
Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change - phonon
https://oracle-base.com/blog/2017/01/28/oracles-cloud-licensing-change-be-warned/
======
bane
One of the projects I'm working on is suffering from many of the ills that
come with using Oracle on a project. At first we built the entire stack using
PostgreSQL (like most sane projects should), but when it came time to deliver
to the customer, they had not yet chosen to allow it as an approved software
component and suggested we move to Oracle -- that was over a year ago.

We've fought every kind of licensing issue you can imagine, shitty support,
broken tools. A simple migration of a few hundred rows in a very simple table
turned into a month long exercise that required 200 billable hours to Oracle
consultants because all of the import/export tools that Oracle provides are
broken in subtle, different and incompatible ways. At one point we _saved_
time by copying and pasting data from one table into another through the
management GUI rather than fight all the bullshit Oracle puts in your way.

The customer, now irate that we've been in standstill for a year, doesn't
understand and hasn't made any progress in getting Postgres signed off on by
their security idiots and now they're out an extra million dollars or so.

From initial install to development to deployment it's been a nightmare and
the only conclusion anybody can reasonable come up with is that it's because
Oracle purposely breaks their software in subtle ways so that the only paths
of execution require deep Oracle lore that only somebody who dedicates their
job to being an Oracle DBA could possibly know.

Oracle can't die fast enough as a company. They're an enormous drag on the
entire technology industry and I'm convinced a force for evil.

~~~
bastardoperator
Companies these days chose Oracle for one reason. They're scared of being
sued. Several operations I've been involved with chose it as insurance policy.
They want the ability to defer litigation to Oracle should it occur. Oracle
touts its support and aggressive legal defense as a selling point. Engineers
don't recommend Oracle, C titles and Sr. Management do. Sorry to hear about
your issues, I'm sure the product worked amazingly on Postgres.

~~~
DrScump
In a sense, it's become the 21st Century version of the old IBM meme: "Nobody
ever got fired for buying IBM."

------
throwaway-2013
I think the days of "no one ever gets fired for buying oracle" are over.

CIO at a company we consult for was recently fired. Or rather made to resign.

In the last few years the cio changed almost the entire businesses enterprise
systems to oracle covering.

HR, performance management, reporting, data warehousing, sales, ecommerce,
repairs, document management

This has effectively allowed the consulting company and oracle to fleece the
business and hold them at Randsom putting the company under tremendous risk.

We have been called in to untangle the mess.

To give you an idea millions have been spent to build an ecommerce portal with
sales in the 1000's. The ROI will probably take years To be realized.

Some of the challenges dealing with the mess of a complete oracle stack:

\- typical people who specialize in oracle solutions are just that. Specialist
in the solution not developers.

\- Unless you are using one of the more popular products. Finding information
is practically impossible compare the google search for magneto vs oracle atg

\- you cannot easily transition a competent developer to oracle tools due to
the complexity

\- some of the tools are complex for reasons I fail to understand simple
things take a long time to achieve. Maybe hard things are easier but I have
yet to see this

\- they encourage bad practices, everything goes in the db including HTML
templates the works.

~~~
Spooky23
I agree... it's a nightmare. Look at the Oracle Identity suite. It's a mess,
crazy disjointed collection of SOA apps to spin up user accounts for god
sakes.

Some friends are working on a project with these tools... they are a couple of
years in and don't have password reset fully implemented yet, and cannot come
up with a date for implementation.

With a commercial product like Microsoft ILM/FIM, a team of 3-4 people could
meet 90% of project objectives in 90 days with 90% less spend. The other 10%
would require some product evals or tool building.

------
echelon
How much longer do you all think Oracle will be around as a company? They
burned all bridges with engineers long ago, and they're not going to be able
to keep selling their blatant and expensive lock-in strategy to management.

Maybe when they finally do go under Google will be able to buy Java and
MySQL...

~~~
elorant
I don't think you realize how the enterprise ecosystem works. There are legacy
Cobol systems scattered all around the place. Corporations stick with their
platforms for decades. This isn't the web development front where we change
platform every couple of years. In corporations change is slow because there
are significant sums of money invested in people and procedures. You just
don't change that for the next flashy thing. And thus the future for Oracle is
much more promising than it is for Google or Apple.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
True, but I think you may be underestimating the need for a public company to
grow in order to survive in its current form.

Relentlessly squeezing existing customers that have no way out will only get
you so far.

~~~
syshum
Worked for Microsoft for Decades,

They also found a new way to apply that same model with 0365 and their
continual effort to add new features that only cost a "few dollars more per
user per month"

Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way... all of them do
it.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
_> Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way_

No doubt about that, but for basic infrastructure like DBMSs the customer of
the future will be another tech company. Try extracting the same margins for a
database system from, say, Airbnb or Uber as from a mid-sized bank founded in
1888.

~~~
cm2187
I bet the mid-sized bank founded in 1888 will still be around well after 80%
of these tech companies failed...

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Being around isn't the same as growth though, and being around doesn't
necessarily mean to run your own IT infrastructure either.

~~~
syshum
I find this modern fixation on growth MBA's have forced upon the business
world to be facinating

Use to Stability, and Profitability not growth was important.

Stability, and Profitability were the goal, growth followed but was not in
itself a goal

Now even if you are profitable, if you are not seeing growth then you failed.
It is ridiculous.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
I don't disagree in general, but Oracle is a tech company and technology has a
particular function in our society that wasn't invented by MBAs.

The role of technology is to drive productivity growth, which is ultimately
the only thing that improves living standards (or at least has the potential
to do so).

A pizza sold in 1987 is just as useful as a pizza sold in 2017 measured by its
nutritional value. But the same is not true of technologies from 1987.

~~~
Spooky23
I'd argue for the Oracle growth drivers, things are much better than 1987, but
only marginally better than 1999.

These mega vendors drive co-dependency, not innovation.

------
webreac
I think that a key explanation of Oracle success is that the complexity of
their database administration has created a generation of full time jobs: DBA.
These people are like salesman working for Oracle to defend the future of
their job. They are well paid, but this cost nothing to Oracle. At the
opposite, Oracle can sell training.

~~~
toyg
Most of these jobs are offshored now, so it's not as relevant a factor as you
think. What _is_ relevant is the amount of business applications and solutions
built on the database, that took years to develop and would cost a fortune to
replace.

~~~
z3t4
is it not standard practice to support at least two different db systems !?

~~~
toyg
For certain values of "support". Say you start on Oracle and then want to move
to SqlServer? Migration will likely be a risky endeavor, even if the
application supports either db _when starting from scratch_. To begin with,
you'll need something to copy schemas across, be it in the app itself or not,
and hope everything made it across. Then you'll have to hope the app doesn't
need db-specific stuff (say, a sequence that you only get on sqlserver) that
you don't have because you started on Ora. And then you'll have to move all
the 3rd party tooling and hacks that you built over the years around that same
database - from backup solutions to custom queries etc. It's rarely as easy as
"copy it all and turn it back on", and all this work often has to be done by
expensive application specialists.

At that point, having to choose between paying hundreds of thousands to move
db, or a few extra thousands per year to keep things as they are, the business
decision is not as simple as one would think.

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Joeri
Oracle is making a big push to move customers from aws and azure to their own
cloud hosting.

[https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-
region-...](https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/global-region-
expansion-011717.html)

Raising prices for hosting with the competitor makes perfect sense when viewed
from that angle.

~~~
giis
Remember, Oracle also forced 'Redhat' customers (who rely on Oracle DB) to
their Linux in similar manner.

Now I wonder BTRFS is not getting enough attention, because its started by
Oracle and their history with open-source?

~~~
sllabres
Not an expert in Oracle DB licensing. Could you explain?

~~~
giis
I'm not expert in licensing too. I've friends who said, when they needed
enterprise support for Oracle DB running on Redhat, directly/indirectly the
message they received is to migrate from Redhat linux to Oracle linux. I think
that quite clear by some kind of 'cold-war' going on between Redhat & Oracle.

[http://fossforce.com/2016/03/microsoft-oracle-oracle-
tried-r...](http://fossforce.com/2016/03/microsoft-oracle-oracle-tried-red-
hat/)

~~~
chris_wot
The very fact that you must be an "expert" in licensing really says everything
you need to know about Oracle licenses.

------
mailslot
Oracle is worth every penny that they charge. Unless you've worked with it,
you won't understand the love / hate relationship toward it.

Yes. It costs money. Why? Because it does so many things that nothing else
comes close to. Its query optimizer is insane. MySQL is a toy and PostgreSQL,
while admirable, remains in a lower class.

I say this as a supporter and contributor to open source databases. Like the
open source cars of tomorrow; you can't compare them to the pedigree of a
Porsche.

I was always a Sybase and DB/2 guy myself, but Oracle could do things. Things
Sybase couldn't be tuned for. You don't put Wordpress on Oracle. You do crazy
insane shit on it that will break MySQL.

~~~
jsiepkes
I think you are not taking into account the shift out of the DB and into the
application layer. People care less and less what the DB can do. Yes large
slow enterprises will continue to have a need for Oracle DB. But I've never
seen anyone connect a microservice to Oracle. Why? Because you dont need that
much complexity when you only have a collection of "simple" services.

Everyone who needs Oracle deserves Oracle.

~~~
sz4kerto
That shift is somewhat insane though. Moving data out from the DB just to do
stuff in the app that could be done inside the database is throwing
performance out of the window.

~~~
jpgvm
In my experience using Oracle is throwing performance out the window. It's not
uncommon to have 40+ machines running an Oracle product that struggles to
support 1-2k concurrent users. For instance the Oracle Identity Manager, which
is glorified LDAP was deployed on about that number of boxes at a previous
company I worked at. It took over a year to implement and they still only used
the LDAP functionality. In the end it was falling over under load testing of
just 10k sythetic users. It needed to support 100k.

I built up a single OpenLDAP box, just using the standard mdb backend and a
ton of RAM. Easily crushed the load test. Sadly could't be implemented for
political reasons.

Screw Oracle, especially if you care about performance.

~~~
user5994461
I don't know about the Oracle identity suite but I'd like to say that OpenLDAP
is a ridiculous joke. (Just like the MySQL/PostgreSQL vs Oracle DB debate at
times).

The only scalable LDAP server is the one from Sun Microsystem (openDS). It was
killed when Oracle acquired Sun because they already had identity products.
Then the sun guys quit to continue the products line under their own company,
ForgeRock. [https://forgerock.org/opendj/](https://forgerock.org/opendj/)

I've done load testing and this ldap is taking millions of accounts, no
problem.

The best products are rarely free once you get out of the average web dev
context. Funny thing, this one is both paid and open source.

~~~
jpgvm
OpenLDAP can also handle millions of accounts, is open-source, supports
awesome replication and availability topologies and doesn't require any
consultants or otherwise bullshit dependencies/support contracts.

I'm sorry but there isn't a commercial product that can compete with OpenLDAP
and there may never be because it is just that good if you know how to use it.
(yes, the learning curve is high, that is the only criticism I really have of
OpenLDAP).

~~~
user5994461
Here's a little known fact for you: OpenLDAP is a commercial software made by
a company called symas. [https://symas.com/](https://symas.com/)

The open-source edition is only a facade with highly stripped features.

If you want any decent replication, HA, performances or bugfix. You have to
pay for their OpenLDAP gold edition, which last I checked was $100k for a site
license.

~~~
jpgvm
Depends on your definition of highly stripped, decent replication, performance
or bugfixes.

If you don't pay Symas money then no, you won't get support, or bugfixes
developed for you.

However I doubt there is a large performance difference, it's already very
efficient so it would be in the single percentage points.

As for replication you can do almost anything with the open-source version by
combining syncrepl/delta-syncrepl into the topology you want, hell you can do
N-way multi-master if you wanted.

I'm not sure what you have against using open-source OpenLDAP, maybe you
should try it first?

------
jpalomaki
Years ago Oracle would have been in a quite nice position to put up
interesting cloud offering. Something like Java platform as a service, bundled
with the message queues, database etc. Not targeted just to enterprises, but
similar to AWS and Azure in the sense that you can get started small. They had
quite much interesting related technology from Sun and BEA (and of course from
themselves).

And maybe this would still make sense. Java is still relevant. JavaEE provides
the packaging for the applications. Maybe the basis for a nice serverless
offering (you have for example the message driven beans).

~~~
geodel
5 years back it would be very interesting proposition. But today a lot of
modern cloud infrastructure is getting written in Go. IBM/SAP/Apple betting on
Swift for server side applications. So in past it could have been Swift app +
Java backend now it is more likely Swift app + Swift backend.

I also think with Rust taken up by programing enthusiasts which otherwise
would have prefered Scala on JVM is also going to put pressure on Java/JVM.

~~~
edblarney
"But today a lot of modern cloud infrastructure is getting written in Go"

I don't think so. I our circles, we think 'Go' is a thing, but in most of the
world, it's not.

Rust, Go, these are all popular with new companies.

Enterprises are so often .Net/Java + Oracle etc..

It's a big world of hospitals, large companies, government agencies etc..

~~~
geodel
Yes, enterprise apps are not yet there. But lot of infra-like software would
have been written in Java if Go were not there. There is growing awareness of
Go at big enterprises such as where I work.

It will start with sucking oxygen for new projects which would be by default
in Java.

------
brad0
Is support the only reason people choose Oracle databases over something free
like MySQL or Postgres?

~~~
pallopiipaeri
MySQL and Postgres have multi-master replication. They do NOT have distributed
transactions (with the distributed locking system etc). For some customers it
is important. Others have delusions that they need it.

Oracle has other products as well. I am generally aware of couple used widely.

Their ESB is one of the heavy players, and some sausage stands always need the
most advanced ones. The funny thing is that with Oracle's ESB you end up
developing the missing glue features using Java, and the ESB product's
framework. The environment is extremely non-productive.

Oracle's JavaEE application server is kind of nice, if you wanted WebSphere
with training wheels. While feature wise it does have similar set, the
maintainability and management features are just plain inferior, and most
options are bolted down, and not available unless you go to lower levels...

Oh, they offer ERP suite(s) as well. Those are for people that are prone to
joining religious cults. They are not technology, and software products
really. They are something sold to general and logistic managers with a story
that you can actually force your company to use their "best practices" sets
for everything, and abandon all software architecture in favor of warm and
nice spaghetti. :)

~~~
rosser
Postgres has two-phase commit, which can be used at the application level to
implement distributed transactions.

It does not have multi-master replication natively, though there are companion
projects that enable it.

~~~
pallopiipaeri
Unfortunately those are blocker level issues for most enterprisey IT
managements.

Adding extra implementation to application, to do the database's work against
the usual division of labor, no thanks. And bringing some shady 3rd party
support package on top of the database is a second really big no.

For businesses only what you get out of the box counts. Otherwise you can
always state that "the platform has C++ compiler, stfu and code". That doesn't
really work. The companies are into buying complete products for a reason:
they don't want to implement unnecessarily things they really should just get
out of the box.

TBH I love postgres, but before they offer proper multi-master transactions
out of the box most companies just still go for Oracle. That's similar as to
why people buy Photoshop. GIMP fell some 10 years after in usability and
features when they did not prioritize implementing the dynamic layer effect
system. Instead of that they chose to masturbate with GEGL or something like
that for 10 years, without providing the actual end user requested features.
The situation still stands there, before they implement what Photoshop 4 or so
did they got no chance of being valid alternative...

~~~
CaliforniaKarl
Vouching parent comment. The last time I looked at Postgres, I was really
happy to see that BDR was now doable without a patched Postgres. But, I
believe transactions affecting multiple tables didn't fully work yet.

Postgres is my preference over MySQL/MariaDB, but I wouldn't have pushed for
it back when I worked in traditional corporate IT: Stability, and having a
third-party to blame, really wins there!

------
cm2187
But hyper threading doesn't really double the performance of the CPU, I
understood it's a marginal improvement. It seems odd to double the cost of the
license if hyper threading is switched on.

~~~
miahi
HT performance grew from generation to generation. In many cases a HT "core"
has 80% of the performance of a "normal" core. A current 2-core+HT i3 CPU is
almost on par with a 4-core i5 (the i3 has faster cores but less L3 cache).

~~~
beagle3
What's "current", and what's your benchmark?

Mine is video encoding using FFMPEG (where I run more program threads than
FFMPEG decides is optimal in order to make sure no cpu thread is idle).

I get at most 15% over hyperthreading off, and often about 5-10% less than
hyperthreading off (For the whole process, beginning to end).

On real cores, it is close to being linear in the number of cores (not quite,
but it is close).

~~~
jmiserez
As I understand HT, in it's most basic form it will try to utilize all
processing units by executing code from a second thread whenever possible.
FFMPG most likely maxes out usage of all arithmetic and floating point units
and limits branching to a minimum, so it would make sense that there are no
real performance gains with HT.

~~~
stuckagain
For any kind of branchy pointer-chasing workload hyperthreading will easily
double the throughput. These workloads spend all of their time waiting for
load and recovering from mispredicted branches. Oracle is the poster child of
this kind of workload.

For decades now we've had to suffer these weird internet arguments about
whether hyperthreading is "real", as if there was a naturally-occuring correct
number of frontends on a CPU. If someone wants to put more instruction
decoders on their CPU there is no rational argument that is "wrong".

------
WhiteSource1
They are really struggling with the cloud. This isn't going to help Oracle at
all.

They might be able to stick around for a while because their legacy system is
everywhere. But....

------
toyg
This is a plain attack on Amazon, which Oracle now sees as a competitor, that
will hit customers in the crossfire. I guess Oracle expects customers will
simply move to Azure, since retooling ops might be easier than rebuilding
solutions on other databases.

It will yet again hurt their image though; they've been hated by geeks for
ages, but they are increasingly unpopular even among executives. How long can
you do business with people who openly despise you?

~~~
coleca
I would guess that Oracle isn't expecting their customers to love from AWS to
Azure. They are expecting they move to Oracle Cloud. I didn't see any mention
of that in the original article but I wouldn't doubt those rules either didn't
apply or could be bypassed by your friendly Oracle sales person if you wanted
to get a taste of the Oracle Cloud.

------
StreamBright
No way, lucky we do not use any Oracle products. This might push some
companies over to some other platforms.

------
racecar789
A huge lock-in for Oracle is packages. Packages make it easy to organize
functions/procedures into groups (one package per group, within the same
schema).

Oracle is the only db that supports packages. Packages make migrating away
very difficult. However...I don't think companies will want to migrate without
package support anyhow...

The alternative to packages are schemas. One schema for every group of
objects. Personally, no thanks. I cannot live without packages.

------
throw2016
Oracle now owns a huge chunk of the enteprise space. They already had a
significant base with their database and ERP and CRM apps. Apart from that the
large multi-billion dollar acqusitions of BEA, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Netsuite
and a near endless multitude of others have left them with tens of millions of
high paying and locked in customers in the enteprise space.

~~~
jay-saint
The acquisition of NetSuite is helping them move into the midmarket. Snapping
up growing companies as they outgrow Quickbooks and hopping they keep growing.

------
benchaney
Could you disable hyperthreading on AWS? If oracle licenses are a significant
portion of you per machine cost, it probably isn't worth it.

------
rbanffy
Just reading this article makes me want to migrate every Oracle workload to
something I don't have to worry about.

------
chenster
"Oracle Fanboy" \- LOL, seriously?

~~~
golfer
I was shocked by this too.. Boggles the mind that this would even exist.

~~~
frugalmail
Think of the morons that have based their career on attaining the latest
certification in their chosen application.

~~~
boulos
Your comment would be just as useful if you did s/morons/people/. You can
highlight that it's awfully risky to pigeonhole yourself into corporate
certifications, but calling people moronic isn't civil.

~~~
chenster
smartass a better one?

------
dzhiurgis
Does it impact RDS layer-thing they offer?

------
unixhero
lol

