

Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals - mitmads
http://www.techcrunch.com/2013/03/24/oracle-is-bleeding-at-the-hands-of-database-rivals

======
therealarmen
Congratulations to Datastax's PR team, they did a wonderful job getting this
reporter to pit them against almighty Oracle. In reality Oracle will die from
a thousand cuts, not just NoSQL but other cheaper (and more reliable)
alternatives such as SQL Server, Postgres, etc.

~~~
ramanujan
Datastax, Datastax. Must have appeared 20 times in the piece. I'm sure they
are a great company but Oracle's real problem is Postgres (and, to a lesser
extent, SQLite and the various MySQL forks). Oracle might want to consider
paying $1B to the Postgres devs to sidetrack development for a few years like
they did with MySQL.

~~~
masklinn
> Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs

There's no single Postgres dev, it's been community-driven from the start and
the various postgres companies mostly provide support. So there's nobody to
pay $1bn to really.

If you look at the contributors page[0], out of 6 "core devs" there are 5
different companies, with EnterpriseDB being "overrepresented" at 2 core from
the company, plus a pair of "major contributors" out of a truckload.

And these people are probably Postgres devs first and foremost. Not Tom Lane
or Josh Berkus, but even if Oracle bought out EnterpriseDB they might just
cash in and work on Postgres from an other company.

[0] <http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/>

------
gizzlon
As much as I dislike Oracle, this article is pure crap. It's only general
speculation with no information or value. Then it starts talking about
Datastax like they are the ones causing these (made up?) problems for Orcale.

------
Vivtek
It couldn't happen to nicer people... After my last upgrade of the Java
virtual machine on my laptop, I found the installer had kindly installed the
Ask toolbar on all my browsers, too. It left me with quite the bad taste in my
mouth.

------
lominming
This is obviously a PR article. Oracle is not just a database company anymore.
Comparing Oracle to a 100 people company does not make much sense either.

------
account_taken
All I can say is DBase IV. If you don't innovate, you will get replaced.
They're trying to do too much. Stick to your bread and butter.

------
pavs
This is nothing but a PR piece by Datastax, from TC.

------
chris_wot
This is what happens with companies who get too slow to innovate. Oracles best
days are behind them, I feel.

~~~
ebiester
I don't even know if it's that Oracle has slowed, but rather their product has
become too complex for them to sustainably innovate. They tried acquiring
other options for the low end, but it hasn't worked. (Berkeley DB is theirs,
for example.)

That said, there will always been a need for the product Oracle provides in
the largest of companies. NoSQL isn't going to be running reports on the
fortune 500 anytime in the next two decades, and neither is Postgres, as much
as I like it.

Death by a thousand cuts will probably still be profitable for decades.

~~~
taligent
I work for an enterprise company (10K employees) and you are spot on.

Oracle will forever dominant HR, Payroll, SCM, Billing, FM etc type systems
where more often than not they have custom software on top of it that has been
built exclusively for Oracle. There is simply no good reason to switch. If
anything the threat to Oracle will come from hosted apps e.g. Salesforce.

But what I've been seeing in our company is MongoDB dominating front end web
apps and Datastax/Cassandra for more of the big data, analytics type
workloads.

Oracle should be far more concerned with Amazon Web Services.

~~~
benbataille
I think your analysis is spot on.

Big companies don't want to house large IT infrastructure anymore. It seems
too costly in the long run and benefits are difficult to explain to the board.

Consequently, you already see companies moving what was before considered core
infrastructure to the cloud and the trend is probably going to increase.

Deploying a VM on EC2 or Azure is easy, quick and cheap enough considering you
don't have to house as many talents as before in the IT department. As
companies move to cloud based services, they don't deal with databases
anymore, the people providing the solution (we don't even talk about software
anymore, that's the current level of abstraction) does. Problem is amongst the
cloud based service providers, few are Oracle shop.

That's the reason Oracle is now trying to position itself in the cloud through
acquisitions (like Nebula today). Unfortunately, they are a bit late to the
game.

------
nodata
Oracle isn't a database company anymore.

~~~
wereHamster
A law firm perhaps?

~~~
arethuza
Applications and services.

~~~
alexkus
Along with their own database and operating system a la IBM.

It's a good model to be spread over multiple segments:
hardware/software/services. Bad quarters in one segment are usually covered by
good quarters in another.

------
taligent
Actually I suspect the reason Datastax is growing is less because of Cassandra
but more because they are one of the only cohesive enterprise class database,
analytics and search platforms around. Having Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr in a
tightly coupled, well supported package is pretty compelling.

~~~
3pt14159
See an article about that would actually be compelling, instead of inspiring
nerd rage when citing Datastax (founded in 2010) for the coming downfall of
Oracle.

------
OGinparadise
Unless I made a mistake, Datastax was mentioned 11 times in an article about
the "bleeding" of Oracle. Now Oracle has a gazillion other competitors so I am
wondering.

Considering how ethical Techcruch is...let's not say it.

