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Oracle Businesses

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Steps Down 142

Posted by timothy from the one-real-american-named-larry-ellison dept.
mrspoonsi writes Oracle founder Larry Ellison is stepping down as CEO. He will be replaced by two executives. Former Oracle presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd will be co-CEOs. Ellison will be the Executive Chairman of Oracle's Board, and the company's CTO. Oracle's shares are off by 3% on the news. "Larry has made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy," said the Oracle Board's Presiding Director, Dr. Michael Boskin.
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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Steps Down More

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Steps Down

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  • DING DONG! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @04:43PM (#47939979) Homepage Journal

    The Wicked Witch is dead!

  • more evil things to do elsewhere? (Score:5, Funny)

    by dmitrygr ( 736758 ) <dmitrygr@gmail.com> on Thursday September 18, 2014 @04:44PM (#47939985) Homepage
    New Microsoft CEO candidate? New member of USPTO?

  • It's about time he stopped siphoning off shareholder value via executive compensation.

  • Good news for Oracle engineers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Those really neat hacks that Larry checked into source control in 1981? You can delete those now.

  • Good riddance (Score:5, Funny)

    by JohnFen ( 1641097 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @04:56PM (#47940091)

    Now, if only we could get rid of the rest of the company.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Eh, it'll take a few more Ages for this.

      This is just Melkor, who is Morgoth, Black Foe of the Industry being cast out.

      We've got to wait for a Sauron to appear, then fall, then appear again. Possibly some H1Bs will be involved in taking a ring to an island in Hawaii.

    • Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Informative)

      by jandersen ( 462034 ) on Friday September 19, 2014 @05:09AM (#47943659)

      Just to represent another side to the argument, and because I like getting modded down for expressing my opinion - I don't think Oracle deserves ALL the flak it gets. Just to make it clear - I work for them as an engineer, so I may come with a certain bias, but I also have more actual insight than most on /.

      Firstly, I don't think anybody can deny that Oracle RDBMS is top notch; I have worked with many other databases - MS SQL Server, Informix, DB2, MySQL, and I still prefer Oracle. The documentation is better than what you get from the competition. DB2 is the only one that comes close. Plus, you can legally download even Oracle Enterprise Edition for free and use it for development and testing. I think it is excellent.

      Secondly, Oracle was amongst the first of the big companies to come out in support of Linux with version 8 of their database. I think that was before IBM came out with an official port of Linux to their mainframe. To me that counts for a lot in terms of street cred.

      Thirdly, in my experience Oracle is a very decent company to work for. They are not hugely generous, but they have some good benefits and I feel valued as an employee. I don't whether Larry Ellison is good or bad; I don't expect to find out for myself, but so far I have no complaints.

    • No, wait! I want them to buy the startup I work for first! I'm not greedy, a few tens of millions is enough for me.

  • Wow (Score:2)

    by M3.14 ( 1616191 )
    Just wow. I wonder what happened. Maybe there's some money threshold where you just say: "naah, I've got enough". Or maybe his bank just phoned and said - "your account balance does not fit anymore in our VARCHAR2(10) column.."
    Anyway - looking forward to see the bright *snicker* future.

  • Jerk (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18, 2014 @04:57PM (#47940105)

    What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So Larry Ellison thinks he's Larry Ellison? What a nutbag.

      • Y'know, I could say Larry Ellison can go fuck himself.

        But then again, I wouldn't be surprised if he married himself.

  • They are going to be Hurding Catz for a long time to come.

  • Stable as a three-legged... (Score:3)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @05:02PM (#47940149)

    >> Former Oracle presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd will be co-CEOs. Ellison will be the Executive Chairman of Oracle's Board, and the company's CTO

    I can see why the stock dove. Ellison appears unsure that either Safra or Mark has the stuff to run the company by appointing them both to do part of the former job of one man.

    In a best case scenario (where this triumvirate works for a while) I wonder which one's Brutus and which one's Cassius, because I'm pretty sure I know who Caesar is here.

  • Co-CEOs.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rodness ( 168429 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @05:06PM (#47940183)

    Because that worked out SO well for Blackberry.

  • Time to update that Oracle joke ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @05:16PM (#47940285)

    /Oblg.

    O/ne
    Rich
    Asshole
    Called
    Larry
    Ellison

  • Just on Oracle employees and board members instead of HP.

  • Attention Oracle Employees - (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For those not familiar with the Hurd game plan, let me tell you how it goes.

    1. He will say all the right things in front of employees. Part of the team, all in it together, shared sacrifice.
    2. He will make the numbers look good for Wall Street.
    3. Your cubicles / office space will shrink.
    4. Employees will be asked to work from home
    5. Real estate will be targeted as a way to reduce expenses.
    6. The stock will look good for a while, then implode.
    7. When he's finally run out, the next person in charge will re

  • So there's a GNU Hurd in charge at Oracle? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So there's a GNU Hurd in charge at Oracle?

  • What Is He Thinking? (Score:5, Funny)

    by FrankDrebin ( 238464 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @05:30PM (#47940399) Homepage
    Sheesh, I know he has a big ego, but even Larry Ellison can't Hurd Catz.

  • Related?

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/oracle-misses-street-1q-forecasts-205042793.html

  • Leisure lawsuit Larry (Score:3)

    by Mister Liberty ( 769145 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @05:55PM (#47940615)

    Is gonna miss boat.

  • Time to start tapping the phones and spying on those pesky board members again!

  • I commented because I could not mod in good faith. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @06:18PM (#47940803)

    I just couldn't stomach the idea of up-voting all of the ding-dong the witch is dead comments, no matter how much I wanted to blow all my mod point here. Instead I'll just add to the crush of Ellison hate, especially considering the whole notion of copyrighting APIs that the smug dickface motherfucker is trying to pander to make a few quick ones from Google.

  • Wow. The end of an era. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Thursday September 18, 2014 @06:52PM (#47941025) Homepage Journal

    That's almost as big as when Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft -- it's the end of an era.

    It'll be interesting to see what direction Oracle heads without him at the helm.

  • Larry steps down (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 18, 2014 @06:56PM (#47941039)

    I'm surprised he didn't break a pool cue in half and walk out of the room saying "there's only one opening boys, make it quick."

  • ...any chances we'll get boolean column types in Oracle? (Yes, I know I can use 'T' and 'F', or 1 and 0, blah blah....but guess what ... the app I'm maintaining now uses 'T'/'F' on half the tables, and 1/0 in the rest.... fun...)
    • I feel your pain. The problem is the ambiguity across platforms. It is very much akin to representing the absence of information, ie: null, there is nothing there since that is very different from zero ( 0 ) since zero is a value. Perhaps one day though.

      • Zero and Null are not completely different. If I look at the balance of money I have in a bank I do not use it is both Null and Zero. Where I've come into issue with this is when looking at exit status if you transform Null to Zero it becomes success rather than what would often be expected as failure.

        • Good luck performing a rolling average calculation using zeroes instead of NULLs.

          • The problem is what to infer out of a NULL, In some instances it should be Zero, like in my account balance example. In other instances it should be non-zero like in exit status. In other instances it should be non-existant/excluded from a list such as your example of a sting of numbers similar to monitoring something like cpu load.

          • I think that it is very context dependent. Think of it this way:

            You have an instrument monitoring something, it is remote. You poll it every hour. In the first 10 hours you get some values. One of those values is zero (0) and that is a valid value for that particular measurement. In second 10 hours you notice you have some null's. Should I interpret those as zero or should I interpret those as no data acquired ?

            I do know that Oracle will not count null values when doing any kind of averaging.

  • Let the hate fly! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FlyingGuy ( 989135 ) <.flyingguy. .at. .gmail.com.> on Thursday September 18, 2014 @07:56PM (#47941343)

    But here is the problem...

    You cannot deny that he built a huge empire on something as banal as a database. Arguably the best RDBMS pretty much ever and where is the competition?

    I use Oracle extensively. I am a DBA and of all the alternatives out there ( and I have tried most of them ) the only thing that comes even close is DB2 with postGres running a close third and depending on your POV, catching up fairly quickly. Perhaps postGres will eclipse Oracle one day, but not unless they get some serious money behind the project and that probably won't happen because no one wants to pump the millions of dollars it would take into a project that cannot even fix the TXID problem, and make no mistake about it, it is a problem. Also if someone dumps that kind of money into a project they expect some kind of ROI. There might be a few white knights that have that kind of money but they are few and far between and most can find more worthy causes to spend that kind of money on. Don't get me wrong, postGres is a fine DB but it has some faults that make it not so attractive.

    Larry understands how to stitch technology together around a DB better than most anyone else I have seen. Arguably Microsoft gets it, but they are stuck running in the windows universe which despite a lot of progress is still broken. You cannot run MS-SQL Server across hundreds of Intel machines and expect it to hold together, but they ave built and end to end ecosystem and MS-SQL Server is tightly integrated, but you can't drop it on a Z-Series mainframe under either IBM's native OS or Linux. PostGres has the same problem but they are moving to fix that, but I am not sure they really understand the problem. Of the other DB's out there ( Mongo, Hadoop, et all. ) that you can do that with, they don't support things like ACID which, like it or not, is pretty much a requirement in way to many situations.

    The facts speak for themselves. If Oracle really sucked as a Database it would not be in the vast number spaces that it occupies. You can cap on Larry Ellison all you want, question his lineage, say he is an ego maniacal asshole, but you have to give the man his due. He built a company that does have the answer to almost all the spaces where a DB matters and he built a business that relentlessly pursues those spaces to the betterment of their stock holders and 98% of the people and organizations that use their products.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Bing Tsher E ( 943915 )

      Oracle is the big hairy ape database who has prevailed.

      That success doesn't mean it isn't a big shit-hurling ape.

      It's way too late to second guess what we would have if the big hairy ape hadn't prevailed and didn't dominate. But there probably wouldn't be the overwhelming stench of apeshit we've all been forced to be accustomed to.

      It probably pays well, being that close to the ape shit.

      • Hey, so I am going let the invective roll right on by...

        Is Oracle a huge turd throwing ape? That is not an unfair analogy and in some ways I agree with you.

        I have been in the database business for a very long time and I have watched them come and go. Some self destructing and others just fading into obscurity but the one thing that I have observed over the years is that the database is pretty much at the heart of anything non trivial. There are only TWO RDBMS's that have stood the test of time and that i

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Zordak ( 123132 )

          and there is no Santa Clause

          [SIGH OF RELIEF] For a minute there, I thought you were going to say there is no Santa Claus. But I can live without his grammar Nazi cousin Santa Clause.

    • I'm not too familiar with PostgreSQL. Out of curiosity, can you elaborate what you mean by the TXID problem? You can share a link that elaborates on the problem if that's easier for you.

      • Re:Let the hate fly! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by FlyingGuy ( 989135 ) <.flyingguy. .at. .gmail.com.> on Friday September 19, 2014 @12:03AM (#47942637)

        Happy to share, and I have posted a link as well.

        So every SQL database, Oracle included, has to have some way of keeping transaction order, which is to say which transaction got there 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. This is part of ACID and it cannot be ignored. Oracle and others solved the problem by using a synthetic number. Oracle's "number" type is not a recognized IEEE standard like an INT or a FLOAT, DOUBLE etc. It i stored using a proprietary scheme in the DB that Oracle guarantees to be correct when it is accessed and it is completely portable. The last estimate I saw ( I rarely look ) was that pushing Oracle to its absolute limits was that it would take ~ 141 years to wrap around. Personally I am not going to be alive then and I doubt Oracle will be either.

        In postGres they use a 32 bit unsigned int to keep tract of this. Now 2^32 is 4,294,967,296 transactions, which is a very large number indeed, but when you get into extremely hi volume transaction environments this can get used up pretty fast, like in a few days fast! Since the number is unsigned and postGres is written in C ( although I don't think it matters ) when you hit INT MAX it wraps back to 1!!! and that is a disaster. In older versions it just kept going and corrupting your data and there was really no way out of it, you were just hosed. In the latest version, the database will only go so far and it will force itself down before it wraps around AND will refuse to come up until the vacuum process is complete. On VERY large tables this can take days!

        Now the guys who write PG are no dummies. They recognized this and came up with a process called VACUUM, it does many things and it will reset the TXID and keep you safe. In most every application this is fine. In Extreme transaction environments where you build up billions of rows very quickly you have to set the VACUUM process to it's most aggressive level to keep up with inbound transactions and it just kills performance and your TX rate falls into the basement.

        This link explains it better than I can. PostGres Wrap Around Problem [rummandba.com]

        • Oracle has this problem, too. [databaseskill.com]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by RelliK ( 4466 )

      > the only thing that comes even close is DB2 with postGres running a close third and depending on your POV, catching up fairly quickly.

      But PostgreSQL is enough for 90% of the installations and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

      • I can't disagree with that statement, but for the other 10% there really is no substitute for Oracle. Like I said in my original post PG may eclipse Oracle and that will be OK. In the mean time use what works for the situation as there are many choices, many that are good, many that are not so good and we as software professionals get paid to advise the right course for the write set of tasks. One thing we are all guilty of though is retreating to our comfort zones and like it or not we weight all of thos

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msobkow ( 48369 )

      Properly tuned DB/2 UDB outperforms Oracle so badly it's not even funny. Sorry, dude, but popularity != quality.

      • I am quite sure that this is true in a lot of spaces and I am quite sure the opposite is true in a lot of spaces.

        That brings up another point though. Tuning a database... This is seeming to be a lost art. Over time I have witnessed what I think is an alarming trend of otherwise mostly competent developers wanting the database to just be a magic box. So much code has been written to hide the database, to turn it into objects that match oop models. Pick any of them, springDB, Hibernate et all. No one wa

    • I like derby. Why don't you like derby?

      kidding!

  • One
      Rich
        Arsehole
          Called
            Larry
              Ellison

  • The time has now come to cleanse ourselves of his filth.

  • What about the rule of two? Larry is going to have two apprentices? What if they team up and kill him?

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