
China’s Biggest Startups Ditch Oracle and IBM for Home-Made Tech - ceohockey60
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-24/china-s-biggest-startups-ditch-oracle-ibm-for-home-made-tech
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megaremote
Startups were using Oracle and IBM? Seems an odd choice.

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mcv
If startups are ditching Oracle and IBM, they went wrong in adopting Oracle
and IBM in the first place. Do Chinese startups really do that? Can you still
count as a startup when you're using Oracle and IBM?

But it seems the headline is wrong, and the actual story is that large Chinese
enterprises are ditching Oracle and IBM for a Chinese startup.

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AznHisoka
Is that unique for China though? Large enterprises in the US and europe are
also starting to ditch Oracle for other alternatives.

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wil421
Who SAP? They are not quite as bad as Oracle but in the same league.

Which devil do you want to get locked into?

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tim333
Amazon made considerable efforts to get off Oracle which proved hard as Oracle
seem to provide some features for large users that are hard to match. However
they got there and are using AMS services. Presumably other large users may be
able to go the same route.
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/amazon_fulfilment_o...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/amazon_fulfilment_oracle_database/)
(Aurora Postgres and DynamoDB are mentioned)

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jacknews
Advertorial? I'm sure more Chinese companies use MySQL, Postgres etc than
TiDB?

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rapsey
Sounds like one. However the DB vendor business is certainly hard to get into
and survive. If pingcap has that many paying customers then well done.

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rsynnott
So much like startups everywhere else, then.

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mruts
I’m not a database guy and I only know enough SQL to get me through whatever
task I need ro be complete. I used MemSQL at my last job and it seemed like an
interesting idea.

Can open source solutions provide the same features as MemSQL, MSSQL, and
Oracle. can one db provide all of the features as the three above? If so, are
there any technical reasons to go with them? Or any proprietary database.

My intiution is that they are probably providing less and less value over time
as the tech and knowledge diffuse into the open sphere. Is this true?

I would appreciate some answers to the above questions!

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thomaswang
Well my guess is that they are planning for a time where they cannot use US
tech. They planning on being self sufficient as a country.

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Merrill
Do Human Computer Interfaces developed by Chinese language programmers differ
from HCI developed by English language programmers?

It would seem that Chinese characters might be used instead of icons in some
applications. Native Chinese OSS may be more suitable for use in China and
have some advantages in HKN countries.

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Barrin92
I know that voice control is very popular in China, for text messages for
example because writing on phones is much more cumbersome compared to latin
alphabets.

Might be interesting to see whether voice control is going to take off much
faster in China than in some other regions over the coming decade.

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bobthepanda
That’s quite interesting; I wonder, given the lack of official status for
other dialects, is voice input compatible with them?

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johnklos
Of course they did. That shit's expensive! And have you ever tried to get
support out of Oracle? They only fix symptoms, not problems.

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9nGQluzmnq3M
This article is... not great journalism.

Some Chinese startups are adopting open-source databases instead of Oracle and
IBM. One of them, PingCAP's TiDB [1], happens to be built by a Chinese
startup. And that's it? I was expecting to hear that the cold dead hand of the
Chinese Communist Party was forcing this, but no, it seems to be simple
capitalism at play -- nobody wants to pay the Oracle tax if they can avoid it.

[1] [https://github.com/pingcap/tidb](https://github.com/pingcap/tidb)

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meddlepal
Serious honest question for someone who might know but is anyone in the US
adopting Oracle for green field projects based on valid technical merits or
biz requirements these days? It's easy to dump on Oracle but I'm curious about
legitimate technical or business requirement reasons for adopting Oracle in
2019.

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yourapostasy
For some highly-specific performance scenarios, Oracle still cannot be beat. I
know far, far more businesses where a supported Postgresql is perfectly
suitable. I know only one business where Oracle was a defensible technical
choice.

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grumpydba
> For some highly-specific performance scenarios, Oracle still cannot be beat.

Can you elaborate on this please? I do not think this statement is correct.

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yourapostasy
Trading environment, there wasn't another solution with the lookup-and-
matching performance they got out of Oracle, from what little was shared with
me. I trust the source as he is the best programmer I know first-hand and
never shied away from throwing together his own solution if he found benefit
from it, like his own object database back in the early 80's.

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grumpydba
> Trading environment, there wasn't another solution with the lookup-and-
> matching performance they got out of Oracle, from what little was shared
> with me.

I've been maintaining trading backend databases for roughly a decade. What
oracle does, db2, sql server, sybase can do. And postgresql, MySQL most
probably too.

Most of the times the Oracle choice is dictated by a software editor whose
devs are more familiar with Oracle and have an oracle first strategy.

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theredbox
Open Source is the worst thing that can happen to the US tech in US vs China
trade war. Chinese scene is largely isolated from OSS in the west and more
often than not they are just leeching whatever the rest of the world produces
in terms of software.

I dont want to picture chinese people as parasites I want to just point out
that the contribution from chinese devs and mainly their tech companies could
be better.

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flohofwoe
You need to know where to look, there are some very interesting Chinese open
source projects on github, but they're often little known outside Chinese
developer circles.

Very small collection of projects I used myself or at least looked into:

[https://cocos2d-x.org/about](https://cocos2d-x.org/about) (ok Cocos2DX isn't
exactly "little known outside China ;)

[http://www.fairygui.com/](http://www.fairygui.com/)

[https://github.com/cloudwu/pbc](https://github.com/cloudwu/pbc) (...and every
other project by "cloudwu")

~~~
est
[https://github.com/openresty/openresty](https://github.com/openresty/openresty)

