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Oracle Named Database of the Year, MongoDB Comes In Second (softpedia.com) 122

An anonymous reader writes: Oracle's database management system has seen the biggest rise in terms of popularity in the past year. Oracle didn't only see a rise in the number of deployed instances, job offerings and mentions on LinkedIn profiles, but for the first time also became a popular topic on Twitter and a constant mention on StackOverflow, a popular Q&A support forum for developers. Second on DB-Engine's popularity list was MongoDB, which barely missed winning the DBMS of the Year award for the third time in a row.
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Oracle Named Database of the Year, MongoDB Comes In Second

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  • frosty pis (Score:1, Troll)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 )

    Because writing to nev/dul is PERFORMENT!!!!!

  • by Anonymous Coward

    So the biggest increase in popularity is the only factor? If someone makes a new DB that increases 10000% in users, does it win? Because you'd only need 100 users to accomplish that.

    • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday January 08, 2016 @05:49PM (#51265135) Journal
      I was wondering that too, here is how it was measured [db-engines.com]:

      General interest in the system (ie, Google trends)
      Frequency of technical discussions about the system.(Stackoverflow + DBA Stack Exchange)
      Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned (Job search engine Indeed and Simply Hired (I'd never heard of them))
      Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. (LinkedIn)
      Relevance in social networks (Twitter)

      They use a 'carefully tuned algorithm' to combine all those results, and get a number for each database. It really makes me wonder who in the world is using Oracle, because they are very, very far away from any company I've ever worked with.
      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Who in the world is using Oracle?? I'm an IT consultant, I work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and other private and public entities. Oracle is all over the place. I'd say at a guess it's the database behind about 70% of the ERP and HR systems I see (probably due to the nature of my clients, I rarely see SAP). Most of the rest is SQL Server database of various vintages, and I've run into about 3 installations of Postgres.

        • Maybe that's the answer then? Oracle is popular because it's well-integrated into ERP. If you don't use ERP, then you won't see Oracle in many places.
        • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday January 08, 2016 @06:29PM (#51265479) Journal

          Who in the world is using Oracle?? I'm an IT consultant, I work with a lot of Fortune 500 companies,

          BTW the Fortune 500 is not a good sample for database popularity.......even if every single one of them used Oracle (and most of them probably use more than one database in various places), it would still only be 500 installations. The Fortune 500 are looked at because they are big, not because they are representative of what most companies are doing.

          • by h2oliu ( 38090 )

            Back in the early day of the Microsoft/Novell/Unix wars Microsoft liked to tout that there were used for mission critical purposes in most (all? can't remember for sure) Fortune 500 companies. When asked what that meant: At least one group was using them for file serving, which MS viewed as mission critical.

          • you think a fortune 500 company only has one installation?

            Really?

        • I have worked on a system where the customer wanted some laptops running a portable instance of custom software. That software required an Oracle-based backend, so the customer wanted us to install the full Oracle Database Enterprise package, rather than fix the software.

          We built the monstrosity, as requested, and demonstrated how bad it was. It took a good half-hour to fully initialize. The customer then ordered a few hundred of them, built to match the demo they saw.

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Frequency of technical discussions about the system.(Stackoverflow + DBA Stack Exchange)

        That measures not so much popularity as unpopularity - people having problems. I'd give that one negative weighting.

        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          That measures not so much popularity as unpopularity - people having problems. I'd give that one negative weighting.

          At any given time you have a *lot* of inexperienced developers and DBAs that are in way over their heads trying to use StackExchange and such as a substitute for competence, even for things that are pretty fucking obvious or in the documentation. At least problems show interest and usage, it's when the help requests stop you know it's really dead.

      • by Nemyst ( 1383049 ) on Friday January 08, 2016 @06:20PM (#51265401) Homepage
        So in essence it breaks often or is very obtuse, requiring lots of Google searches and questions on Stack sites, it's used as a buzzword by HR and they spam about it a lot.

        Great, that's completely representative of actual usage.
      • by ADRA ( 37398 )

        Not my history. They're damn expensive, but they're a great DB. Its hard to objectively deny either assertion. The only piece of Oracle which is complete and utter horse sh** is in tweaking and to a lesser extent management of environments. Last I worked with them, they really needed well trained DBA's with access to Oracle's support site in order to really make the DB sing. Any jack and Jill dev working with MySQL / PostgresSQL could tune it -well enough- for the DB's inherent capabilities to shine.

        • The only piece of Oracle which is complete and utter horse sh** is in tweaking and to a lesser extent management of environments.

          And the syntax for transactional DDL is weird, and PLSQL is weird and annoying.......I'm sure there's more.

          • Oracle is such a pile of shite it does not actually work unless you have a support contract. and even then, the features you use are likely to be abandoned without warning unless you are a major first world government (and probably even then, but I cant speak from experience on that).

            OTOH, your "theoretically correct" Oracle implementation, is probably actually correct, and can trivially be ported to Postgresql. If your are lacking performance, spend the money you saved on Oracle licences (and managing th

            • by sphealey ( 2855 )

              - - - - - Oracle is such a pile of shite it does not actually work unless you have a support contract. and even then, the features you use are likely to be abandoned without warning unless you are a major first world government (and probably even then, but I cant speak from experience on that).

              That's funny. I learned Oracle when I inherited a midrange ERP/WMS system at a small manufacturing company that used a vendor-supplied 8i as the base. It pretty much just ran for two years under heavy load with j

        • For what it's worth, if you use APEX with Oracle DB and have pretty rudimentary knowledge, you can make a DB sing using Oracle DB around as well as you can make it sing using PostgreSQL or MySQL. I just started seriously playing around with it this year (I'm a storage admin & sysadmin, not a database admin) and was flatly astounded that Oracle doesn't advertise APEX more. It's really the killer-app for the kind of mid-scale reporting, data collection, and simple apps most people think of relational da

      • The link you give is to a counter for how many times someone searches Google / Bing for the Database, or uses a FREE service to talk about the product. This is so obviously flawed I don't know where to begin. Lets start with: Running MySQL, my mode of support is Google and my postings about my cool tools and handy hacks will be in Stack Overflow. Running Oracle, my mode of support is Oracle as I have no reason to search for help in Bing or Google. Further, my epeen waving will be on Oracle's forums, not

      • It really makes me wonder who in the world is using Oracle, because they are very, very far away from any company I've ever worked with.

        That misconception about Oracle here always confuses me. It is used at every company I've ever worked for, including a small development firm. I don't know anyplace that doesn't have Oracle used in finance, HR, etc.

      • So if my mentioning Oracle on my resume on LinkedIn helps them out, I guess it's time to take Oracle off my resume. :) It's not like it'd hurt me because I've only used OSS DBs for the last 15+ years anyway.
      • Oracle is one those products that companies tend to use because the bank told them to. We have a number of applications that use Oracle where I work they are all a nightmare and some of them despite being extremely complex are not even normalized. It's just scary that anyone can even think of writing a database like that even an amateur.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    :..elect the only relevant nosql db, plus the SQL db everyone hates so much that nosql almost seems worth trying by comparison.

    In b4 web scale

  • I'm not real sure what one idiot they polled to get these results, with the fanboys of nosql these days, I can see MongoDB ... but Oracle? Bullshit. You lose all credibility right there.

    • by arth1 ( 260657 )

      I'm not real sure what one idiot they polled to get these results, with the fanboys of nosql these days, I can see MongoDB ... but Oracle? Bullshit. You lose all credibility right there.

      Just the other day, Slashdot told us that Oracle Java was the top programming language, so this is par for course.

      I can only presume that Slashdot has been sponsored by an ophthalmologist chain, because this hard eye rolling will have repercussions.

      Next week: Slashdot tells us that Oracle Linux is the leading OS.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        If you are not aware of the absolutely widespread use of Java and Oracle, you are at best a hobbyist and at worst a schoolkid on some campus somewhere.

  • Methodology? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Friday January 08, 2016 @05:50PM (#51265147) Journal

    Sorry, but with silly results like this, I have to ask why such a small article so vapid of meaningful content was posted on Slashdot. Shouldn't paid shill articles be a different color or something?

    No mention was given as to how this ranking was accomplished, and the list given at the bottom of the article doesn't even match the headline (where 2 and 3 are MySQL and MS SQL Server, and Microsoft Access beats Cassandra.

    Any DB ranking that puts Access in as a top contender should definitely back up their claims - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! [rationalwiki.org]

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Microsoft Access beats Cassandra

      This all sounds entirely accurate. They've come at it with a popularity-based ranking based on discussions and job postings. Fischer Price[tm] My First Database (Access) is used and griped about on Stack Exchange by a *lot* more people than a tool like Cassandra, which is a narrowly-focused and featured stack chosen and used by professional DBAs.

      Likewise, Mongo & Oracle's high rank is more to do with popularity driving popularity than real benefits in many use cases.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    MongoDB comes in 1st Place as the leakiest and most compromised of 2015. They'd like to thank the Academy, and all of the companies who laid off their DBAs and sysadmins in favor of hiring a barely-over-minimum-wage "full stack developer" to do it all. Schadenfreude is beautiful.

  • by EmperorOfCanada ( 1332175 ) on Friday January 08, 2016 @05:51PM (#51265161)
    I really tried to love MongoDB but I realized that all the freedom they claimed was freedom to structure things exactly there way and only their way. I now hate MongoDB like it is leaking sewage pipe at an Ebola hospital.

    I used oracle professionally for about 8 years until I realized that things like PL/SQL didn't exist to help me structure an N-Tier system better but to just lock me into their stupid database. Oracle as a database isn't terrible so much as their pricing, and even worse, their sales people are horror shows. Pretty much if I can't install my datastore using apt-get or yum then it isn't getting installed.

    I would say the only thing worse than having to deal with either of the two above poxes upon humanity would be the people who evangelize these solutions. Someday they will realize the MongoDB isn't NoSQL but HUMONGOSql. Or that PL/SQL was just a huge joke designed to waste many billions of developer's hours while making them pay for the privilage.

    Until then we will just continue to use our secret MariaDB and PostgreSQL handshakes and we will just smile as the Oracle and Mongo people keep struggling in the mire not knowing that there is a great jogging path a few feet away.
    • by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      Same here w/r MongoDB.
      I get that for high-traffic websites need a better scalable solutions than the traditional databases, and I get that you have to sacrifice some of the features of those traditional databases to do so.
      But... MongoDB is pretty much the worst possible way of doing this. Just compare it to other alternatives to traditional databases. I just can't find any reason to ever use MongoDB, and I've even made an effort to try and find reasons. There are alternatives that are better in every single

      • by sphealey ( 2855 )

        - - - - - I get that for high-traffic websites need a better scalable solutions than the traditional databases, and I get that you have to sacrifice some of the features of those traditional databases to do so. - - - - -

        Whenever I read something similar to this as related to a database I immediately think that what is being sacrificed is transaction integrity and multi-user contested performance/scaleability, but that's just me.

        sPh

        • ... I immediately think that what is being sacrificed is transaction integrity and multi-user contested performance/scaleability, but that's just me.

          Whenever I read something similar to this as related to a database I immediately think that what is being sacrificed is not necessarily important to absolutely all applications, but that's just me.

        • by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

          A practical case I have once enountered is a database that tallies API usage for billing purposes and rate limiting.
          It's a single table with simple inserts (so no transactions, no updates and no deletes ever)
          And if every once in a while an insert fails, it's not really a big deal; at the very worst, a few customers would pay about $0.00001 less.

          With a full SQL database, on the other hand, the worst case would be having to invest thousands of dollars in a server and still not being able to cope with the traf

    • For large enterprise systems, there are not a lot of good options to begin with. Had the discussion with a college the other day. Apart from the two you mentioned (MariaDB and PostgreSQL), and the one that "won" Oracle, that really only leaves IBM DB2 (which I know little about).

      If you work for an organization that outsources most of their technical talent, so can't have a bunch of experts on payroll, that pretty much rules out both MariaDB and PostgreSQL (which is really too bad as I have heard a lot of go

      • You say, "need to be able to have access to external support from another big company" why?

        I have had "support" from the really big companies and it was worthless. Using google to search for solutions was a vastly better solution. When it comes to MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and most of the others the amount of support is bonkers. But with one extra magical bit. The open source aspect means that once in a blue moon some actual bug will be out to bite the user. That expert user will then solve the bug and p
        • I'm just postulating really. For corporate managers they may not understand that the support is useless. It very well could be that it is just a game of management having someone else to throw under the bus should the need arise.

          That said it probably has as much to do with momentum and application lock in. With Oracle being around for so long, and with most of your applications/db already using Oracle, making any kind of change or attempting to support multiple platforms is pretty difficult. That could be w

          • Often when I am designing a schema I leave out any features that are database specific. Some DBA type will show me all kinds of "optimizations" that will make it better. It doesn't matter what database it is when I say, "I want to make sure that we can switch databases in the future, so, no." they all get all butthurt that I am not treating their special flower with the respect they think it deserves. For relational MariaDB is my absolute favourite and I am 99% sure that any system I implement on it will en
            • Unfortunately I don't deal with a lot of "new" databases, most of the work I do is with preexisting legacy stuff from the early 90's usually with little or no documentation. In trying to reverse engineer schema for various databases it becomes obvious that most of the relationships are being handled by the applications themselves which makes things difficult in a number of different and interesting ways.

              Even the code depending on how it was developed (usually over time by various developers) can have some i

  • I can never use Oracle because I have no kids, ergo no firstborn son to give away.

    Seriously, don't use Oracle. Even if it's the best option technically, nothing is worth the biblical level of screwing coming your way.

    • Oh, don't worry, they'll take a pledge for your first born, and if you fail to deliver they will come and rape your wife/girlfriend/significant other then send you a bill for their time.

    • by lucm ( 889690 )

      No wonder people talk about them...

      Until this year, Oracle didn't lightly use the "nuclear option" breach notice, Guarente says.
      "We’ve seen an uptick in aggressive audits and breach notices," he says. "I started this company in late 2011. From that moment until February, I saw no breach notices. Zero. Now we’ve seen several this year."

      http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]

      Also the new licensing rules for using Oracle in non-OracleVM virtual machines are disgusting.

  • Larry Ellison (Score:4, Insightful)

    by slazzy ( 864185 ) on Friday January 08, 2016 @06:02PM (#51265253) Homepage Journal
    Larry really needs to buy another Hawaiian island, so just in time.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    What is this, an unpaid advertisement?!
    Everyone knows Oracle sues its customers into using all kinds of software they don't WANT or NEED.
    You don't win a popularity contest by being a bully.
    These number indicate AGONY, not POPULARITY.

  • by lucm ( 889690 ) on Friday January 08, 2016 @06:05PM (#51265289)

    Oracle 12g now supports multiple databases on the same server instance! Amazing breakthrough in database science, coming just a few years after their latest innovation: case insensitive LIKE.

    Of course multiple databases per server instance has been available in SQL Server since the time it was still Sybase and in MySQL since before Y2K. But those are not Enteprise Worthy Databases of course so it doesn't count, and the fact that on SQL Server there's no additional expensive license to enable this feature is all the evidence we need. ORACLE RULES!

    • They certainly do have some of the most aggressive salespeople on the planet. Maybe that is what they mean by bleeding edge?
    • Oracle has had the capability of multiple DBs per instance since AT LEAST 10g. Maybe your confusing the new Oracle technology, pluggable databases, which are actually pretty cool and basically make DBs an easily transportable entity. I'm not an Oracle fan, but I did manage a few Oracle DBs for 10 years at my previous employer and while the cost is pretty intense, it is a rock solid RDBMS as long as you know what you're doing. It's definitely not as easy as MSSQL to setup or configure, but part of me thin
    • You can easily run create as many ORACLE_SIDs as you want in one ORACLE_HOME. Just export the environment variable for a new SID, login to sqlplus, CREATE DATABASE, then run CATALOG.SQL and CATPROC.SQL.

      The problem with multiple ORACLE_SIDs is precisely the problem with VMs: the kernel is duplicated within each instance, which is a waste of RAM and storage.

      I don't have enough instances to justify the new multitenant, but the idea behind it is the same as nspawn/Docker or Solaris Zones. There is only one kern

      • by lucm ( 889690 )

        A different ORACLE_SID indicates a different instance. It's not because you use the same binaries that you're actually running two databases in the same instance. You can also install 2 instances of SQL Server on the same machine (few people do it since it's useless), and if you use the same version they will share binaries, but with SQL Server each instance can host many databases. Same for MySQL, Postgresql and others. One database engine, one service instance, multiple databases.

        What Oracle is bragging a

  • At least tag articles or something if they're going to be clickbait, misleading, non-news stories.

    Also, your description is wrong; from the methodology page (for the "study", http://db-engines.com/en/ranki... [db-engines.com]), the metric doesn't measure deployed instances, or usage, or even active interest. The metric measures delta in mentions online related to the DB type. The only valid conclusion you can draw is that there was a larger increase of mentions of Oracle than other databases.

    I could suggest one compelling a

    • by ADRA ( 37398 )

      "the metric doesn't measure deployed instances, or usage, or even active interest", Yes nobody publishes this, so why are you so shocked that this study doesn't? Wouldn't you be more shocked and tin foil if someone actually was measuring backoffice service usage universally?

      Your second paragraph is rank with hyperbole without any quantifiable links for verification, so... At least the article source actually tells us their methodology instead of just spewing crap assumptions.

      This is how you could have quant

      • The second paragraph where I specify what the "study" does and doesn't indicate, based on the actual study methodology, is rank with hyperbole... how?

        Perhaps you meant the third paragraph, where I speculated on an alternative explanation (in which case you might want to look up "hyperbole"). Admittedly, though, the statement that vulnerability control is laughable in Oracle products is somewhat unsubstantiated, although I assumed it was common knowledge (among the knowledgeable in the field) at this point.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Friday January 08, 2016 @06:21PM (#51265409)

    if popularity mattered, i would run Windows. what's popular is rarely good. how else do you explain beiber?

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      if popularity mattered, i would run Windows. what's popular is rarely good. how else do you explain beiber?

      Apples and oranges, sometimes you just need *a* tool no matter how basic. I've done things in notepad. I've done things in MS Paint. I've done things in Excel that have absolutely nothing to do with a spreadsheet. Nobody has to suffer Justin Bieber unless they want to, there's always the off switch. But sometimes you just need a tool that's good enough for the job, and knowing the tool is more important than the quality of the tool. For a lot of things MySQL is perfectly sufficient. Oracle operates in the c

    • if popularity mattered, i would run Windows. what's popular is rarely good. how else do you explain beiber?

      Popularity matters to PHBs. I once saw a two-page Microsoft ad in PC Magazine that trumpeted Popular = Compatible = Good in huge letters. Guess who that ad was aimed at?

      As for Beiber, I chalk that up to naïve tweens with undeveloped taste.

    • Oracle is popular with mission-critical enterprises, who have LARGE checkbooks, HUGE transaction volumes, and cannot afford ONE MINUTE of downtime.

      This is not, and has never been, Microsoft's target market.

      No one has attempted in quite some time [tpc.org] to seriously challenge Oracle in massive transaction volumes.

      You will notice that Oracle's top score is on SPARC, and is from nearly three years ago. There is no significant challenge to them on TPC-C.

  • First Java and now Oracle? Hmmm, I wonder how that happened.
  • Given how vilified Oracle is especially for it's licensing practices, which were discussed here: http://developers.slashdot.org... [slashdot.org] I'd think people who can would be migrating away in droves and voting it down rather than database of the year.

    • Microsoft is vilified also. As is Apple, Google, and increasingly, Red Hat.

      Having the lion's share of some market seems to make you evil.

  • I use databases in embedded products.

    Oracle is proprietary and probably not free.
    MariaDB (MySQL) are not reliable, verified the hard way multiple times.
    MongoDB is not structured; some found that fun, I found them horrible (for example to update the field of a record).
    Postgresql is free, very reliable, and the last couple of versions can even manage unstructured data for the fanatics.

    So the big shared part of the system consist in structured tables and notifications, while the clients applications that conne

  • Someone is still using that piece of shit?! It takes the crown from MySQL for the worst database ever. Here's only the most recent example:

    A coworker issued an update to a large table to which he didn't have update rights. Oracle's response? Drop the table!

    Way to go, Oracle! This is only the latest reason my company has decided to ditch Oracle in favor of PostgreSQL.

    And multiple databases per server? PostgreSQL has had that forever.

  • Since Oracle now owns Java and Solaris as well as MySQL and various brands of Linux, I wonder how they qualified between an Oracle-branded database and an Oracle Database.

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