Google Cloud CEO Called Oracle Cloud a 'Disgrace' (businessinsider.com) 40
An anonymous reader shares a report: Veteran Silicon Valley executive Thomas Kurian surprised the tech world two years ago when he suddenly left Oracle to become CEO of Google Cloud. The reason may have just gotten a bit clearer. Kurian apparently had an unhappy tenure as head of Oracle's cloud, according to a lawsuit. He felt pressured by top management, including Oracle founder Larry Ellison. And he clashed with his people at Oracle, berating execs who reported to him for work he considered "atrocious" and "awful," the lawsuit alleges. The suit, filed on behalf of a group of investors led by Union Asset Management Holding AG, a Frankfurt-based investment firm, accused Oracle's top executives of painting an upbeat picture of the tech giant's cloud momentum in 2017 to 2018, even though they knew the company was falling behind in the cloud wars. The suit was originally filed in 2018. The amended suit, which was first reported by the Register, was filed last week. Kurian's email was part of a shareholder lawsuit before a federal court in California which claims that Oracle had misled investors on the state of its cloud business. Oracle rejected the suit's claims. "The suit has no merit and Oracle will vigorously defend against these claims," spokesperson Deborah Hellinger told Business Insider in an email. [...] The suit cited Kurian's email in which he also told Miranda that Oracle's cloud software "was considered so atrocious" that it was simply "a disgrace."
Not only the cloud (Score:5, Informative)
The rest of Oracle too.
Re:Not only the cloud (Score:5, Informative)
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If you wanted big databases, Oracle used to be the only game in town. Their competitors didn't have enough market share to fully compete in terms of resources, training, and service. Thus, organizations have a lot of software designed around Oracle DB's. It's not easy to migrate all that existing SQL quickly.
However, orgs have more choices now in general such that Oracle is looking stagnant. If they don't find a new rabbit to pull out of
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No Oracle fanboy here. But I must say that it scales better than SQL Server 2016 does. I have the same code-base make regression test with the same data set against Oracle 12 and SQL Server 16 databases. Each run on separate, but similar specced bare metal systems.
Oracle finishes on average 15 minutes earlier than SQL Server does with a "static" data set. Then I continue with regression tests which have a very dynamic data set (generating lots of dummy data) and Oracle finishes between 30 to 45 minutes earl
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What about compared to DB2? I will agree that on the high-end Oracle is hard to beat, but most orgs have a lot of medium and small DB's also. They used to put all of them on Oracle, but now often put the mid & low end on MS or open source DBs. Supporting a single vendor's product is usually easier staff-wise, but Oracle is too expensive for the smallish projects.
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Towards the end of my career with a manufacturing company based (at the time) in the Pacific NW, we were looking to evaluate SQL database's. There were three platforms to test: Oracle on Sequent, DB2 on a Power based IBM system and Teradata.
One of my superiors designed a decision support database using our data to run benchmarks. I was on the hardware support side (I got to pull hard drives out of the banks of the systems while they were running query's, pull power cords from processor boxes, network cables
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François Duvalier (Papa Doc) did pretty well for himself, but that doesn't mean the Haitians enjoyed his presidency.
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How would you characterize the presentations? Long winded? Redundant? Captain Obvious? Dilbert PHB-style?
amen (Score:5, Interesting)
For the past year at work I've gotten what are at best cold calls, but really are essentially phishing emails from Oracle trying to sell us on their cloud.
These emails are semi-targeted (they avoid both junior employees (powerless) and actual admins), and are carefully worded to imply that the company has some ongoing business with Oracle, suggesting to set up a meeting to "review" the integration. I don't know how these meetings would go since I never played along, but I assume they would quickly turn into basically cold call sales techniques.
Very deceptive practice. I won't go so far as to say Oracle is doing this systematically at an org level, but it's clear that their salespeople are desperate and hungry and that my complaints about this behavior have been ignored. Oracle has been very desperate to pump up those cloud numbers.
Devil's advocate post. (Score:3, Interesting)
Devil's advocate here:
I don't have to worry if Larry will kill Oracle Cloud, while GCP can go poof, just like Hangouts, Picasa, and many, many of their other projects.
Because I know Oracle Cloud is going to be around as long as anyone else, it is worth considering.
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Re:Devil's advocate post. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would recommend you avoid BOTH Oracle and Google. It's not like there are no other choices.
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Funny how this stuff works. I was just looking into Ceph on Sunday and it occurred to me to see which of the various clouds had provided any worked examples of setting up a cluster on their cloud platform; Ceph has a number of tedious steps to wade through and I figured others might have done the leg work. Oracle Cloud has actually done this [oracle.com], exclusively, as far as I found.
That is as close as I have been to considering anything having to do with Oracle Cloud. There is plenty of room for competitors in
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Worked examples, or a click to install?
https://console.cloud.google.c... [google.com]
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y tho?
All the clouds have their own storage platforms which are far more performant, far more available and far cheaper than you could ever run it on a set of your own nodes. There's no point for them to encourage you to build it on your own when they provide a far better option already.
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On AWS it's a wizard-based config that is secure by default. A lab partner and I, neither of whom had any cloud experiencet, followed the instructions and set up a failover cluster with shared storage in well under an hour (and I think it was under a half hour.) The rest of the short workshop was in how to open up access.
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a wizard-based config
Would you have a pointer for that? It's either gone or buried well because I haven't found it. Or I'm looking for the wrong thing.
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It was four years ago, so no. I worked doing physical security (key cards, cameras, etc.) for AWS, and the organizer of the workshop wanted to give us a taste of what we were protecting. I think it was located in the training section of the no-charge level.
Re:Devil's advocate post. (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny thing is that the two largest cloud providers are often times competitors to the businesses wanting to run on cloud. Oracle isn't.
What I mean is Google is a competitor to any data processing firm because Google is a data company. So any company with a primary business of selling data should avoid Google.
Amazon is a retailer and competitor to all retailers. Between retailers and data companies that is a huge portion of the potential cloud customers.
Only Microsoft's Azure and Oracle Cloud would not be competitors to either of these spaces, as they are both tech companies and don't compete in retail or data selling.
Oracle's offerings are sub-par but Azure is actually quite decent. Microsoft has spent a good deal of effort building out management tooling, making sure users can choose to use Linux or Windows (SQL Server was ported to Linux for use in Azure) and they have a pretty impressive world-wide physical data center foot print.
Where I work we are deciding between the big two Amazon and GCP, but I spent a day with Microsoft and I recommended we consider them.
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Such as? For humongous databases, for example.
Just curious, I don't have much to do with databases.
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MS SQL will run a database for any useful thing you can imagine, distribute it globally, transparently encrypt it, and automagically sync it all up for you.
If you don't know what you're doing and you want to track every time your glass shop melts a grain of sand, you can just clone the structure and start a new data set annually.
11.4 million tons of glass manufactured in the US every year, 2000 pounds per ton, approximately 1mg per grain of sand, 453592.37 milligrams per pound. MS SQL can get you about 48.3
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Stop using single-server humongous databases. What is this, the 1980s? If you can only scale up, you're an embarrassment at this point. At my last employer, our architecture interview was there just to filter out engineers who didn't have some way to scale horizontally to solve real-world problems. DB sharding, NoSQL, whatever, didn't matter, as long as you actually knew how to make a viable design.
Re: Devil's advocate post. (Score:3)
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because oracle never discountinued a product?
exp (Score:4, Interesting)
Eh, I think Cloud CEOs should not throw stones. (Score:2)
It isn't as though anyone has an actually good public "cloud" that even approaches transparently providing the type of quantifiable increase in reliability of which "cloud" technology is theoretically capable. In fact, in the entire history of "cloud computing," none of them have been able to prove they even have the resources or expertise on board to approach the reliability or uptime of the private server in my closet that I've assembled from spare parts. So there's that, anyway.
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Re:Eh, I think Cloud CEOs should not throw stones. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, if you willfully ignore the facts, then the server in your closet is great.
Good systems aren't based on the idea that parts won't fail. Every part fails, eventually. Good systems are built on automatic, transparent replacement of anything that does fail. For storage, this is pretty mature, and systems like S3 are more reliable than anything you could ever build. If you want to explicitly manage servers, well then, you're stuck explicitly managing servers like a chump, but at least provisioning new servers is trivial and fast on AWS or Azure. I've launched 50,000 cores worth of server in two minutes - do that in your closet. But far better for most shops is to just use something like Lambda, and forget about servers. Or, a bit more old-fashions, at least use Docker or some other container and let the cloud wrangle servers for you.
But google is a disgrace too (Score:1)
Have you seen their shit search results lately? Fucking clowns.
Can't wait to hear what he calls the Google cloud (Score:3)
Can't wait to hear what he calls the Google cloud. Can we start the next lawsuit already?
I mean, you _run the fucking thing_. You're a "head" fucking "product development". If it's a "disgrace", it's your damn fault.
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Good point. He's shifting blame for his failure.
Oracle Park (Score:1, Offtopic)
Next time I'm in SF, I'll watch the Giants at Oracle Park.
On second thoughts, maybe not. Oracle would want me to pay for 42000 seats, because I could theoretically sit in any one.
Wait, what? (Score:2)
Oracle is being accused of over selling a polished turd? This is their business model you know?