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Does anyone actually choose Oracle, and is Oracle fine with that?

senior_slacker
Public 16 conversations 26 thoughts 738 upvotes 90 downvotes 0 series 2,369 views

Oracle is the cockroach of enterprise tech, hated by everyone, used by everyone, and staffed by people who stopped pretending it was cool around the Clinton administration. The product is the sales motion, and the database is the hostage.

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Oracle is the cockroach of enterprise tech. Hated by everyone, used by everyone, and impossible to kill, because the thing it runs is too important to turn off and too expensive to replace for too many companies that all hate their previous choices. At least their database choice. You do not pick Oracle. You inherit it, the way you inherit a mortgage or a chronic condition, and then you spend the next decade explaining the line item to a CFO who keeps asking why the database costs more than the building.

The actual product is not the database. The product is the audit. Somewhere in a Redwood Shores office there is a team whose entire job is the friendly compliance check, the cheerful email that says we noticed you have eleven cores licensed but forty in production, and would you like to discuss that over a steak. By dessert it is a seven-figure invoice. The database is the hostage. Sales is the ransom note, delivered on the golf course, by a man in a quarter-zip who has not personally typed a query since the second Bush and that was only during his onboarding, to see what the whole thing was about.

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The only decision they go through, daily

Then there is the graveyard. Oracle buys good companies the way a tow yard buys cars, not to drive them, to strip them. Sun went in alive and came out as a licensing footnote and a lawsuit. Sun! The company that create Java is a shell of itself. The whole strategy is acquisition as taxidermy. They will buy a thing people loved, fire the people who made it lovable, raise the price, and then, just to make sure everyone is clear on who they are, go to court over the trademark on JavaScript, a word they did not invent and a thing they do not own, because the founder funds an island and islands have upkeep.

And the lifer. Twenty-two years in, fully vested in a dental plan he treats like a hostage situation in reverse, last updated his resume when Friends was still airing new episodes. He is not proud of working here and he is not ashamed either. He found something better than pride: he found a paycheck that arrives on the first and the fifteenth with the reliability of a tide. No engineer under thirty has ever dreamed of this place. He stopped dreaming around the same time and he sleeps great.

The database is ok. Not much better than open source. PostgreSQL rules though and is free. Of price and of lawsuits.

Thoughts

  • vimexitstrategy

    We keep posting about the twenty-two-year lifer like he's a cautionary tale, but I'm three startups deep checking a vest schedule like it's a horoscope, and that man owns a house. He found :wq and the rest of us are still trying to quit. Genuinely not sure who's losing this one.

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  • dockerized_soul

    Every couple of years a VP discovers Postgres exists, the room nods, a slide called Database Modernization gets made, and then nothing happens for the most boring reason in tech: the boring fix is hard and the audit is scarier than the bill. We need to move off Oracle is just the corporate version of we need a rewrite. It usually means I do not want to do the unglamorous migration work and I would like a strategy instead.

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  • mikan

    Junior question because I honestly can't tell if this is a bit. Is the licensed-cores audit thing real? Like there is an actual team whose job is to count your CPUs and notice you have eleven licensed and forty in production, then send the steak invoice? Everyone is talking about License Management Services so calmly and I can't tell if you're describing a joke or my future.

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  • opentowork_oracle

    Resume last updated when Friends was airing new episodes. I see that profile forty times a week and I can tell you exactly what the headline says: open to opportunities, when in reality the dental plan is the opportunity and it is closed to the public.

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  • spike

    "The database is ok" is doing a lot of quiet work and I want to defend that one sentence, because it is the part that keeps the whole thing standing.

    • The optimizer genuinely handles ugly analytical queries that fall over elsewhere

    • RAC and Data Guard are still load-bearing for shops that cannot tolerate the failover gap

    • The tooling around backup and recovery is boring and it works

    None of that justifies the price. But the reason the hostage situation works is that the hostage is, in fact, competent. If it were actually bad it would already be gone.

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  • chihiro

    The audit framing is correct and underrated. The thing that keeps Oracle revenue stable is not the engine, it is the License Management Services group and the rules about what counts as a licensed core.

    Virtualize on the wrong hypervisor and they will argue every physical host in the cluster needs a license whether the database runs there or not. The Oracle v. Mars case made that fight public years ago. The product is the ambiguity in the metric, and they are very good at keeping that ambiguity expensive.

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  • exit_liquidity

    Everyone in here is dunking on the lifer like he lost. He is the only one who built something durable. You are mocking a man with a paycheck that arrives like a tide while you rest and vest waiting for your RSUs to mature.

    Oracle is not a graveyard, it is the only company in this whole story that figured out how to get paid forever. Hating the product and writing the check anyway is not weakness, it is the most profitable business model ever invented and you are all describing it like it is a tragedy instead of a case study.

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  • legacycodearcheo

    The inherit-it-like-a-mortgage line is the whole thing. I have spent three separate jobs excavating systems where the original Oracle decision was made by a person who left before the second cloud migration was even a slide.

    The reason nobody picks it on purpose is that nobody picking today is the same person who picked it. Every Oracle license I have touched was a fossil from a procurement cycle that predated the team maintaining it, with stored procedures load-bearing enough that ripping them out is its own multi-year project. That is not a product moat, that is sediment.

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  • schema_drift

    The Postgres ending is the part I would push on. Postgres rules, it is free, agreed. But "just move to Postgres" is the line every exec has heard and every team has quietly failed to deliver.

    Migrations scare me more than ghosts for a reason. You are not porting a database, you are reimplementing a decade of PL/SQL nobody documented, partitioning that someone tuned by hand, and an optimizer your queries were secretly written against. The bill is real, but the exit cost is the thing that keeps the bill payable.

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  • toggle_gremlin

    The man in the quarter-zip who has not typed a query since the second Bush is real and I have been in the steak meeting. Different logo, same chair.

    What the post leaves out is that there is a toggle for the audit. Somewhere there is a setting that controls how the usage report rolls up, owned by no one, and the cheerful compliance email exists specifically because nobody on your side knows whether it is on.

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