Oracle's Larry Ellison Pokes Amazon Again With New Cloud Pricing Plan (siliconangle.com) 65
Oracle went on the offensive again versus Amazon.com this week with a new cloud pricing plan that gives discounts to Oracle database customers who move their databases to the cloud. From a report: Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said during an event at its Redwood City, California headquarters that while Oracle has matched Amazon Web Services for base-level computing, storage and networking services known as infrastructure as a service, it's now moving to make higher-level cloud services such as databases and analytics cheaper than AWS's. Actually, Ellison claimed that Oracle's infrastructure runs faster and therefore ends up costing less, but it's clear that the company is focusing more on its traditional strengths one tier up from the infrastructure: so-called platform as a service offerings such as the Oracle Database. Oracle said it will allow customers to move their existing licenses for databases, middleware and analytics to Oracle's platform services, just as they've allowed them to bring licenses to its infrastructure before.
Great. No thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
No way I'd ever deal with those incompetent & crooked bastards ever again.
Ever.
If you're planning a big move, take advantage of it to move away from Oracle.
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Why doesn't the industry blackball this guy? How do people continue to give Oracle money?
Re:Great. No thanks. (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is a large number of incredibly good Oracle skilled people. You have to be to get a lot of it to work. There are also a huge amount of poorly trained and usually inexperienced Oracle people - mostly on visas.
Oracle is bought because they do great sales presentations to the executives then employees and consultants make bank implementing and running it.
That all being said... Oracle software quality has been falling fast the last 15 years with no end in site. The problem is that you face lock in as w
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Why the requirement of a single node? Why are you baking in a MASSIVE anti-pattern into your DB requirements from the get-go? One that artificially makes scaling difficult and expensive, one that makes HA far less A? All with zero upside for anyone save the hardware vendors balance sheets?
And PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL is a close and highly effective match for Oracle's PL/SQL.
Honestly, the only legitimate reason for swallowing Oracle's BS is if you're running Oracle's applications. For absolutely anything e
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PL/PgSQL may work as well, but it's not even remotely compatible with Oracle's flavor, so you'd have to do a complete manual port of all DB-layer code.
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Theres also a MASSIVE lock-in factor with Oracle, and often not where you think it'd come from.
Last Govt job I had, us folks in IT really really wanted to get Oracle out of our datacenter, because just dealing with the company itself was so damn expensive. On a team of 6 of us, one of the guys pretty much spent half his time dealing with oracle lawyers and all their bullshit auditing and compliance. But we just couldn't break the chain. Turns out the department was dependent on Oracle accounting software th
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Worst part is , if you took the stupid company out of the picture, the database itself is actually a pretty neat piece of software. Then again, so was SCO Unix, once upon a time, before satan unleashed his lawyers all over the place.
Exactly. I work with an Oracle system for 17 years now, started with Oracle 7 and it's up to Oracle 11 now. The Database is great. We had exactly *two* major unplanned downtimes in that 17 years, (which were both related to the OS layer. And we got rid of most problems there when we switched from AIX to Linux)
As long as you can handle the database yourself with the on-line support resources, it's great. But God help you if you have to deal with someone *from* Oracle. (and I'm *so* grateful, that we have a l
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I've worked with Oracle ever since I started in IT, but I have to say: they're not just crooks when it comes to licenses, they're also lagging behind on the database. As far as I can tell they're in the cashcow phase.
Microsoft SQL Server is still playing catchup in some cases (I have a list of 5 items I'd *REALLY* want to have in SQL Server,such as their default isolation, separation between data and metadata for case sensitivity, autonomous transactions etc.), but the (mostly) hasslefree experience, great
Re: Great. No thanks. (Score:3)
I have a huge posting history that shows that I don't do a whole lot of hating. I can't even say that I hate Larry Ellison, but I can say that I hate his company. Hate isn't even too strong a word. Oracle can suck my unwashed left nut, metaphorically.
I have dealt with incompetence, dishonesty, and malicious and only Oracle managed to exceed expectations in all three categories. I am truly bothered by the fact that they still exist. I can't even think of a nice thing to say about them, and I can usually find
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The reason we run Oracle is not because we like it - its because its a vendor requirement for our ERP (and the switch from a pick system to Oracle happened in the 90s for this particular product).
And of course - we are looking to switch vendors, but for systems that have been in place since the 70s it's a rather complicated project.
But yeah - Oracle is BY FAR the single biggest software licensing expense we have.
Re:Great. No thanks. (Score:4, Insightful)
I worked with Oracle 7 in the mid-1990's, and since then PostgreSQL, MySql, and SQL Server. In the 90's, SQL Server was making inroads into my company (Alcan Aluminum), but us 'old dogs' were fighting back, saying it wasn't ready for prime time. But since then, it has grown up and now I view them as pretty much interchangeable for straight-forward apps.
Back then, SQL Server's advantage was price. Oracle was $8k/cpu(on a small/mid Alpha-OpenVMS box), and SQL Server was much cheaper, but Windows-only. These days, OpenVMS has pretty much relegated itself to a niche, and SQL Server is about as expensive as Oracle for equivalent performance. So my vote, these days, goes to PostgreSQL, the only open-source database that is pretty much feature complete (for the day), and has been around for decades.
Re:Great. No thanks. (Score:4, Informative)
And I really can't imagine having my database in the cloud, it just sounds hideous.
A great many databases are in the cloud these days. Equifax, OPM, Ashley Madison, Friend Finder, RockYou, TJ Maxx, Heartland, Sony Pictures, Card Systems, Target, Yahoo, and many more.
Re: Great. No thanks. (Score:2)
Having your database in the cloud makes sense if your app servers are also in the cloud - that's where the heavy traffic comes from. Having the DB in the cloud just to say you do while all consumers of the data are not is just horrible design.
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Every experience I've ever had in working with Oracle was painful. If you need to hire a "license manager" to make sure you don't get shafted by Oracle later on, things really start to suck. A co-worker at a different company tried to switch to a cheaper option: The Oracle salesmanager just said that yes, there was that option but in their case they got a "very special price, my friend" that made the cheaper option exactly the same price as their old contract.
It's practices like that, that people consider t
Re: Great. No thanks. (Score:2)
Scroll up. I shared some of my experiences with Oracle.
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Hehehehe...I once had a conversation with a professor on the West Coast who's wife had company back in 70's when Oracle wasn't called Oracle and were small fry in a large ocean. Uncle Larry screwed her out of payment for services rendered. He's always been pond scum.
Re: Great. No thanks. (Score:2)
I'll pay a bit more to not have to deal with Oracle and their bullshit. K thx.
Oracle jumped the shark long ago. (Score:2, Interesting)
Smart move (Score:5, Insightful)
Just get a lot of database licenses on the cloud, and then Oracle can raise the prices again. As Oracle is a master in the art of gouging the clients, they will design a complex update-upgrade-improve set of changes, new platforms and services, that will make very difficult to ever compare prices with what you were paying before (because now you are getting MOAH), or what other people are paying now.
It has the added advantage that Oracle can make arbitrarily difficult to return to your own metal if you are unsatisfied. I'm sure there is some subtle change in your license when you move to the cloud, or will be when some new "platform" is unveiled, that will hinder you when moving away. I'm also sure that the tools and support for moving to the cloud are far better than the tools and support for moving away from the cloud. If you thought that your organization was Oracle-dependent due to the quantity of code developed for the platform, just wait until you run on their servers. In due time, you won't be able to just get a full copy of all your data and metadata in a local computer.
Time to buy Oracle stock, I'd say.
Spit out my coffee funny (Score:5, Informative)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I'm crying - can I have a glass of water? Is there really anyone left in IT who still believes that Oracle is good for their company's bottom line?
More seriously, it's not Oracle that Amazon needs to worry about - it's Google's cloud services. My company's already switching almost every currently Amazon-based app it can find to GCP. GCP tech is kind of AWS 2.0 (since they had the opportunity to learn from the "first mover" - think how Microsoft learned from Novell back in the day) and Google's currently trying to buy up the enterprise market with lowball pricing.
Google's uses "production is beta" approach in GC (Score:1)
We started to move to Google Cloud because you're right, it has some really slick features and does feel like AWS 2.0. However, we noticed a disturbing trend with several of their services. Google seems to follow their general philosophy of "here, beta test our stuff for us" which would seemingly be fine since they almost always have a "LTS" and "General" version of their APIs. However, it seems they also have the same ADD based philosophy of ignoring/abandoning their LTS version when they have their new
Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Larry,
There are precisely zero people who use your product due to your business model. Your company has a decades-long history of costing customers huge amounts of money, either in licensing, legal fees, or both. Nobody looking to do a database migration is going to believe that the cost savings over AWS will last for any length of time; everybody, everywhere, ever sees right through the attempt to lock people in, yet again. Amazon, Microsoft, and OSS databases are your competition, and "We're not Oracle" is a selling point they will always possess. Even if by some miracle "Oracle is cheaper" was an argument anybody believed would remain true for any length of time, odds are good that most potential customers would be so wary of your business practices that paying more for Amazon is a better business decision.
The ability to continue increasing the cost for your current clients basically-indefinitely is the only reason your company is still in existence. Your decline will be slow, and will likely remain wealthy for the rest of your life, but when Oracle eventually goes under, your legacy will be such that there will be cheers and celebration for your demise.
Warm Regards,
Me
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Hear, hear!
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Anyone who has ever looked into Larry's history will see that he's a pure con artist. He's like a smarter Trump. There was one executive Oracle used to have who kept champion the idea of longer-term customer loyalty and product quality. He was booted: didn't fit the get-it-now-and-get-it-fast culture of Oracle.
Anyone else at twice the price (Score:1)
I can't imagine Oracle appealing to many people based on a small cost advantage. I can get a large house in Detroit for $10,000 but I'm not going to do it. Cost isn't the only consideration.
Yes, Larry Please add to and tighten the shackles! (Score:2)
Yes, sir... may I please have another?
Any company that takes this deal has even less control over their data. And you can bet prices will go up up up after Larry has got most of his cows (um... customers?) corralled into the new reinforced pen.
I've poked both of these companies (Score:1)
Stream Data From an Oracle Database (Score:2)
I've got my own complaints with Oracle and their licensing BS. It's a capable database no doubt, but when they make it difficult for me to spend my money I sometimes wonder.
Any who, I found a start up that enables the Oracle database to store unstructured data within the database and is able to transform, stream it, and manipulate it at speeds that rival traditional object storage.
Disclaimer: I am a DBA for a mid sized manufacturing firm, no affiliation with this start up.
I called to inquire more and found
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Did I just somehow get transported back to 1995?
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I had the exact same feeling. Why would I want to store unstructured data in a relational database? I'd rather put the video and sound somewhere else.
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Agreed, video and sound can go on a filesystem or a NoSQL store. And I couldn't imagine using the database (typically the hardest layer to scale) to serve web pages.
Postgres Oracle Compatibility Pack? (Score:3)
I'm curious if anyone has had any experience using the Oracle compatability pack on Postgres? It's supposed to let you drop an oracle schema into postgres and have it work unmodified, PL/SQL and all.
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It works for very basic PL/SQL and fairly basic queries.
Businesses don't run Oracle because they want to (Score:4, Insightful)
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Except for Larry's License demons. (Score:1)
The Oracle Cloud (Score:2)
Other than Jarvis, does anyone actually use the Oracle Cloud?
Feeling some pressure... (Score:2)
Honestly, I don't know why it took Oracle so long to really push their own cloud solution (after all, it's a chance to lock customers down even more), but it's really a bit too late. AWS and Azure have been doing this for years. SQL Server is going on Linux, Aurora is getting better and better. Postgres is a great option, there's the whole NoSQL option if you want. Personally, if they get taken down quite a few notches, so much the better.
It's a choice (Score:2)
Okay, so they want me to consider a vendor that charges for everything, saves money where it can, and has lockin. And they want me to choose Oracle over that vendor? They're nuts!