Oracle Bullies Enterprise Clients Into Cloud Purchases, Consultant Claims 184
An anonymous reader writes: A consultant claims that Oracle has adopted the widespread use of 'breach notices' this year to force existing enterprise customers to adopt its newly-bolstered range of cloud services, or else be told to stop using all Oracle software within thirty days. Speaking to Business Insider, the unnamed source described the tactic as a 'nuclear option' which is now practically the default when the need to add services or users to an existing contract triggers an 'audit' by Oracle. An ex-Oracle contract negotiator who now works in the ever-expanding business niche of 'Oracle contract negotiation' commented 'Internally, the water cooler gossip there is that they've never seen this kind of aggression before. Oracle has really dialed it up. Customers are buying cloud services to make the Oracle issue go away, not because they have any intention of using cloud services.'
How much you got? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How much you got? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like a desperation move for a company with under-target earnings [businessinsider.com], if they're willing to poison long-term relationships with their customers like that. You're going to see businesses deciding that they don't like having a gun held to their head. They'll pay the ransom for now, but some of them will probably start investigating other options in the background.
Re:How much you got? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is just what happened at my previous job. The ever increasing cost and pure hostility against customers made the company start switching from Oracle to other alternatives.
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This is just what happened at my previous job. The ever increasing cost and pure hostility against customers made the company start switching from Oracle to other alternatives.
Ditto. Our edict last year was "get off Oracle by the end of the fiscal year". The priority from the CEO was published and restated every month: #1, keep the existing service running, #2, get off Oracle.
Every sprint planning meeting at every team began by restating that goal. Do only minimum bug fixes necessary to keep the system running, all other tasks must be toward getting us off Oracle before the end of the fiscal year. Existing features could be reduced if that helped get us off Oracle quicker or
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Businesses have already decided to drop Oracle if possible. I know of some very large companies that plan a migration to Linux in the infrastructure mainly to get rid of Solaris and thereby of Oracle because of under-performance and overpricing.
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Migrating to Linux does not address the Oracle issue.
Linux is the reference platform for Oracle.
It's an entirely orthogonal issue: OS vs RDBMS.
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Linux is the reference platform for Oracle.
Not true at all. Solaris is the reference platform for Oracle. They own the whole thing, hardware and software. When you buy Oracle on Solaris you are getting the ultimate "reference" platform for all things Oracle.
Linux CANNOT be a "reference" platform for Oracle, because they don't control it, they can't mold it to fit their needs. However they can do whatever they want with Solaris, to make it into their "reference" platform.
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Oracle's own linux distro is the reference platform. Solaris is dead and Oracle knows it.
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As can be seen by the lack of updates and development effort to fix, e.g., the parts of the network stack that are still abysmally slow (e.g. local sockets).
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Rather obviously, I was not referring to Oracle DB, but Oracle Solaris. And, again rather obviously, the migration is _not_ to Oracle Linux.
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Indeed. I see what I said was clear enough for an intelligent person to understand.
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The point in real life is not about being buggy, but about providing workarounds, solutions and prompt support for bugs. In the meantime i actually like companies who focus on the most important bugs and leave the rest alone.
(e.g. i am a heavy matlab user for 15 years, and my best times with ML were the ones where they only focused on the things which made it crash; my worst times with ML were the ones where they "fixed a fundamental problem".
Re: How much you got? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle is not particularly buggy. It's a stable and mature piece of software. However, it's extremely limited, always has been. Like Cobol, everything is limited so it puts real constraints on the solutions you build with it.
Choosing Oracle is not really about support or quality though, it's about CYA. See, the people who makes the decisions don't really know what they're doing, but nobody was fired for choosing IBM^H^H^HOracle, so it must be a good fit for your system, right?
Wrong. There are many alternatives and better tools for various problems: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=oracle+alternatives
Even some who provide enterprise support.
Anyways, SQL is really really old now, and is only chosen because people generally don't like to think for themselves and open themselves up for risk. Well, then you're also becoming a dinosaur who uses IT as a cost center instead of advancing your business with evolution of technology. As soon as top management openly admits that, everything is good, because then they're finally being honest at least. It won't help the business though until they become expert at managing IT services, which today is part of every fucking company.
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What are alternatives to all the relational databases that use SQL and provide the whole ACID package? I don't particularly care about SQL as a language or relational data models as long as I know my data is guaranteed to be safe and up to date.
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MariaDB. Google switched from MySQL to Oracle to MySQL to Google F1 for it's AdWords technology. See the wiki page on Adwords [wikipedia.org]. Since then, many companies, including Google have switched their smaller MySQL databases to MariaDB.
There is an interesting account of the Google Oracle migration at the wayback machine. [archive.org]
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That's a terrible suggestion.
MySQL (MariaDB is essentially MySQL) is very limited in it's SQL language support and query capabilities. If you're looking to switch from Oracle, the go to database is PostgreSQL. The syntax is nearly the same, the query engine is powerful.
People who use Oracle or Postgres use it because it has a powerful SQL engine. People who use MySQL or MariaDB use it as a glorified table store, because frankly, it's pretty much useless for anything more advanced than that.
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Yes. I had forgotten about MySQL's rudimentary support for SQL syntax. That is certainly annoying. Although I would find it's built in backup and recovery features much more troublesome from a production support perspective.
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For the majority of cases MariaDB is sufficient, it's only when you need to do specialized stuff that it may not be sufficient, but that's the same with every database - you end up into the realm of vendor specific details.
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For the majority of cases where MariaDB is sufficient, you'd probably get away with using MSAccess in the background.
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If you can make MSAccess work on Linux.
Re: How much you got? (Score:5, Informative)
MariaDB is only good if you need extremely fast. For a full ACID compliant DB, go for Postgres.
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That does not surprise me at all.
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Quite possibly so. In that case, there is no reason left to use MariaDB.
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MySQL variants are only acceptable if you are willing to tolerate data loss. It is not comparable to any of the payware RDBMS products at all. It hasn't even caught up to the robustness of Oracle from the 90s. Even other libre projects are not as dire in this respect.
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Does MariaDB (MySQL forked by the author of MySQL) now support ACID, raw devices and live guaranteed viable backups?
If so, that's welcome news.
PostgreSQL (pgsql) has been the main alternative for a while, but in my experience, despite automatic vacuumdb and similar, busy / complex databases still need to be dumped and restored periodically, or else they become terribly sluggish over time.
For 24/7/365, pg is not always the best alternative. It may be for 24/7/90, but in my experience, it is one of the datab
Alternative to Oracle Database (Score:3)
Re: Alternative to Oracle Database (Score:2)
How can you not mention postgres?
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Where do you get the same kind of support contract for postgres that you would for Oracle? These companies that are being bullied probably want that part of the package.
Re: How much you got? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think gmail would have become the most popular email service if it would have used ACID? ACID is *not* the only option. It's the *old* option. It's the expensive and slow option.
Maybe ACID [wikipedia.org] doesn't mean what you think it means. It is not a technology that is "old" or "new", it is a way to think about the requirements of your system. Each of the four letters in ACID stands for a particular property of a database system and these properties (in various combinations) may or may not be needed by the system being built.
If your system is processing something where the integrity of the data is important (like financial systems), you are very likely going to need all four properties. If you are moving money from one place to another, you want to guarantee that that the the money is completely moved or not. You don't want the money partially moved, you don't want money to be lost, and you don't want money to be created out of thin air. ACID (as a concept) guarantees this.
If your solution requires ACID, you don't have to use a database that supports all of the properties of ACID, you could instead implement ACID in your application layer. However if you do this, you have to guarantee that that your application layer implements it properly and that there is no possible way to get to the underlying data store without going through the application layer. You also have to guarantee that no changes, updates, upgrades, or bugs in your application layer every break the ACID guarantee at any time. Making all of these guarantees in your application layer is VERY HARD, which is why people use ACID complaint databases instead to solve this particular problem set.
If your requirements don't need the properties described by ACID, than there isn't anything wrong with using a non ACID database. If may be acceptable for your data to "eventually" become consistent, to be inconsistent, or maybe even lost.
In the gmail example, you don't really need all the ACID properties, so you don't need to use that sort of database to hold the information. Email is not transactional end to end; when you send an email you are not guaranteed that it will get there. Email is also not order guaranteed; if you send multiple emails there is not a guarantee (or need) for them to arrive in the destination mailbox in order. If you are bulk moving messages from one mailbox to another, and only some of them get moved, it is okay and you can just move the remaining messages later.
As always, it is important to chose the right technology to solve the problem you need to solve. ACID compliant databases solve a lot of important problems (usually involving money), and if you have one of those problems, there is nothing "old" about ACID.
Re: How much you got? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the last time this was debated here I brought up a similar point, and someone else pointed out that banks don't use ACID but mostly use eventual consistency for their transaction systems. That does cause them to lose (a lot of) money sometimes, but they write it off against the expenses of real-time ACID compliance.
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For the majority of applications where SQL is used ACID isn't honestly needed for safe data. Just keep adding it to a DBM and back it up regularly.
This comment made me cringe. ACID has almost nothing to do with regular backups. Backing up a non-ACID database regular does not make it even close to ACID compliant. This is one of the reasons why ACID is unfortunately so important; because almost no software developers even know what it is.
Re: How much you got? (Score:4, Insightful)
MongoDB is webscale!
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He was making fun of MongoDB.
It is a classic video.
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It's not just buggy as hell, it's also slow as molasses due to their insistence on using Java everywhere, and not particularly well-written Java at that. Add to that a really weird method of using the database and you have a horrible experience.
I like Apex and Oracle SQL Developer though. Still somewhat buggy, but at least they're free.
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MongoDB is a document database. If I wanted a document database to story the company data I would have switched to Lotus Domino a long time ago.
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MongoDB is a document database. If I wanted a document database to story the company data I would have switched to Lotus Domino a long time ago.
Speaking of blobcentric databases, whatever happened to Informix? It was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread for documents, and would render file systems obsolete, if I remember their marketing correctly...
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I do not know much about enterprise DBs like what Oracle offers. I wonder if there are viable alternatives.
Probably 95%-99% of organizations currently on Oracle would be better off on MS SQL Server instead. It's a far superior product.
Re: How much you got? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's just like Microsoft. Most people assume they're a computer company, but they're really a marketing company. Google is advertising, not search. Meanwhile, Oracle (and CA) aren't really technology companies, but sales organizations.
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on the planet where they run television ads for hardware made by other companies
Re: How much you got? (Score:2, Informative)
You need to know how Oracle sales work to fully make sense of what just happened. Oracle pushes its sales force to position products that are strategic to its earnings report and not the product that could best solve the problem at hand... In past few years, it was the era of Engineered Systems (Exadata).. What customer needed was just a bunch of cheap x86 servers and some Oracle DB licenses, but more often than not, the overall cost offered by the Oracle sales person would be the same with or without Exad
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I have myself seen customers holding multiple Exadata units in their docking area, and never even open the package, although on paper, each unit costed several hundred thousand dollars!
Dang! Any chance you could get me a nice offer on those?
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Re: How much you got? (Score:2)
But support. If you are a medium business you need support... Because your IT department is no where near big enough for super detailed debugging when production is stopped and bills aren't being mailed out. My $200k support contract buys me a person on the line that will stay till the problem is fixed most of the time. The smaller players just can't do that reliably.
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Headline from the future: (Score:5, Insightful)
The End of Oracle: Unhappy Customers Jumping Ship In Droves
You can only be pushy for as long as you are irreplaceable.
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I'm sure IBM is worried.
We're ditching Oracle (Score:2, Interesting)
I work for a company which develops online charging solutions currently in production on several telcos worldwide and although this is news for us, since last year we have been replacing all Oracle products with open-source software.
The non-Oracle version is already running in the lab with at least the same performance level of the old one and we won't go back.
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Oracle is only good for huge implementations. I see a lot of organizations that use Oracle but at a level were it isn't nessary.
And many of the other product open source and closed commercial are actually quite good, and not like in the 1990's
Where you had Oracle and crap systems that peaked at around 500,000 rows.
oddly enough just as long as you don't have dumb ass vendors switching to an other database system isn't as hard as it seems. Just as long as you don't make the mistake and become a "vendor" sho
Re:We're ditching Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is where things are getting dicey for Oracle. Even an open source DB can deal with billions of rows. And when you go beyond that, people start using multiple interconnected specialized systems instead: a big mismatch of a relational db, hadoop, redshift, dynamo, vertica, spark, etc.
If you need a trillion records in one table, there's better commercial options than Oracle. If you can need specialized tool to handle different data sets of various size, you'll be using a soup of tools, most of which are open source.
There's no reason to use Oracle stuff anymore, aside for legacy compatibility, or if you use their ERP (which for large Retail, is probably the best one, unfortunately)
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Even an open source DB can deal with billions of rows.
bzzzt wrong, you clearly haven't set up enterprise databases on 64 core systems with hundreds of gigs of RAM and big disk farms. All of the "free" databases will treat this like an 8 core system at best, a terrible waste of money. Try running really big benchmarks against databases like DB2 and you can watch the "free" databases will end up costing more.
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You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.
disclaimer: the company I work for runs a little over a trillion (a trillion as in a thousand billion) records in _ONE_ table, which is also our most used one. That doesn't count the hundreds of other tables.
Yes, the primary source of that data is a commercial database (vertica). Its also not an RDBMS (doing the kind of stuff we do even on an Oracle DB would be absurd). But we do use open postgresql and other open source non-relat
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You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.
you do if you have 10,000 concurrent users
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10000 isn't even that much. My previous employer ran 100~ billion record tables on a 100 million user a year, about 20-30k concurrent at all time, thousand transactions a minute, on freagin MSSQL on 16 core machines.
The only thing that happens is you have to be really careful with your database design, partitioning, etc. My wife works for freagin Amazon, and they don't have that much trouble getting their e-commerce site working. I never asked, but I'd be very surprised if they ran their backend on Oracle
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You also do not need 64 cores on each machine to deal with billions of rows.
modern databases have parallelization, well-indexed queries can utilize hundreds of cores
ORACLE is (Score:4, Informative)
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No, you become a billionaire by giving yourself hundreds of millions of shares of stock.
No, it's not that easy. Someone has to be willing to buy those shares from you at a few dollars each. Else you're just dealing in imaginary play money.
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Like ... derivitives fantasy?
Someone is willing to give you money for that. That makes it a cut above imaginary money. And dark pools are markets not securities.
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No you do it by criminally mis-stating your corporate earnings in order to goose up the quarterly numbers which rug-merchant Larry did twice!
yeah, investors really do believe these reports
in some weird fantasy...
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Apps (Score:2, Insightful)
You ( and so many others ) forget oracle is NOT just a database company. They also sell enterprise apps, and dev tools that lock you into their DB since that is the ONLY thing the final app will work with ( Apex for example ).. Once you get on the train it's really hard to get off, especially financially. ( actual hard cost of the change, then the soft cost of starting over ... )
Are there alternatives to everything? Sure, but it's not just a simple 'lets move our data somewhere else' and you have to addre
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Virtually every database I've ever seen is a bit bucket. There's precisely zero reasons for them to be on Oracle because the data set is well into the size where PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server could easily provide a more cost-effective alternative.
That's fine for in-house stuff. The problem is when the organization buys an ERP or accounting package that requires Oracle. Maybe it could technically run on MySQL, but the vendor doesn't support that.
Usually the only other supported database is SQL Server, but this means having Windows servers, and for an organization that has made a substantial investment in big AIX or HPUX, it's a show stopper.
Red Hat has done a terrific job of making Linux enterprise-friendly. It's common nowadays to have organizations
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it would be trivial to sue them claiming monopolistic abusive business practices.
Suing someone for monopolistic practices is never a trivial thing to do. Remember than Microsoft was convicted of being a monopolist, and still got away with basically zero punishment.
News at 11 (Score:2)
Oracle is being Oracle, claim people who can't do anything without Oracle.
Comment removed (Score:3)
"Oracle Photoshop" (Score:2)
Adobe is also pushing users toward their vision of the cloud. I have an IT client who needed to use InDesign for a publishing project. It seems like a ripoff to have to subscribe by the month for cloud software, but it was a cost she was willing to bear and at least there's a lessened degree of platform dependence, right? So she signed up, only to discover that the cloud version will not run on Windows Vista. Adobe still sells the direct-install Version 6, but Vista was supported only up through 5.5 . Adobe
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While hardly an Adobe apologist, you have a client that is running an OS that the OS vendor barely supports and you want an application vendor to tailor it's policies to your edge case? For software that there are other alternatives [onextrapixel.com] for?
Be reasonable. And, if your client is a 'real' business, suggesting that they torrent something is pretty dodgy. It could well end up costing them much more than an upgrade to a newer OS.
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"you want an application vendor to tailor it's policies to your edge case?"
Exactly. I'm not asking Adobe to invest manpower into keeping an old version updated, but just to continue selling a version it has already developed. At the very least, allow third parties to sell it. Pure profit, and they are passing it up.
Why does anyone use Oracle? (Score:2)
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Anyone that actually cares about their data uses Oracle or something like it. Droning on about raw speed that's probably achieved with a dubious configuration really isn't relevant to people that have serious work to do that can't be interrupted.
If you think that MySQL is a drop in replacement for any Oracle database then you're probably missing the point entirely.
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You lie, mysql/maria will corrupt and lose data. I've seen it again and again. Those are toys used by developers that don't know any better and so stick with the simple things they know, then businesses get stuck with that juvenile level of decision making.
Postgresql however is robust enough for mission critical data, though high performance clusters such as can be built with Oracle are not possible. No DBMS is a drop in replacement for Oracle, re-coding would be necessary.
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So I could invest a fuck of a lot of money into staff that know how to use MySQL, and writing the software to use it.
Or I could invest a fuckload less money into an Oracle database, buy the fucking application that already connects to it, and draw on a wide range of cheap competent capable DBAs and developers across the planet.
You appear to have no concept of business. It's all politics and people, technology is the easy bit..
What does Oracle do well? (Score:2)
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What does Oracle do well?
Sales and Marketing.
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What does Oracle do well?
Sales and Marketing.
Really? They have TERRIBLE marketing. Just about every article you read about them (like this one) is negative. Marketing is about creating a positive attitude in the mind your customers. Oracle does this worse than just about any other company, they're up there with Verizon and Comcast.
What you don't seem to understand is, just like Verizon and Comcast, that they have something nobody else has, they know it, their customers know it, and the customers pay. Bullies, one and all, with none to push back.
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Oracle's enterprise stack is pretty strong in certain fields. Their ERP is top notch in brick and mortar retail for example (better than SAP). And once you go down that road, its Oracle stack the whole way.
Beyond that, if you're trying to scale an old school relational database to crazy scales, Oracle leaves everything else in the dust. For horizontal scaling, nothing else comes close.
The thing is, if you're trying to do that, you're very likely doing it wrong. For insane amount of data, other commercial so
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Beyond that, if you're trying to scale an old school relational database to crazy scales, Oracle leaves everything else in the dust. For horizontal scaling, nothing else comes close.
Sorry, I don't believe you, DB2 scales out even better than Oracle.
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My experience with DB2 was mainly in large finance (Goldman and Morgan Stanley), and while they have very large datasets compared to most of the industry, they don't push these things as nearly as far as others. That said, I mainly saw DB2 scaling well for data warehousing purpose, not raw transnational loads. There's a significant difference between the two. DB2 did really well when you just dumped loads of data on it and then did reporting. But constant transactions like you would in a retail/brick and mo
Workday learned their lesson... (Score:4, Interesting)
All of the Workday executives are former PeopleSoft executives. PeopleSoft (now owned by Oracle after a nasty takeover battle) is a great product but it has a fatal flaw - nearly all of the critical components are controlled by someone else. Database (either Oracle, SQLServer or DB2) is owned by someone else. Middleware (WebLogic) is owned by someone else. Reporting (SQR and Crystal Reports) is owned by someone else. Hardware is owned by someone else. Operating systems are owned by someone else.
Workday, starting with a clean slate, decided that they wanted to control everything. So they used an object oriented open source database. They own and control every layer of the software stack. They, since it is cloud based, control the hardware.
This gives Workday a big advantage when it comes to supporting the software. There is only one configuration to support. Oracle and SAP and others have hundreds of combinations of database, hardware, operating system, etc. to support.
Oracle has typically been able to use its stranglehold on the database platform to force customers do this or that. But they can't do this to Workday or its customers. And this has Oracle scared shitless.
Oracle is rushing to get cloud based products to the market. I don't know that Oracle is trying to strong arm their customers into using those new products but it is not without precedent.
What I do know is that internally they have this philosophy known as TOTO (Turn Off The Oxygen). That is how they destroy their competition. Their hope is to TOTO on Workday until they run out of money and fold. They know that Workday is operating at a loss and that their stock is trading at insane P/E levels (2650 as of Fridays close). Oracle will give away their cloud offerings if they have to. It's a waiting game and Oracle has the cash to wait it out.
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Workday, starting with a clean slate, decided that they wanted to control everything. So they used an object oriented open source database.
Switching to an "object oriented database" doesn't seem like the right direction to go for......anything.
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Well, I believe the reasons were two fold. One was to escape the clutches of Oracle (and IBM and Microsoft for that matter). The second reason was to create a system that was highly configurable. Workday does not come with any native capability to customize the application. This is in contrast to Oracle and SAP, which do allow you to add your own bolt on customizations to the delivered code line.
I believe there are now ways to customize Workday via third party extensions but not directly. Workday believes t
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SQL queries on well indexed tables will have much better performance than any kind of object database in the vast majority of circumstances.
If you have a large busy site with performance requirements, you will probably have a tough time meeting your requirements with an object database.
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I agree with you but have you seen Workday? It's pretty slick. From the demos I have seen speed is not an issue. I believe much of what they do is in memory so I'm sure that speeds things up.
Full disclosure - I work on one of those "on premise" systems. We use SQL for everything. I'm not trying to sell anyone on Workday. It's a nice product but it certainly has its limitations.
The point of the original post was to point out that Oracle has screwed over its own customers (not to mention partners and competit
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I stand corrected. What I quoted was the Forward P/E (from Yahoo Finance). 2,650,67. Compare that with, say, Apple at a Forward P/E of 12.66 and it gives you a good idea of how overvalued Workday stock is right now.
Oracle has another scam going too besides cloud on (Score:2)
Another scam Oracle pulling on enterprise level customers is forcing virtualized customers to buy its hardware platform, claiming that virtualization as done by the major players means all physical hardware in the cluster could potentially run Oracle so must be licensed.
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I think Oracle's virtualisation policy is driving customers away, and instead of fixing their stupid policy they're trying to push cloud instead.
Larry might like playing with his boats in the bath, but on this one I think his ego is costing him.
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Larry should consider what threatening to sue long time customers, intimidating long time customers, being disrespectful to long time customers, will get him.
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News for you, not everyone has an AIX infrastructure. Stop spreading lies and FUD. Is that you Larry?, read my other comment below
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Meh, while I'm sure Oracle would love the idea of holding your data hostage in the cloud, at the moment they're not insisting on it. As I understand the news article, customers are having to pay them for cloud services but don't actually have to use it.
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Oracle is going to boil itself. The rise of MS SQL Server happened because databases were slow on Windows. SQL Server, last I checked, was faster than all the competition at light loads... but scaled worst. That was a long time ago though. When Oracle's licensing tactics make Microsoft look good, there is opportunity.
Re:Your data held hostage in Oracle cloud (Score:4, Informative)
I'm using SQL Server 2012 now (first time I ever used SQL Server for serious data loads) and I have to say it performs pretty good as a data warehouse for a moderate size organisation. We're loading 500 million lines and it seems to hold up well on a single mid-range server. Querying the whole set is not a pleasant experience if you do a full scan, but if the index is selective enough we get okay performance out of that as well.
Over the last decade most of my deployments were on Oracle but I think that for almost any business I know, SQL Server is a pretty good alternative. I'm not so impressed with the query performance but update/insert performance is much better that I know of Oracle.
However... if you need decent materialized views, or analytical functions, or really low-level control over the database, Oracle is still the first contender. Statistics are easier to manage on SQL Server, though.
However... the SQL Server pricing is not as low as it once was, and climbing steadily into Oracle territory. So unless Microsoft can keep the price down, it may not offer much of an alternative.
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I hadn't considered that, but it actually makes a lot of sense.
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I did business with BEA. Oh.
I did business with Sun. Oh.
I did business with Eloqua, BigMachines, GoldenGate, Hyperion, PeopleSoft and Siebel.
I might be able to replace WLS and the Sparc hardware but switching out a CRM, a HR system, a Finance system, a Marketing system.. that costs a fuck of a lot of money.
I have many issues with Oracle but I seem to be doing business with them nonetheless.