

A Story of O(racle) - bjonathan
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/08/31/A-Story-of-O

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j_baker
Much as I dislike this as a developer, this is a smart business strategy for
Oracle. Let's face it: at the companies that use Oracle, the developers aren't
the one making the call as to what database to use. That's the call of much
higher-ups.

About the only solution I can suggest is to avoid working for such companies,
but I'm be preaching to the choir to say that.

~~~
cageface
Maybe. Maybe not. I've had _nothing_ but bad experiences with Oracle in
several jobs now and will emphatically advise against it at every opportunity.
Postgres may not be a drop-in replacement for every Oracle use case but for
those that are I'll recommend it first any day of the week. Oracle in a job
description is a big red flag for me.

~~~
gaius
Technically or culturally?

Because a properly installed and maintained Oracle is pretty reliable and
straightforward to use. If you even _can_ run your application on Postgres
then you wasted your money buying Oracle; you aren't using it for what it's
for[1].

[1] I am aware that convincing people that they might need to in future is key
to Oracle's business model, but that's beside the point.

~~~
cageface
Technically. In two different jobs now I've seen a small army of consultants
unable to keep an Oracle cluster running as reliably as a single Postgres
instance, despite jaw-dropping license fees. It's also pretty painful to use,
from simple command-line interactions to dumping & restoring data to
interfacing with any code that isn't "enterprise". Blob performance was also
astonishingly bad.

I guess you're stuck with it if you need to run Oracle financials or
Peoplesoft or something like that but one of my professional goals is to never
work for another company big or dumb enough to use either.

~~~
gaius
That says more about consultants than it does about Oracle ;-)

Oracle (the database) in the hands of anyone basically competent is easily
capable of 5-9s reliability. Not that I'm saying Postgres isn't mind. I'm just
saying, use the right tool for the job (and hire the right people).

I find DataPump very easy to use, and very fast, it's I/O bound even on
serious storage arrays. YMMV. SQL*Plus is definitely showing its age I agree.

------
protomyth
> The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business
> relationship ... The concerns of developers are just not material at the
> level of that conversation

Sadly, this is why Oracle could buy Sun and not the other way around.

~~~
bad_user
Having an engineering culture and fostering developer mindshare ... hasn't
been a bad business choice for companies like Google or Apple or Microsoft (at
least in their early days).

And last time I checked, all 3 companies mentioned are bigger in market cap
then Oracle.

What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of
Sun to a company who's culture is so different?

~~~
TY
To the question of why it was sold to a company with such a vastly different
culture.

Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracle
has. The only metric that mattered was how much money Oracle was willing to
pay for Sun vs another bidder.

Using any other criteria would just launch a nasty shareholder lawsuit against
Sun's soon to be departed management...

~~~
maukdaddy
^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go _pubic_ with an IPO, the
shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are _elected_ on behalf of those
shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value.
If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his
fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.

~~~
jrockway
How did Oracle maximize _their_ value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java,
and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for
Sun quit.

So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?

~~~
gvb
Recent history suggests for Sun's patents, not their software.

Oracle has claimed they bought Sun for their hardware (e.g. so they could do
vertical integration selling like IBM), but that remains to be seen if it is
true or not.

~~~
ora600
Oracle used Sun's hardware to build the Exadata - which they very aggressively
sell as a data warehouse solution. Competing with Netezza, Teradata, Greenplum
and the likes.

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TrevorBramble
Some might miss the significance of the post title:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O>

~~~
abeppu
Is there an allusion or metaphor implicit here that I'm not getting?

~~~
Jun8
On a tangential note, if you think _The Story of O_ is about an abusive
relationship, I'd say you haven't read the book or watched the movie: (i) O
_willingly_ enters the relationship (ordeal may be a better word here) and
(ii) it's not your usual S&M or _Belle de Jour_ story either, because she also
gains power over her lover, e.g. see the last scene in the movie.

So, the analogy may be more apt than the crude master-slave relationship that
people have commented here: many companies willingly choose Oracle, knowing
full well its tactics and that they will be locked in.

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ora600
Maybe I don't understand the concept of "developer mindshare" well enough but
it seems to me that Oracle does engage with the user community and not just
the business community.

They do this through user conferences such as Collaborate and ODTUG (which is
developer specific) - those conferences are much more technical in nature than
the marketing oriented OpenWorld.

Oracle also have the OTN and its ACE program for engaging with the technology
people, including forums, beta programs, code sharing site, etc.

And of course, Oracle supports the local user groups which are also technology
oriented - many of those user groups are highly critical of many Oracle
decisions (and you should have heard the noise when Oracle Support site
switched to flash) - but Oracle still supports them because they know that an
active user community is essential.

~~~
j_baker
Well of course. I don't doubt that Oracle is aware of their developers'
existence and gives them _some_ form of support. But how much of Oracle's time
and money goes to developer support compared to companies like Microsoft? Much
as I dislike Microsoft, I have to give them credit for engaging their
developer community.

~~~
ora600
I'm not sure how to answer that. How do you know how much of Microsoft's time
and money goes to developer support? How do you know that Oracle does any
less? I don't have any real hard numbers.

Microsoft MSDN for developer support and Oracle has OTN. Both companies have
developer oriented conferences in addition to business conferences. Both
companies employ evangalists that work with startups to help them adopt their
technologies. Where do you see the difference?

------
10ren
Sun was a phenomenally successful business - but not at selling software.
Software was their way to sell hardware.

A few years back, I wanted to buy stock in a software company, because I was
in the software business, knew something about it, and owning stock would
result in me learning more, which would benefit me doubly. Out of Sun and
Adobe, and choose Sun (still love java); but after I placed the order, I
realized that Sun wasn't a software company. It didn't draw significant
revenue from software. I tried to change the order to Adobe, but it was too
late.

I sold it years later, for half. I don't regret the loss (it's the stockmarket
after all), but I do regret mistaking Sun for a software company.

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julius_geezer
It has been a while (decade?) since I went to OOW. But as I recall I had no
trouble finding technical sessions, if not at a level to engage Tim Bray. Many
were about making your database run faster & better; some about using Oracle's
favored tools of the moment (BC4J, possibly still some client-server stuff).

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pkaler
How is this a bad thing? It's all about building the best applications for
your customers.

In the enterprise space the customer is other businesses. Apple does
essentially the same thing in the consumer space. The user is more important
than the developer.

This is a good thing.

Imagine if airlines treated their relationship with the flier as the most
important. Imagine if politicians treated their relationship with constituents
as most important.

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rmorrison
If you have experience with your startup partnering (or trying to partner)
with Oracle, could you please contact me? Particularly, if Oracle added your
product to their price lists (or if you were trying to make this happen).

Thank you very much.

