
Oracle’s Cloudy Future - craigkerstiens
https://stratechery.com/2016/oracles-cloudy-future/
======
tmptmp
I am happy Oracle is losing this battle (edit: or at least feeling the heat),
one sort of personal reason is that they have killed/crippled many open source
projects.

Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools
around running big corps, who can conveniently _pass the buck_ if something
goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too.

But if you really want to see your money well spent, Oracle is not at all the
way. The recent decision by Yandex to shift from Oracle to Postgres should be
seen here. [1]

[1]
[https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05....](https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/attachments/426_2016.05.19%20Yandex.Mail%20success%20story.pdf)

~~~
treehau5
> Other reason, they are gaining money mainly because there are enough fools
> around running big corps, who can conveniently pass the buck if something
> goes wrong. Similar is true for MS too.

This is also the _sole_ reason IBM still exists, at least in services.

"Oh our system is an overengineered pile of garbage that takes two weeks to
deploy an update to a static asset? It's (cue dramatic music) _their fault_!"

 _CTO proceeds to get bonus_

 _IBM Consultants are brought in_

~~~
abakker
For many people in IT, generally not the Hacker News crowd, but the guys in
the trenches of [insert corporation name here] with ops in many countries, The
Money is NOT really the important thing. Risk mitigation by having a
passthrough to the big IT vendors is what they are paying for specifically. I
work in the IT consulting / business research space. In our surveys, "vendor
viability" is a frequent concern, and the more critical the workload, the more
weight is given to wondering whether the vendor will be around, unchanged, in
the next 3 years.

The risk mitigation factor from large vendors comes not from performance but
from reliability. You can trust that old mainframe code will continue to be
supported for many years. You can trust that your COBOL workload will be
continue to run, and that the 20 years of updates, patches, and tweaks have
made it reliable and predictable in a way that precludes rip and replace in
all but the most extenuating circumstances.

IT budgets tend to be governed by an 80/20 rule - maintenance vs innovation.
Sometimes, its more of a 95/5 in practicality due to shrinking budgets. My
experience says that the innovation side is drastically shifting away from
these big vendors, but that the maintenance side has a lot more riding on it
still.

~~~
oblio
Well, thing is, Open Source is changing that proposition. As long as you're
prepared to be conservative in your choices, something like Debian + Apache +
OSS programming language will likely be around 20-40 years from now.

When is the last time an OSS programming language that took off actually died?
For example, even though it's not as popular Perl 5 is still used
professionally in many environments and as far as I know the ecosystem
actually went through a sort of renaissance a few years back.

And these days I think it's even easier for OSS ecosystems to achieve critical
mass and sustain themselves for decades since communication is easier (a lot
more broadband internet in the world) and there's a lot more programmers
around. Python, Ruby, PHP & co will probably be around long after I'm dead.

~~~
ubercode5
I agree. However one additional thing to keep in mind in the COTS vs FOSS is
if there is some bug that affects the company and requires attention. The
company doesn't generally have the engineers on staff to actually change that
software, and there's no guarantee that the associated FOSS community will
prioritize the bug. With a COTS solution, you can pick up the phone and call
the support team. Generally my company chooses COTS over FOSS because they
want guaranteed support even if it costs more.

Note, some FOSS products also provide a strong support team to handle this
exact thing, and in those cases they were usually the winner.

Edit: Looks like abakker posted the same idea simultaneously.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Indeed. It seems that the most sustainable business model for Open Source so
far is a combination of FOSS product + paid support / consulting company. It
has some potential conflict of interest (e.g. deliberately not improving some
aspects of the product that brings in support calls), but being a successful
open-source product often depends on outside contributions which themselves
depend on reputation, and that may keep companies honest.

~~~
geoka9
> It has some potential conflict of interest (e.g. deliberately not improving
> some aspects of the product that brings in support calls)

You could say the same about proprietary software, no?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yes. I was stating they exist, not comparing to propertiary software.

------
freyr
Earlier this week, Oracle had their OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.
Thousands of badge-wearing attendees swarmed the city and signs plastered all
over declared Oracle "The fastest-growing cloud company."

But even the Oracle conference attendees weren't buying it. In a live audience
poll held during the live keynote, they voted that Oracle would be unlikely to
meet it's cloud goals, and challenged the company's "fastest-growing" claim,
giving the title to Amazon instead.

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/oracle_openworld1/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/oracle_openworld1/)

~~~
yankoff
Oh, this con.. they blocked Howard st. and majorly have been disrupting
traffic downtown the entire week.

------
gizmodo59
A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies
(Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your
customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server?

Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue:

1\. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there
should be someone who can come on premise to fix things.

2\. We need to use X because X is used by other big corporations and you never
get fired for choosing X.

3\. The products (Oracle,MS SQL) are not that bad. (Not sure if there is a
better way to put this)

I could be wrong, but I can't think of any other important reason. Can anyone
pitch in their experience?

~~~
rb808
We use Oracle. When starting a new project you are told to use Oracle because
that is strategic plan of the company. There are teams of Oracle specialists
in house that assist us. There are Sybase, SQL Server apps around but would
ideally be migrated.

I think its probably time to move off to a free open source platform like
PostGres, esp for non critical apps.

Don't underestimate the power of corporate support. I had a problem with IBM
DB2 in a previous job - to diagnose IBM went out and bought an exact copy of
our hardware, installed the exact copy of our build and ran automated queries
to match our load and recreated the problem. You don't get that support from
stackoverflow.

~~~
andrewbinstock
This! Enterprise DB vendors like Oracle will send a team of engineers to your
site and work with you until the problem is solved. For IT managers, knowing
they can rely on this level of commitment is something they will happily pay
for.

~~~
erikpukinskis
So, IT managers like Oracle because they can pay someone else to do their job
for them?

What are they getting paid for then? They take the TPS reports from the in-
house engineers to the Oracle managers? They're people people?

~~~
zigzigzag
Almost all companies need databases. Very few companies can or want to hire
highly skilled database engineers with years of experience of debugging and
performance profiling complex applications.

~~~
AndyNemmity
Right, when I go to major client sites, often their people don't know anything
about databases really. It's in some random city, and they hire the people
that are local.

You get very wildly different levels of skill, and many times very low levels
of skill. Then they hire consultants, because we can make the thing go.

------
gaius
_However, there were two big limitations with hierarchical databases: first,
relationships were pre-determined; what was a parent and what was a child was
a decision made before any data was actually entered_

Well, yes and no. IMS was developed for bill-of-materials processing, which is
a kind of thing you do in engineering to keep track of all the parts in your
thing you're building. It was first used for the Saturn V rocket. At or at
least near the top level you would have things like "a booster" and at the
bottom level you would have something like "a bolt", "a nut", "a washer".
There was no conceivable case in which you'd want to make a bolt out of
boosters so having these relationships pre-determined wasn't actually a
"limitation" at all, in the sense that it would never, ever stop a user of the
system doing what they needed to do with it.

 _Secondly, queries analyzing the children of different parents are
impractical: you would need to traverse the hierarchy to retrieve information
for every potential item_

The sort of query you'd do with this system would be, I want to make a rocket
engine, what exactly do I need to order and how many of them, I want to give
this piece of the work to this group, do they have all the parts they need in
their inventory, and so on and so on. So that's not really an unreasonable
sort of query if you are managing an inventory of parts and the processes that
make them into ever bigger parts until finally you have your very top level
parent "a moon mission".

~~~
jasim
What if you also wanted to know who supplied those bolts, when, and which
other parts use that same bolt?

~~~
gaius
Apparently, you can put a man on the moon and return him to Earth without
needing that query...

------
jdcarter
What a lot of these analysts overlook is _why_ Oracle is trying to take on
Amazon, despite being years late to the party. I believe it's a defensive
move: Oracle is seeing long-time customers deploy new applications in AWS, and
that customer starts to realize, "hey, that went pretty well, why not move
more of my stuff to AWS?" Their Oracle sales rep comes calling, and suddenly a
once-reliable customer needs _fewer_ Oracle licenses than last year.

Oracle therefore needs an answer to those customers transitioning to the
cloud; they want their own cloud to sell. Oracle can undercut Amazon on price
--even run their own cloud offerings at a loss for a while--because losing
some money on their cloud is better than losing customers from their high-
margin products.

~~~
toyg
_> why Oracle is trying to take on Amazon, despite being years late to the
party. I believe it's a defensive move_

Ellison is all about the money. When "the cloud" started, he quietly
bankrolled a bunch of companies spearheading the space, so he didn't have to
risk his cash-cow. Once the space was proven, he's steered the whole company -
and he didn't do it yesterday, he's done it about 6 years ago. You're seeing
results today because Oracle is large, it takes a while to release stuff that
has almost been rewritten from scratch to fit the new paradigm, and it takes
even more to sell it to Oracle's very conservative userbase.

If it succeeds, the subscription model will make Oracle even more money than
before. However, they are effectively rewriting from scratch a large number of
their products; this is why they are very limited. It will take another 5
years before they can reach feature-parity with on-premise solutions, assuming
on-prem doesn't get anything new in the meantime. Performance is also pretty
dismal for some cloud products at the moment.

~~~
jdcarter
Oracle selling higher-end products as a service makes total sense, and I
agree, the subscription model has potential to make them a good deal of money.
What I'm getting at, however, is why are they so aggressively taking on Amazon
in the IaaS space? That's the part which doesn't make sense on the surface--
they show up late and then attempt to compete on price. Since when has Oracle
competed on _price?_

The conclusion I come to is that Amazon must be eating away at their customer
base. Once a customer starts to move some of their IT into AWS, and it goes
well, that puts Oracle on the defensive--not a spot they like to be in.

I doubt Oracle really wants to be in the IaaS business just for the sake of
IaaS. They want to focus on higher-margin services. The IaaS part must be a
defensive move to keep customers away from AWS and within the Oracle
ecosystem.

~~~
toyg
There's another thing that is specific to IaaS: auditability. Part and parcel
of Oracle's business model is sending goons to count your servers running this
or that appserver, and invariably telling you are not paying enough in
licenses. A serious cloud-based architecture that can scale up and down at
will (which is what you would deploy on AWS) is fundamentally non-auditable,
because it can be scaled down to minimal levels when auditors land. But if
you're running on Oracle's servers...

~~~
athrun
Not sure about auditability. If anything, IaaS is more auditable since
everything is traceable.

Additionally, AWS will provide partner ISVs with detailed reports on how
customers used their products over a given billing period.

That being said, this transparency might be an issue for Oracle as it limits
their usual predatory sales/auditing practices.

------
mwnorman
(long time ex-Oracle employee ... take with whatever size grain of salt you
wish :-)

As the article mentions, Oracle aims primarily at its own installed-base,
which limits how much "innovation" they can do .. can't piss-off the paying
customers! Their world-view is incredibly narrow ... years ago they discovered
that even though they have millions of paying customers, there is a core of
only about 5000 customers that they _really_ need to listen to.

Oracle should look carefully at IBM's recent moves within the Cloud eco-
system: instead of offering the AWS-style "everything-including-the-kitchen-
sink", IBM's purchase of 'The Weather Network's big-data division has lead
them to offer high-level cloud-APIs for dealing with weather data without the
need to put it all together (S3+SQS+DynamoDB+EMR...)

~~~
vgt
Very timely:

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/global-
historic...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/global-historical-
daily-weather-data-now-available-in-BigQuery.html)

------
SEJeff
Quote Larry Ellison in 2008: What the hell is cloud computing?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0)

"The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion driven than
women's fashion."

~~~
dkarapetyan
He's not wrong. He brings up several good examples and how "cloud computing"
is basically meaningless. He says they're gonna change the marketing to be
"cloud computing" friendly since both gmail and salesforce are considered
"cloud computing". In that world Oracle DBs are also cloud computing.

~~~
SEJeff
Oh I don't disagree. Just found it amusing the change of attitude.

~~~
dkarapetyan
He's not dumb. He's a very competent businessman. He's not gonna let a 2009
Q/A session get in the way of getting more money just so he can be consistent
about ragging on "cloud computing".

~~~
pjlegato
^^ The difference between management and engineering.

------
pinaceae
Good article, but misses the point on Oracle's risk against AWS.
Understandable as Ben is more focused on consumer stuff.

Oracle's main money maker is their database product. Running on prem,
collecting money through license and maintenance contracts. The more DB
installs out there, the better.

Salesforce uses Oracle for their backend. But here's the rub - as a SFDC
customer, I do not care which DB is running below it. And I don't need an DB
in itself anymore. I have my customer data in my CRM, and runs in SFDC
datacenters. SFDC is the largest known user of Oracle DB, but it is
abstracting away the raw DB product from enterprise users. Like any other SaaS
product does.

Which means the total number of ORA DBs will shrink, massively. Hence Oracle
buying business apps left and right with all that DB money, to augment the
sellable stack. Oracle is the elephant graveyeard of enterprise software, in
CRM alone they acquired 5-6 different solutions and still sell a bunch of
those (Siebel, Oracle CRM, Oracle OnDemand, Fusion, Peoplesoft, etc.).

SFDC has announced a big move onto AWS, getting away from running their own
datacenters - they're moving upstream, going after the business end users. The
underlying tech is a commodity, plumbing, invisible.

And what happens to price points of commodities? bye bye fat margin DB
business...

~~~
dmourati
Correct. Amazon understand this dynamic and how to play the game. They can
take something like Oracle's DB, turn it into a service, and manage it end to
end for the customer, and even provide tools to do the migration. This is a
straight attack on Oracle. Once in the AWS ecosystem, it becomes easy to
follow the logic described in the CIO using MS products in the article.

One real risk is lock in. Larry has been harping on this. The counterpoint, of
course, is if you are running on the best platform, lock-in is not a problem
because you don't want to switch.

~~~
lightman_group
You mean the best platform running 4 year old hardware? That one.

------
TheRealDunkirk
> Software Development Laboratories implemented it and called it Oracle, and
> in 1979 sold it to the CIA...

I've long suspected that Oracle's success was due to becoming the de facto
RDBMS for any and all government TLA's. I think this is part of Ellison's
legendary arrogance. He knows he has the US government by the short hairs when
it comes to IT.

I think it also ties well with Sun CEO Scott McNealy's famous, "You have no
privacy; get over it," comment. McNealy understood that the CIA (and NSA, FBI,
et. al.) were running big data mining operations -- with Oracle, as that was
the only game in town, at that point -- on his hardware, but he couldn't just
come out and say that.

~~~
gaius
That's not exactly how it happened - Oracle got the CIA as a customer
specifically because doing so would let them skip the queue for a new
mainframe, for which there was a waiting list. It was what kids these days
would call a "growth hack".

The original "Oracle" was a scheme for storing data on mylar strips, getting
into database game was what kids these days would call a "pivot".

(Source: Larry Ellison's bio).

------
erpellan
I sat next to someone who worked for a well-known company on a plane on the
way back from re:invent last year. They were ripping out Oracle and switching
to AWS with extreme prejudice after one too many 'guilty-until-proven-
innocent' license audits.

The days of being able to treat their customers like dirt with impunity are
well and truly over.

------
Roboprog
To summarize other comments:

If you are running a Fortune 1000 IT group, you'd be a fool not to use Oracle;
if you are running a startup, you'd be a fool to use Oracle.

It's a pain to _create_ something using Oracle. But it's just there :-(

------
calpaterson
This is a wonderful explanation of the original rationale for relational
databases. Periodically poeple re-invent IMS' hierarchical design only to
rediscover why relations are important. MongoDB's "document database" is a
current example.

~~~
js8
Actually, I just got a little training on IMS last week, and I have to say,
IMS should be reinvented. But not for its weaknesses (hierarchy), but for its
strengths (speed).

The idea that the application program gets a compiled representation of the
exact data pointers that are in the database, and those data pointers
optimized for the problem, is very sound, IMHO. IMS is very close to the
metal, at the expense of flexibility, and that's how it should be reinvented.

~~~
Jweb_Guru
That's essentially the idea behind Protobuf and friends, is it not? It's not
_quite_ as optimized because there's a bounds check, but that's about it (and
in many languages you can't get around a NULL or bounds check anyway, and just
rely on the branch predictor).

~~~
js8
Protobuf is not a database. What comes close is DataDraw, but that is an
embedded database, not a server.

~~~
Jweb_Guru
I don't understand your meaning, then... lots of database systems have
hardcoded fixed pointer offsets for data structures, and some even compile
queries into bytecode with those hardcoded pointer paths (for instance, HyPeR
does this using LLVM, and I think some other column-stores do as well). Is
your issue that those databases aren't hierarchical? On modern machines,
pointer chasing is much slower than predictable sequential memory access, so
that model doesn't seem like the performance win it was in the past... maybe
I'm wrong.

~~~
js8
I think what IMS does is they have those pointers, but these are pointers
between records on disk (to minimize IO), not in memory. And the hierarchy is
essentially a pre-calculated one-to-many join. So what you do when you design
IMS DB is you look at what joins you need and you build your DB structure
around that. And that's where, even though IMS is still row-oriented, it
differs from the relational model, which is more flexible, but at the cost of
higher IO per query.

DataDraw is kinda similar, but in memory. There is a reason why it doesn't
have a generic SQL interface, although it would be probably possible to build
a slow one on top of it.

P.S. I don't know HyPeR, and I can't google it. And yes, it's possible that
somebody already reinvented IMS, I am just not aware of it.

------
pdevr
If you want to know the history of Oracle, "Softwar" is an excellent book. It
includes Ellison's notes too, wherever he felt he needed to add them.

------
geodel
Oracle is going to be hobbled by Cloud providers in similar manner as TV
networks by Netflix. If Oracle reduce access of its software to Cloud
infrastructure providers then they lose potential revenue stream and Cloud
providers can start promoting alternatives. On the other hand if cloud
providers have access to Oracle products in their cloud then Oracle cloud
looks unimpressive to customers and no reason to use Oracle cloud.

Like networks learned that must watch shows are decreasing on their networks
in last few year Oracle will learn their software is must for decreasing
number of customers.

------
planetjones
Are any new companies choosing Oracle products? Or are they really only
relying on banks,insurance companies and other blue chips to take up their
'cloud' offerings?

~~~
Karunamon
This is actually a question I never had a good answer for.

If I'm a developer, and am going to create a complicated line of business
application, are there non-political reasons that I'd want to target Oracle as
opposed to, say, Postgres or Maria?

~~~
gaius
If it has a feature that's cheaper than creating and supporting it yourself.
Oracle the database is literally state-of-the-art.

Being database-neutral means only using lowest-common-denominator features,
which in turn means if you need it, you gotta write it and maintain it.

------
hyperpallium
What db does the new enterprise use - airbnb, tesla, uber... even google,
apple, facebook, amazon?

If "software is eating the world", and the new enterprises _are_ software
companies (even if they don't sell software), do they write their own custom
solution, optimized for their usage patterns?

Or do they "grow up" into traditional companies, and rely on outside vendors
for their software? I don't think so.

------
suyash
Oracle has brought top talent from Amazon and MS, including Deepak Patil who
launched Microsoft Azure: [http://agetimes.net/tech/enterprise/this-is-how-
oracle-lured...](http://agetimes.net/tech/enterprise/this-is-how-oracle-lured-
top-flight-programmers-away-from-amazon-and-microsoft-to-build-its-next-big-
thing-orcl-amzn/)

~~~
amaks
What a terrible article, and written in such layman language:

"it comes as “bare metal,” a attention tenure for servers with no program
installed"

~~~
ahsvduabs
Something about it makes me think it was poorly translated into English.

------
gjkood
I guess this is an off topic question, but shouldn't the example of the
Hierarchical Database show Customer as the Root and Order as the Parent and
Books as the Child?

I guess it makes sense if the query is "Show me all the Orders in the system".

------
nowey
Oracle has IaaS and PaaS solutions now....

~~~
colemannerd
and the point of the article is that they're light and provide no where near
the optionality and features of AWS.

~~~
bduerst
Amazon doesn't really have a PaaS though, right?

~~~
dmourati
One could argue the entire suite of AWS products make up a PaaS. One could
also argue that Elastic Beanstalk is their standalone PaaS offering.

[https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/)

~~~
bduerst
Except that isn't really a PaaS when stacked up to the others like App Engine,
Heroku, and Azure.

