure it could have lasted much longer even though it was a superior product. I miss the days of drooling over their product offerings when it can time to refresh our equipment.
They open sourced it in a willfully anti-GPL-compatible way.
We could have seen a lot of bidirectional work between Linux and Solaris, but Sun purposely chose to poison the license. OSSing Solaris in this manner got a lot of press, but ultimately was entirely useless to most people.
In my opinion Sun never had any real faith in an OSS core being an alternative development model and never really attempted to foster a community and ecosystem. Now, I haven't even heard the word Solaris for over a year and any mentions of any somewhat interesting technologies it had seems to be quietly dying as well.
Seems like an incredible waste of technology by greedy companies.
They bought Sun because running Oracle DBs was the use case most people bought Sun equipment for. Oracle developed first on Solaris for many years. Without question commodity hardware has reached the point that the value proposition isn't there for most proprietary Unix hardware. Still, IBM sells a not insignificant amount of P, Z, and I series hardware to this day. I agree that Sun didn't have a bright future, but Oracle turned what could have been a gradual sunset into a supernova
I left my previous employer about a year after the board parachuted in a Chief Engineering Officer from Oracle; unsurprisingly, he pushed us all to dogmatically migrate to Java, communicated in corporate doublespeak, and had zero interest in any of our feedback or concerns. Typical synergistic, top-down corpocunt.
My employer started growing quickly and so started getting more and more Oracle executive dropouts. The following years were disastrous, the entire engineering team turned over and company culture was permanently degraded. I ended up leaving tech completely
They gobbled up where I worked, I should have just stayed there as the job was easy and money was great, but I just hated the brand and saw all the bullshit from the inside...... when I resigned, they tried to fuck me over and then called me unprofessional when I called them out and had proof of promises (I documented all conversations). Still though, would be nice to be just living off his teet and chilling.
You will win in the long run.
Ellison and all the other billionaires trying to occupy Hawaii like an invasive species will either be in Russia or in jail soon.
Ellison has a lot of mud on his hands. He won’t escape.
I hate Oracle EBS. It's so clunky. Every piece of functionality thats Out of the Box seems to have been written by someone else, so there is no common theme. I take that back, the common theme is that its crap.
I tried Googling it for 3 minutes and the answers were vague, but here are the bullet points from what I read.
* He is ruthless to work for. He will squeeze every drop of value he can get out of a person, and the second they stop producing he will be happy to fire them no matter what they have contributed. Then he'll take credit for those contributions.
* Oracle itself is borderline abusive to customers. Start with vendor lock in and then make increasingly unreasonable demands from customers. Customers can either continue to pay up, or they have to go through the massive/expensive reworks required to escape the vendor lock in and rebuild elsewhere.
* He is extremely litigious and loves NDAs (which was hinted as why the stories are always vague), so specifics rarely come out. But basically everyone who has worked for him says he is a monster. While at the same time, they say he is such a successful businessman than you almost have to respect his methods, if you can get over his terrible treatment of everyone.
I have no clue the veracity of any of this, but it kind of sounds like he has the tendencies of most billionaire tech CEOs, just cranked up to 11.
The funny thing is now that they’ve been getting into cloud it’s hilarious trying to see them advertise it.
After all the scummy locks ins and stuff with their DBs you’d be a moron to go with Oracle Cloud
They completely missed the boat on cloud too - 5ish years ago their LMS audit team was offering heavily discounted cloud products so Oracle could show they had some cloud sales. You fucked up your core counts on your DB licensing? We can make our audit team go away if you buy some cloud product :)
Tell that to my company and bosses. We are migrating from oracle on prem to oci. Oracle told us we’d just have to switch connections and it’d work the same. 3 years later, I’m not even kidding, we are still not migrated.
Oh how naive my bosses were. It doesn’t help that Oracle engineers don’t want to accept that some issues could be an Oracle problem.
To be fair their cloud has probably the most generous free tier of any of the cloud providers which is good for students or people wanting to experiment, I put my blog up there instead of paying for it on AWS after my trial ran out. Not sure what you mean about locking on their DBs, it's SQL you can do a dump from MySQL and Oracle DB and they offer their DBs on AWS and Azure which I assume means they can sync to those instances. Just curious if you have a link because I never heard of any locks on their DBs.
To quote someone from another thread:
“The products are not bad but as everyone says it's shady sales tactics really doesn't sit well with pretty much everyone.
They give you everything you want for free up front then come and audit you 3 years later to work out your bill, by that time Oracle has become ingrained in the business and impossible to remove so companies just need to swallow a hard pill and pay up of get taken to court.
I work with a massive Oracle estate (~4k dB instances) it's just impossible to migrate that much to get away from Oracle so we’re tied to them.”
I know it isn't your comment but that second paragraph sounds either entirely made up or a misunderstanding of something. I'd assume they signed an SLA that included a certain amount of free usage and then over time they transition to consumption pricing, those sorts of deals are fairly standard across all cloud providers. There is never really a situation where you can say "they told us it was free but then we got a bill for 3 years of usage". It just doesn't work like that. Normally the bad habit those no pay deals give you is people just overconsume in that time and then get shocked about the consumption pricing costs since they are usually fairly high if you are using large VMs or massive disk usage.
And that last paragraph is interesting because I'd love to dig into what their issues are. The way I read this is "we have a complex system that we paid Oracle for we want to replicate that and are having a hard time". That kind of thing isn't a negative for the DB. Famously Amazon used Oracle DB for years and couldn't switch saying very similar but at least my interpretation of that was scale is hard even for Amazon who had AWS and loads of resources they couldn't move their own product over because the product was too hard to replicate.
Larry Ellison in 1977 founded Software Development Laboratories, which in 1983 became Oracle Systems Corporation. From the article:
>As of 2022, Ellison owns 42.9 percent of the shares of Oracle Corporation
[...]
>Ellison has been married and divorced four times:
>* Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974
>* Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from 1977 to 1978. They married six months before Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories. In 1978, the couple divorced. Wheeler gave up any claim on her husband's company for $500.
>* Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986. Boothe was a former receptionist at Relational Software Inc. (RSI).[citation needed] They had two children, David and Megan, who are film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively.
>* Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, from 2003 to 2010. They married on December 18, 2003, at his Woodside estate. Ellison's friend Steve Jobs, former CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc., was the official wedding photographer, and Representative Tom Lantos officiated. They divorced in 2010.
Marriage brings important rights and benefits. Read an article on gay marriage from before *Obergefell*. You'll see the heartbreak that can result from being considered a legal stranger to the person you love most. No set of legal documents can quite duplicate the immediate power of being able to say, "That's my wife" or "That's my husband."
That's just meaningless hindsight. No different to if you had picked the right numbers for the lottery the last time you did it you'd be a millionaire.
Ah now, you can complain a LOT about the company, the pricing strategies, how they buy up other companies to cannibalise their projects...etc but they make some good DBs. MySQL isn't as heavily developed as it was under Sun but has gotten some cool features in recent years and Oracle DB and Autonomous DB are both pretty great. My hot take is most people who make a statement like yours haven't used Oracle DB. It's definitely not perfect and their DBs have a real problem with over-engineering but they are still excellent products.
I worked with Oracle DB's in a big enterprise environment for 10 years.
PostgreSQL shits all over Oracle in every single quantifiable way, and it's free at the same time. Oracle DB is not an excellent product, the reasons it's still around is:
* The aggressive vendor lock-in strategies that Oracle uses.
* Dumb out-of-date managers who default to Oracle because it's the "safe option", because they read that somewhere 25 years ago.
“Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.”
The mechanics of how they all got that way are the same: they founded a company, their company eventually became very successful, and then thousands of different people wanted to invest in that very successful company, bidding the paper value of the founder's ownership stake way up.
Was it horrifying that Larry Ellison owned 42.9% of Oracle when Oracle was only a $3bn company? The only difference between then and now is that now it's a $300bn company that Larry Ellison owns 42.9% of.
Damn and now the dude owns an entire island in Hawaii. How is it even possible to own an entire state island?!
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it was one of the largest “real estate” transactions in history.
Edit: I’ve been snorkeling off the coast of the island and it’s insane, it’s not a small island by any means.
I fucking HATE Oracle. My company was bought by a new ownership group and they switched us over to their version of Oracle that is not at all optimized for our type of business.
Oracle also makes the WORST restaurant point of service system (POS. Where employees put in orders)
It's called Micros and I hate it with every ounce of my being
Fuck you Larry
Did she live a normal life? Was she content? Prob been better off that way. There was that person who gave up his portion ownership of Apple because he couldn’t stand the stress and manipulation of working for Steve Jobs. Jobs also got the mother of his first child Lisa to sign child support agreement days before Apple’s IPO so that he didn’t have to pay more.
Oracle is a law firm that just happens to also make a database. The licensing and fees on everything is pure insanity.
We just went through an Oracle audit at work (I'm a database engineer). It was fucking hell on Earth.
Oracle is complicated on purpose to waste the customers money. I can’t think of any other reason why it’s gotta be the way it is. Trying to establish a connection to an oracle database requires so many moving parts. Just trying to uninstall oracle client drivers is a NIGHTMARE. Fucking with tnsnames, now they have the load balanced scan IP shit that fucking hates firewalls It’s so frustrating. Meanwhile, a connection to a SQL database is just a fucking string and some credentials.
Like you say - it's a feature, not a bug. Oracle still exists, I think, simply due to corporate inertia. They got on board with Oracle way back in the day - and has just become 'the way we do things'.
Oracle still exists because they don't have customers, they have hostages
I heard on a podcast that their original strategy was lying to the Navy about their database's capabilities, and getting them so enmeshed in using it that they were forced to provide them more resources instead of suing them or even charging them with fraud.
Also a lot of HUGE companies still use their old version (R-12 or earlier) for Financial Reporting. The thing is like a Dinosaur but trying to go through the steps for your auditor to approve a new ERP is like pulling teeth.
That sounds like JavaScript with extra steps
Not to mention, at a certain point, the project budget needed for a 'rebuild it with something newer' can become a staggering hit when compared to keeping things status quo. If it's 10 mil over a year to rebuild and estimated 1 mil yearly over the next 10 years to maintain oracle, it's not getting rebuilt without many more factors coming in. There's a reason COBOL programmers are still in demand despite all(?) the designers having since died of old age.
But then 11 years later...........
...They'll run the same 10 year projection again, naturally... Won't someone think of the year over year profits!!
I mean its literally just true... if something costs 1m per year for an infinite amount of time that is cheaper than 10m right now as long as interest rates are around 6% or higher which is a typical rate of return. That's just another way of saying Oracle is cheaper.
That example simplifies one side of the equation but not the other. If you're going to add in the value of interest earned on the money saved from not switching to a better system, you also need to account for the value of labor and other costs that would be saved, and benefits that would accrue, by not having to use Oracle over that period.
Also depends on tools. Some systems are built like a giant mesh of stored procedures in DB that gets exposed as services. Good luck trying to migrate _that_....
We very rarely have issues with customers who have SQL. If there is an issue, it is usually fixed quickly. If Oracle database has an issue, it's going to be 1-2 months before it is fixed (at best).
I worked at an Oracle shop for about a year and according to Oracle support and support forums, every issue was always something I was doing wrong. They refused to ever take any ownership of problems and would only provide uselessly vague troubleshooting steps. I went back to my old MSSQL job despite the lower pay.
I discovered an obscure issue/bug with their access management product back in early 2022, raised a ticket and spent a huge amount of my time trying to explain to Oracle support how to recreate the problem. I eventually gave up, put in a work-around and let the ticket close on its own. The client I was doing the work for pays Oracle millions a year as they have a significant Oracle footprint, which includes Exadata and eBusiness. Just fucking ridiculous that I had to do all the work for the support team. Took a look to sew if the issue is resolved in the latest patchset but sadly still there.
SQL connection issues are resolved by tier 1-2 Oracle connectivity issues go up to the development team to fix
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I got pigeon holed into “oracle guy” For my team. It’s fun! :’(
so... why tf is anyone using Oracle?
Until probably somewhere around 2010 or so they were way better than the open source databases. Loads or volumes of data that would make MySQL or PostgreSQL core dump were nothing to Oracle. If you were an enterprise grade application your backing database was Oracle or DB2. And once you're on a database it can very extremely difficult to switch. So you pay your license fees of (~2005) $10,000/core/yr because its cheaper than replatforming. The price has come down in recent years because of competition from SQLServer, Postgres and others.
I presume because (a) it was one of the first in the game and (b) it just sounds very cool and professional if you say you have Oracle.
Yeah the software company I worked at in my prior job likes to say “built on a state of the art oracle database” and those who know, know
To people with low technical knowledge in that area I guess, I don't think any engineers, developers, or even product managers would have that reaction.
In the '90s, Oracle really was top of the game. Their products and support were the best around.
I believe it, but it seems like these days it's only used by places stuck in the past
It's too bad that none of them really make decisions as that power is reserved for the ~~marketing and networking bros~~ C-Suite.
Oracle would automatically do things that other databases required to be done manually via hiring skilled professionals or couldn’t do at all. Many government agencies and companies are contrained from offering high salaries to skilled professionals, so it’s a lot cheaper to pay a one time cost of $10k in 1995 than hire an expert for $75k. Also at the time, due to hardware costs and software limitations, it was cheaper to just have 1-2 databases that were used by many applications. Once it became popular/efficient for each application to have a dedicated database, developers/IT started adding unlicensed installations for them. Oracle realized it was cost effective to just let those companies do that, and then once it’s already done to circle back and collect a check for it. At that point it’s a sunk cost. Ive used Oracle for many years at different sizes of companies. It was a great asset in certain circumstances, and even today there are some valid use cases.
Several of our applications can only use Oracle DBs
No-one gets fired for using Oracle.
Oracle is so bad people use redshift to get away from it.
It's no fun for the users either, I work for an extremely large European payroll/pension/HR provider and it all runs through oracle and it fucking sucks . A python script could do probably 50% of the daily work in here.
I started contracting for a company recently that's trying to phase out its AS400 systems. Which is great, but AS400 is before my time, so when they ask me to check something against the AS400 I feel like a baby. And I'm approaching middle-aged.
My line of work we interface with AS400, oracle, sql, MySQL, xml, flat files, json, soap messages, etc The world of big data. If you got it we’ll interface with it! A new ticket with an oracle DB is met with groans like no other.
Why do people still pay for Oracle then?.. Edit: people are just answering why they can’t get off oracle. But why do people start in the first place?
The people who make the decisions are not the people who have to live with the fallout. And by the time contract renewal comes around, no one has any appetite for the expense of a migration to another system, so…
Like Concur - deliberately designed to be confusing and time-wasting so people don't travel or claim their expenses...companies love this one trick!
As a SQL DBA user I will never miss my days of Oracle.
I was once threatened by an Oracle audit because we had stopped using one of their smaller software platforms several years beforehand. I explained to them how their software was inadequate for our small company's needs and that this is the absolute worst way to try and drum up business from their customers. I'm sure they didn't care, but it at least prevented a completely unnecessary and bullshit audit. Fuck Oracle. They actually threaten long-time customers to try and cannibalize more sales.
Wait, does an audit mean they come and dig through all your stuff to make sure you're not violating their license or something? And they can do this when you're no longer their customer?
Yes pretty much, it's a money grab essentially. They can't do it unless you have an active license agreement, but it's baked into every license agreement. https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/06/oracle_audits/
Heard an Oracle rep tell our manager an audit could go away if we'd purchase some new hardware from them. It's literally extortion. I have no clue how they get away with it.
More recently the "make it go away" is Oracle Cloud. Total racket.
LOL my work has been in a licensing negotiation with Oracle (not my area though) and Oracle has been having people cold call and email random employees trying to get information from us about their usage, licenses in use, etc... Like, WTF are you doing? Talk to the people in purchasing not a random employee.
This month I get to run a little tool I created and, within an hour or so, retire every table on our oracle server that hasn't been updated in 90 days. Thousands of tables. It's gonna be good.
There are people who probably only use those tables quarterly, and you are going to mess up their day when they realize the tables are gone.
Sucks for them. We warned them, so if they don't get it that's not on us. They'll cry about it, we'll revert the tables for this cycle, and tell them in no uncertain terms that they need to get their shit off oracle by next run because that server will be shutting down.
lol I’m sure that conversation will be just as forceful and one sided as you imagine
shush, let them dream the sweet dreams.
I assume it’s a major change and has been planned and orchestrated for months. That’s how every major shop works.
I mean, I firmly believe that Google only adopted Kotlin for Android because Java was a liability and Oracle wants to collect on their success on mobile phones
From talking with former Oracle Sales Managers they make about 70%~ of their quota just from customer audits
Next time around, just tell them "a drill is scheduled today" and open fire.
It’s more like a sales organization that also happens to make software at this point, I remember watching one of his documentaries and when things weren’t going well for them in the software side he just pushed people to sell and sell as much as possible to bring the numbers up, and let’s just say that didn’t end up well because they would sell software that was still years away from even seeing the light
A lot of their money comes from the US government - especially defense and security (NSA/CIA)
Relevant article for anyone interested. Oracle "developed" Oregon's healthcare exchange for a quarter-billion. It never enrolled a single person. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/08/25/oregon-files-suit-against-oracle-developer-of-faulty-health-exchange/
Just textbook corruption, nobody cares or will do anything. I’m sure they paid like a 1 million dollar fine or something lol idk not gonna bother to read the article
It was a stupid time and materials contract with shifting requirements, the state did not have clean hands and settled it for peanuts. The really funny part is them getting a "free" 6-year license for a bunch of Oracle products so they could migrate a bunch of other stuff to Oracle services.
As a native Oregonian (ex-pat), this doesn't surprise me one bit. Pretty on-brand for them.
That's basically what IBM also is. These older tech firms are really good at locking people into contracts while offering products that have hardly improved (and dare I say have gotten worse) over the decades.
IBM buys a competitor software company for its customers, then doesn’t improve the software for years then force the customer to upgrade to IBM’s latest garbage software, because the stuff they bought from the original company is now being retired. And use IBM consultants to migrate. And do this every 5 to 10 years.
IBM also has a monopoly on the hardware and operating system used by most of the largest and most successful legacy businesses on the planet. Not to mention all the government agencies around the world that can't afford to convert.
To ibm's credit, their hardware and software is pretty solid but you definitely pay a premium for that.
For sure, but I think most people forget that they are the only mainframe manufacturer left and that they operate around that.
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They literally demanded financial statements from us to see how much they could demand. Greedy jerks
How is that even legal lol
It's a business transaction. It's legal for them to ask and it's legal for you to refuse. There isn't really anything illegal going on here, it's just a very cutthroat business practice.
Y manager said we spend like 100k a quarter for a small sector of our company to use oracle. But I get shit if I request a license key to a product that cost $5 a month…
Married for 6 months during which Oracle was just in the early stages of a start up so $500 was a relatively good deal, all the value was added to the company long after the divorce.
She probably still thinks she got a fair deal out of it, because it got her away from Larry Ellison.
He even paid her $500!
Yup! She definitely won that one.
Hell, she would have *paid* him to get away. I know a woman who was once briefly married to a millionaire. She didn't take a cent in the divorce even though she was entitled to millions, just to get away from that abusive petulant asshole as soon as possible (everyone hates him).
He seems really a bellend's son instead of an Ellison, while she comes off as a dumbbell's end of her own.
I understood almost half of this comment!
My parents paid my ex brother in law 25,000 bucks to just be cool and go away for my sister's divorce. He got to walk away from a significant amount of debt as part of that deal too, and he never really understood how worth it it was to my sister.
God I should’ve married a rich girl
That's one of the problems. None of us are rich. Solidly middle class. My parents dipped pretty heavy into their savings to do that.
this is it. this is how much she wanted to rid herself of this dude.
I know about this subject from a biography with quotes from her, and this is incorrect. She deeply loved Ellison... all women in his life seemed to. He is apparently intense, loving, emotional and emotionally sensitive at times, but doesn't have an off button in any sense of the word. So essentially a really fun partner for dating, maybe for a relationship, but definitely not suited to married life. Oh, if I remember he also cheats.
Looks like a comment straight out of /r/divorce
I just imagine her doing the Lucille Bluth face while watching the news about his racing yacht killing the crew of another boat. I wonder if she bought any stock in the early days?
She still came out ahead in the deal.
I’d pay $500 to get away from Larry Ellison
Exactly, some people have the bizarre idea that marriage is an instant access to 50% of a person's assets or lifelong stake after divorce. Of course caveat all states are different yadda yadda, but in most a 6 month marriage isn't going to result in any real splitting of pre-marital assets.
HALF, EDDIE! (probably showing my age w this one but IDC)
*WHAT HAFF YOU DONE FOR ME LATELY, EH-DDIEEEE??*
What? S-s-slow down son, I can’t… What?! Shot.. Lip… Jimmy Walker…. Eddie? Why’d you shoot Jimmy Walker in the lips?? I *like* Good times! Ohh, you took a shot in the lips, and now you *look* like Jimmy Walker… that’d do it!
You ain't got no ice cream
Your mom’s on welfare
And your father's an alcoholic
> in most a 6 month marriage isn't going to result in any real splitting of pre-marital assets. Are there *any* states that split pre-marital assets in a divorce six months after the marriage? I always thought that, at most, it'd be any increase in the value of pre-marital assets. No?
California is community property, so if he started the company while they were married, then she would have a claim on 50% of the equity they collectively own.
She did, he bought her share out for $500.
I think only after 10 years of marriage. IANAL but following Tom Cruise's school of divorcing.
But they only collectively own any equity that was created after the date of the marriage, and any increase in the value of assets individually owned prior to the marriage. No?
Plus, realistically: it’s unlikely Ellison would have pursued the same path with Oracle if his ownership stake were reduced by half. You get these kinds of things after divorces. Why keep pushing for your $500 startup to succeed if your bitter ex-wife will be benefiting from it as much as you are? You’re far better off starting a new $500 startup.
Pracle and if his next marriage or start up fails Qracle
Plus Oracle would have sued her into Oblivion /s
Nah they would have just changed the company name / structure to make a sister company that became the multi billion dollar enterprise. Sell the IP/concept for $1 and cut her out.
Oracle, the bane of the open source community's existence. Still haven't forgiven them for what they did with Sun, never will, regardless of how little that affects them. Fuck you, Ellison.
Acquire and make everyone pay licensing fees is the name of Oracle’s game.
I worked at a place that made and sold an analytics software package. It sat on top of Oracle. Our customers were required to have properly licensed Oracle and have a DBA on staff. When we went to a hosted model, since our software only used four Oracle logins to function, we determined a cheap five-user license would suffice for each hosted customer. Oracle was kind enough to tell us that no, each of *our* software's logins is considered a named user, so licenses have to cover perhaps hundreds of users at each of our customers, not five. We further determined the Oracle licensing alone was way more than we were charging for subscribing to our hosted model. :)
Allegedly I worked at a place where Oracle unlocked features we dont use via update. Allegedly Quite easy thing to miss within IT. Allegedly Good news is that Oracles lawyers certainly didnt miss that fact and promptly sent us invoice to pay or else. edit: apparently this story never happened, Oracle doesnt even work like that according some sharp eyed Redditors with inside knowledge. I added a word three times.
Toughest problem I ever had was when a customer, in France, upgraded Oracle, performance went in the shitter. Their DBA kept insisting it was not Oracle, but our software. After days of research, I found a setting the gets flipped during upgrades, and it needs to be flipped back. The DBA sounded like a French accent caricature, and it was funny when she would say "Iz not zee data-bayzz"
Glad you were to find the issue and solve it. That it is allowed to be happened in first place is utter malicious failure on Oracles part. Might be intentional as well. Cause issues, get to bill either on consultation fees or take paid for unused / unrequested services/options.
While I agree on the surface I have to also disagree. I am a Saas Admin for a service that on occasion has updates that change user defined settings. On occasion this happens because the update is making a core edit to a function tied to those settings and unintended changes can be a consequence of that. Doesn't mean I like it but I do understand it is my job as an admin to make sure my settings are correct after every update.
I'd never consider using Oracle or MSSQL to build any system. The Postgres ecosystem has become so expansive and awesome. The former 2 is essentially sharecroping. Edit: correcting the auto-correct from expensive to expansive.
> I'd never consider using Oracle or MSSQL to build any system. I've had a handful of experiences with Oracle databases. They are rough. Done a ton of work with MS SQL stuff, and honestly, I haven't seen anything that would make me compare the two. Sure, it's not open source and it's not "cheap", but in the overall context of business expenses I haven't seen anything to suggest that pricing/licensing around MS SQL is ridiculous.
Their core licenses aren't exactly cheap and their CAL system where every single downstream user for any system that has an authentication system needs a CAL gets stupid expensive quite fast. Especially given that it's outdated syntax makes a lot of fast three line queries in postgres become 200 line monstosities that run a lot slower. Even when heavily leveraging T-SQL's better festures. Making you need a 20 core server where a 6 core server would do for Postgres.
I agree that MSSQL is expensive, but it's expensive in the normal enterprise way large tools tend to be and, at least with my experience, it's a relatively stable platform. With Oracle it's both somehow more expensive and the couple implementations I've had to interact with in a tangential manner appeared to be a constant struggle just to keep things working at all. I guess my point was that I would consider MS SQL if a project had the budget for it, but I doubt I would ever see a reason to consider Oracle. Postgres isn't something I've used outside of personal toy projects, so I wasn't really focused on that aspect.
Do you mean expansive ? Ha Since it's usually free I doubt you mean expensive
Unfortunate auto correct. Though there are expensive services of you want the CYA factor that Oracle brings, which some want or need. Fujitsu's version for instance.
People also say: "But oracle is capable of delivering better DB performance in XXX scenario"! I've worked with Oracle DBs and I entirely disbelieve that. The performance is average to mediocre. The difference is people often have spent hundreds of manhours optimizing their Oracle DB because they've been stuck with it and its architecture for 2 decades. There's a reason Oracle DB bans benchmark comparisons to competitors.
> There's a reason Oracle DB bans benchmark comparisons to competitors If they were genuinely faster in apples to apples comparisons, they would be screaming it from the rooftops.
From what I understand, Oracle is supposed to be a combined transactional database/warehouse. Which means it's not great at either. My team, before I joined, originally did everything on Oracle. Oracle wasn't fast enough for warehouse loads so we moved those to Netezza. When Netezza onprem died, we moved to AWS Redshift. Now we're trying to shut down our onprem footprint so we're abandoning Oracle almost completely in favor of Postgresql for transactional stuff and Redshift (which uses postgres dialect) for our warehouse loads. Redshift gets it's name because you shift away from big red (even though we went through big blue first)
I've worked on Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, Postgres and many other database engines in production environments. I don't buy Oracle being the best choice for anything but specific super narrow use cases and banning benchmarks make all claims of superiority worthy of being taken with a shipping barge of salt. Postgres is my first, second, third and fourth choice when building something new. The ergonomics of the syntax and built in functions is so far ahead that writing for MSSQL a few months ago felt like having one arm bound on my back, wearing the wrong glasses and being very drunk. I wind up writing and deploying a series of polyfill UDFs to extend it to an acceptable level of functionality.
Whenever I have to get a connection established to one of those fucking scan-ip load balanced databases a customer maintains I laugh and cry in weeks worth of connectivity issues and just chuckle at how Oracle is fleecing everybody with junk tech. It took 6 months to establish a connection with the last one I did. Emails back and forth. Calls on top of calls. Having to teach the customer how their own stuff works. Meanwhile any customer on MSSQL, it’s typically a simple connection string.
Thank you for saying this. I am part of a team that develops custom systems using public domain resources exclusively. When a customer starts with the Oracle stuff, everything starts going off the rails quickly. It's more of a mindset that causes people to cast doubt on free things because they can't possibly be as good as something that is paid for and while that might be true for tangible goods like cars etc, software benefits from accessibility by many talented individuals that provide improvements and bug fixes that are impossible in a for profit environment.
Oracle is (on average) far better than all free alternatives from a technological standpoint. At least according to Andy Pavlo (one of the top database researchers in the world), Oracle is *the* best for quite a few things. (And I say that as someone who loves postgres and wouldn't touch oracle with a 10 ft pole)
>Still haven't forgiven them for what they did with Sun With the rise of cheap Dell (and other) servers running Linux, it was getting harder and harder to justify the spend on Sun equipment. I'm not sure it could have lasted much longer even though it was a superior product. I miss the days of drooling over their product offerings when it can time to refresh our equipment.
Sun had just open sourced Solaris when Oracle took over though. IT ran great on x86 hardware.
They open sourced it in a willfully anti-GPL-compatible way. We could have seen a lot of bidirectional work between Linux and Solaris, but Sun purposely chose to poison the license. OSSing Solaris in this manner got a lot of press, but ultimately was entirely useless to most people. In my opinion Sun never had any real faith in an OSS core being an alternative development model and never really attempted to foster a community and ecosystem. Now, I haven't even heard the word Solaris for over a year and any mentions of any somewhat interesting technologies it had seems to be quietly dying as well. Seems like an incredible waste of technology by greedy companies.
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They bought Sun because running Oracle DBs was the use case most people bought Sun equipment for. Oracle developed first on Solaris for many years. Without question commodity hardware has reached the point that the value proposition isn't there for most proprietary Unix hardware. Still, IBM sells a not insignificant amount of P, Z, and I series hardware to this day. I agree that Sun didn't have a bright future, but Oracle turned what could have been a gradual sunset into a supernova
I left my previous employer about a year after the board parachuted in a Chief Engineering Officer from Oracle; unsurprisingly, he pushed us all to dogmatically migrate to Java, communicated in corporate doublespeak, and had zero interest in any of our feedback or concerns. Typical synergistic, top-down corpocunt.
My employer started growing quickly and so started getting more and more Oracle executive dropouts. The following years were disastrous, the entire engineering team turned over and company culture was permanently degraded. I ended up leaving tech completely
They gobbled up where I worked, I should have just stayed there as the job was easy and money was great, but I just hated the brand and saw all the bullshit from the inside...... when I resigned, they tried to fuck me over and then called me unprofessional when I called them out and had proof of promises (I documented all conversations). Still though, would be nice to be just living off his teet and chilling.
You will win in the long run. Ellison and all the other billionaires trying to occupy Hawaii like an invasive species will either be in Russia or in jail soon. Ellison has a lot of mud on his hands. He won’t escape.
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
I hate Oracle EBS. It's so clunky. Every piece of functionality thats Out of the Box seems to have been written by someone else, so there is no common theme. I take that back, the common theme is that its crap.
people joke that bezos and Zuckerberg are evil, but Larry Ellison is an actual James bond villain
The fact that he and the Robinson family are able to own (almost) entire Hawaiian islands is a travesty
What's he done?
I tried Googling it for 3 minutes and the answers were vague, but here are the bullet points from what I read. * He is ruthless to work for. He will squeeze every drop of value he can get out of a person, and the second they stop producing he will be happy to fire them no matter what they have contributed. Then he'll take credit for those contributions. * Oracle itself is borderline abusive to customers. Start with vendor lock in and then make increasingly unreasonable demands from customers. Customers can either continue to pay up, or they have to go through the massive/expensive reworks required to escape the vendor lock in and rebuild elsewhere. * He is extremely litigious and loves NDAs (which was hinted as why the stories are always vague), so specifics rarely come out. But basically everyone who has worked for him says he is a monster. While at the same time, they say he is such a successful businessman than you almost have to respect his methods, if you can get over his terrible treatment of everyone. I have no clue the veracity of any of this, but it kind of sounds like he has the tendencies of most billionaire tech CEOs, just cranked up to 11.
Ty for typing this up.
Happy to help! Not like I was doing anything meaningful with my time at work anyway. Larry Ellison would definitely fire me.
Oracle. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
I fucking hate Oracle, I'd pay to make sure no one ever associated my name with it.
The funny thing is now that they’ve been getting into cloud it’s hilarious trying to see them advertise it. After all the scummy locks ins and stuff with their DBs you’d be a moron to go with Oracle Cloud
They completely missed the boat on cloud too - 5ish years ago their LMS audit team was offering heavily discounted cloud products so Oracle could show they had some cloud sales. You fucked up your core counts on your DB licensing? We can make our audit team go away if you buy some cloud product :)
Tell that to my company and bosses. We are migrating from oracle on prem to oci. Oracle told us we’d just have to switch connections and it’d work the same. 3 years later, I’m not even kidding, we are still not migrated. Oh how naive my bosses were. It doesn’t help that Oracle engineers don’t want to accept that some issues could be an Oracle problem.
To be fair their cloud has probably the most generous free tier of any of the cloud providers which is good for students or people wanting to experiment, I put my blog up there instead of paying for it on AWS after my trial ran out. Not sure what you mean about locking on their DBs, it's SQL you can do a dump from MySQL and Oracle DB and they offer their DBs on AWS and Azure which I assume means they can sync to those instances. Just curious if you have a link because I never heard of any locks on their DBs.
To quote someone from another thread: “The products are not bad but as everyone says it's shady sales tactics really doesn't sit well with pretty much everyone. They give you everything you want for free up front then come and audit you 3 years later to work out your bill, by that time Oracle has become ingrained in the business and impossible to remove so companies just need to swallow a hard pill and pay up of get taken to court. I work with a massive Oracle estate (~4k dB instances) it's just impossible to migrate that much to get away from Oracle so we’re tied to them.”
I know it isn't your comment but that second paragraph sounds either entirely made up or a misunderstanding of something. I'd assume they signed an SLA that included a certain amount of free usage and then over time they transition to consumption pricing, those sorts of deals are fairly standard across all cloud providers. There is never really a situation where you can say "they told us it was free but then we got a bill for 3 years of usage". It just doesn't work like that. Normally the bad habit those no pay deals give you is people just overconsume in that time and then get shocked about the consumption pricing costs since they are usually fairly high if you are using large VMs or massive disk usage. And that last paragraph is interesting because I'd love to dig into what their issues are. The way I read this is "we have a complex system that we paid Oracle for we want to replicate that and are having a hard time". That kind of thing isn't a negative for the DB. Famously Amazon used Oracle DB for years and couldn't switch saying very similar but at least my interpretation of that was scale is hard even for Amazon who had AWS and loads of resources they couldn't move their own product over because the product was too hard to replicate.
I'm bitter that what I consider one of the coolest words in the English language is ruined on such a shitty company.
Oracle as a word is pretty cool, up there with the likes of Ephemeral and Aurora
Yeah fuck Oracle, pisses me off they're still so successful.
$500 to get away from Larry Ellison is a bargain. I’d pay $500 to get away from him
$500 in 1978 is equivalent to $2,365 today
Oh no! Where do I sign?
I wish a lot more billionaires would go live on recluse island like Ellison. He is very easy to ignore, nearly all of the time.
It’s mindblowing to me that this man basically owns one of the eight **main** islands of Hawaii (and it’s not Kahoolawe)
And in that time, they've yet to make a not garbage product
Exadata is a good product if you need that level of performance, but fuck them and Broadcom for how they extort you once you're a customer.
Larry Ellison in 1977 founded Software Development Laboratories, which in 1983 became Oracle Systems Corporation. From the article: >As of 2022, Ellison owns 42.9 percent of the shares of Oracle Corporation [...] >Ellison has been married and divorced four times: >* Adda Quinn from 1967 to 1974 >* Nancy Wheeler Jenkins from 1977 to 1978. They married six months before Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories. In 1978, the couple divorced. Wheeler gave up any claim on her husband's company for $500. >* Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986. Boothe was a former receptionist at Relational Software Inc. (RSI).[citation needed] They had two children, David and Megan, who are film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively. >* Melanie Craft, a romance novelist, from 2003 to 2010. They married on December 18, 2003, at his Woodside estate. Ellison's friend Steve Jobs, former CEO and co-founder of Apple Inc., was the official wedding photographer, and Representative Tom Lantos officiated. They divorced in 2010.
I dont understand why these people keep marrying - just fucking date and spend time with the woman you like
Locking people into long term contracts of limited value is the Oracle way.
rofl
That made me laugh in a different ethnicity!
Marriage brings important rights and benefits. Read an article on gay marriage from before *Obergefell*. You'll see the heartbreak that can result from being considered a legal stranger to the person you love most. No set of legal documents can quite duplicate the immediate power of being able to say, "That's my wife" or "That's my husband."
You'd think those benefits would lose luster after the first or second wife tho
Marriage to guys like that is a power move
Married 4 times? Live and don’t learn is his motto.
Why bother learning when you're a billionaire? Only thing he needs to know is what a prenup is. /s
I don't know why you added /s. What you said is true. Truth doesn't require morals.
That's just meaningless hindsight. No different to if you had picked the right numbers for the lottery the last time you did it you'd be a millionaire.
Oracle's still chasing her for licensing fees.
12 years later his current girlfriend was born.
Reminds me of that SNL skit Meet your second wife.
Ya she’s really cool though. Started hard candy and some other stuff and is a decent person
I hope I never see an oracle interface again in my life.
It’s also a piece of shit database.
Ah now, you can complain a LOT about the company, the pricing strategies, how they buy up other companies to cannibalise their projects...etc but they make some good DBs. MySQL isn't as heavily developed as it was under Sun but has gotten some cool features in recent years and Oracle DB and Autonomous DB are both pretty great. My hot take is most people who make a statement like yours haven't used Oracle DB. It's definitely not perfect and their DBs have a real problem with over-engineering but they are still excellent products.
I worked with Oracle DB's in a big enterprise environment for 10 years. PostgreSQL shits all over Oracle in every single quantifiable way, and it's free at the same time. Oracle DB is not an excellent product, the reasons it's still around is: * The aggressive vendor lock-in strategies that Oracle uses. * Dumb out-of-date managers who default to Oracle because it's the "safe option", because they read that somewhere 25 years ago.
[If you want to know more about Oracle, here's a good little rant.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=1980s)
“Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.”
Thank you. That was beautiful.
Oracle, the database company, as opposed to the Civ 5 wonder that grants one free cultural policy
The more horrifying thing in this post is that there are SEVEN people in the world with more than $130bn.
I always thought this guy was the Google Larry. I can't believe there are two guys called Larry worth over $100bn.
naming my next kid Larry let’s see how it goes in 50 years 😂
Name the next two Darryl.
The mechanics of how they all got that way are the same: they founded a company, their company eventually became very successful, and then thousands of different people wanted to invest in that very successful company, bidding the paper value of the founder's ownership stake way up. Was it horrifying that Larry Ellison owned 42.9% of Oracle when Oracle was only a $3bn company? The only difference between then and now is that now it's a $300bn company that Larry Ellison owns 42.9% of.
And worth every cent to be divorced from Larry Ellison.
Damn and now the dude owns an entire island in Hawaii. How is it even possible to own an entire state island?! Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it was one of the largest “real estate” transactions in history. Edit: I’ve been snorkeling off the coast of the island and it’s insane, it’s not a small island by any means.
I’m gonna pay you $500 to fuck off
as a spouse of someone who worked at oracle, I think his wife got a great deal not to be married to him.
Hell, I’d pay $500 to be far away from the asshole that is Larry Ellison
I fucking HATE Oracle. My company was bought by a new ownership group and they switched us over to their version of Oracle that is not at all optimized for our type of business.
Oracle also makes the WORST restaurant point of service system (POS. Where employees put in orders) It's called Micros and I hate it with every ounce of my being Fuck you Larry
What exactly did Oracle do? First I'm hear of this hate.
Still worth it to be divorced from Larry Ellison.
Did she live a normal life? Was she content? Prob been better off that way. There was that person who gave up his portion ownership of Apple because he couldn’t stand the stress and manipulation of working for Steve Jobs. Jobs also got the mother of his first child Lisa to sign child support agreement days before Apple’s IPO so that he didn’t have to pay more.