

Oracle shuts down PostgreSQL test servers - murrayb
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/221051,oracle-shuts-down-open-source-test-servers.aspx

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lsc
Man, Oracle works /hard/ to maintain their bad reputation. I mean, they do
some good work, look at BTRFS, but it looks like their general public
relations to nerds is really, really bad.

To some extent, you have to make a choice to focus your marketing on managers
or to focus your marketing on Engineers... but even so, it sometimes seems
that oracle goes out of it's way to piss off the Engineers.

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guelo
I'm scared of Oracle. Having built my current career around Java I'm actually
glad Google has forked Java with the Android project.

~~~
nitrogen
I feel your pain. I've decided that after my current big Java project, I'm
going to move into HTML5+CSS3/Ruby web apps. I've seen what people are doing
with JS these days, and I wonder why I'm still writing my UI in C++/Qt and
Java. I find Sunoracle's lackadaisical treatment of Java 7 and JavaFX
unacceptable.

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jacquesm
Don't blame on malice what you can most likely comfortably blame on
incompetence or miscommunication.

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bioinformatics
I have access to Solaris on SPARC-based machines, would be glad to help.

~~~
bioinformatics
Found the <http://pgfoundry.org/> site and will add the system to it.

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moe
Oracle scared of PostgreSQL? Good times.

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tomjen3
Yep. Oracle is scared of pretty much any other database (properly not sqlite,
but otherwise).

They are so scared that they prevent anyone with an Oracle license from
publishing a benchmark of it. Which can only mean that they suck at everything
except playing golf.

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viraptor
To be honest it makes _some_ sense in their case. Just look at the amount of
blog posts that compare how fast databases are by running an insert of 1M
rows, then a couple of selects and declaring a "winner" based on that... I'm
sure Oracle wouldn't like any "tests" like that published.

~~~
ahi
I don't think that is really their concern. Even if Oracle comes out on top in
benchmarks they lose. "We're spending how much to get a x% performance
increase?" Once numbers are attached a rational decision can be made come
buying decision time. Oracle wants/needs that decision to be based on
qualitative arguments, "our space unicorn is better than they're blue
elephant."

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adolfoabegg
They're trying to avoid what Paul Graham said:

"It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest,
easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the
crosshairs of whoever does."

<http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html>

~~~
adolfoabegg
from the same post:

"In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an
inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So
the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more
powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end"
products against the ceiling."

~~~
silvestrov
I think Apple is the exception. They ate the other mp3 players and they ate
the other mobile companies' profits. So it seems like if the high end is cheap
enough, it can eat downwards.

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compay
I'm a big fan of Postgres and have a hard time overcoming my visceral dislike
for Oracle. But I suppose this makes perfect sense for them. Businesses
protect themselves from real and potential threats. If I were an Oracle
shareholder, this is probably what I would want and expect them to do.

~~~
ahi
Except it does nothing to protect Oracle. The cost is so inconsequential
somebody is going to provide hosting. All they achieved was a couple days
(hours?) of hassle for the pgsql people and pissing off some devs. Zero
competitive advantage was achieved while confirming to developers they can't
be trusted. If it was an accident, Oracle employs humans. If this was
purposeful, Oracle employs idiots.

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ars
Debian could probably provide a build server if they ask.

The have them anyway, and they build PostgreSQL anyway when it's uploaded to
debian (although obviously that's not every commit).

But with ccache a rebuild is not very expensive.

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rnicholson
I think it was more about Solaris support than just the mere fact of having
another build server.

 _Sun Microsystems - and for a short time its new owner Oracle - had provided
three member servers to ensure PostgreSQL was stable on the Solaris operating
system._

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cageface
With the end of OpenSolaris I think it would be wise for the open-source
community to write off Solaris support. Time spent supporting Solaris is time
better spent making Linux a better server OS and making sure that things like
Postgres work as efficiently and reliably as possible on Linux.

~~~
gleb_sitnikov
Linux will never get all enterprise features of Solaris. That OS, broken into
a myriad of distributions, driven by lammers who think they are making smth
great while they're not - is it gonna become your OS of choice for a mission
critical system? Where did you see "the end of OpenSolaris"? Is all that FUD
made by Linux users who I so happy to blame the competitor? See
[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-
storage/opensolaris...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-
storage/opensolaris/overview/index.html)

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Confusion
Could it be that this was an accident? I can imagine someone at Oracle going
"Sun guys, what do these servers do?". The Sun guys, some of whom may have
already left Oracle, some of whom may have shifted departments recently, don't
know and say: "they don't seem to be used for anything, according to the
administration. There's some weird postgres stuff going on there, but it
doesn't seem to do anything useful". "Well OK", the Oracle guy says, "then we
can use those machines elsewhere".

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rnicholson
I wonder if this move has more to do with killing off Solaris than with Oracle
directly trying to screw PostgreSQL.

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bnoordhuis
I don't think so. It's not uncommon to run Oracle on Solaris + SUN hardware.
Not a large market but one with high profit margins. Why would Oracle want to
kill a cash cow?

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ams6110
For years, Solaris was the "original" platform upon which Oracle was
developed. Everything else was a port. Solaris got the patches first, etc.

Several Oracls DBAs I know used to say "if you want to run Oracle you might as
well run it on Solaris"

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astine
That is true, but Oracle recently has been pushing Linux, not Solaris. The
Exadata, which is Oracle's first attempt to to build a database appliance on
Sun hardware uses Linux, not Solaris, for example.

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vegai
So PostgreSQL won't work on Solaris soon. Nothing works in it anyway, so will
anyone even notice?

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astine
I will. I run PostgreSQL on Solaris at the day job and it runs very well.
(Most things run fine on Solaris so long as you avoid X.) We use a lot of Sun
hardware where I contract, and it will be very annoying if I end up having to
port my software to MySQL to make Oracle happy.

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julius_geezer
It sounds pretty bush-league.

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elptacek
Boo.

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bdwalter
There seems to be no end of the enterprise deuche-baggery that is Oracle.

