
Oracle laying off hundreds in Santa Clara - prostoalex
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/20/oracle-lays-off-450-employees/
======
jimnotgym
From the comments >This individual case is just the result of terminating
Solaris 12 development. Part of the old Sun software, operating system, picked
up when Oracle bought Sun. Not a big deal.

So so canning the special operating system for your special hardware which is
purpose built for your flagship product in 'not a big deal'?

This week I told the rep from Netsuite that there is no way we are buying
Oracle products, if we can help it, and he seemed actually shocked. How long
before Salesforce comes in house and is ruined too? I would spend a lot of
labour on Postgres to avoid Oracle again.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> I would spend a lot of labour on Postgres to avoid Oracle again.

The best time to start was years ago. The second best time to start is today.

~~~
protomyth
I'd love to, but I guess I'm in the situation a lot of folks are in. One of
our software vendors used Oracle for its backend, so we have the privilege of
having to pay for an Oracle DB, but we also don't get direct support. Sadly,
we haven't hit the point where we cannot replace the damn software.

The other thing that truly ticks me off is the lack of any virtualization
option for the damn thing that doesn't 8x my current cost. These damn fools
actually had the nerve to call me about their HR software. I would rather buy
another iSeries machine, thanks.

Oh well, it goes so well with the PowerBuilder-based database some government
agency foisted on all its grant recipients. At least I don't have to pay a per
CPU fee for that one.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I don't expect everyone to be able to do so. I'm simply saying that if the
opportunity to migrate presents itself in a cost effective manner, do so. If
scoping/requirements comes up, recommend Postgresql over Oracle at the
beginning of the project.

Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

~~~
sdfin
Is there some website or technical article that compares Oracle DB to Postgres
and explains the advantages of Postgres? I know the data required for the
comparison is out there, but if it's already nicely written somewhere I'd find
it handy.

~~~
jimnotgym
I think this is unlikely to be possible, and acknowledging that I don't have
any postgres projects in production, but this may help.

1) except in extreme edge cases it is likely that either would be a
technically capable DB for a large project.

2) Cost is a huge factor. Take your Oracle licensing costs for the life of the
project. The cost of specialised hardware, and the uncertainty of its future.
The cost of hosting is also a part of that. Look at the cost and availability
of DBA's in your area. Now apply a discounted cash flow analysis to that, and
it is not likely to beat 'free'

3) The Oracle ecosystem is looking uncertain. I can imagine the SPARC hardware
you buy now not getting great support, maybe you will have to move platforms?
Conversely it seems probably that you could run Postgres/Linux on any x86 VM's
you want for the next decade or so!

~~~
abraae
The number one reason we stay with Oracle was that once, years ago, we had a
come to Jesus moment when the database shat itself and the backups wre not
working as they should have been. After a terrifying ride, some combination of
Oracle support, a ton of googling and some smart in-house work repaired the
damaged data and got things up and running again, literally saving the
company.

Would postgres have been recoverable in that situation, that one, critical
time? (its fruitless to conjecture whether postgres would have been in that
situation in the first place).

I genuinely don't know. But based on experience I do feel a high level of
confidence that Oracle can get me out of the shit when the chips are really
down.

I'd genuinely love to know if postgres is as reliable as Oracle. Not just in
day to day use, but on that once in a blue moon occasion when you really need
it to be.

~~~
kogepathic
> we had a come to Jesus moment when the database shat itself and the backups
> wre not working as they should have been

So who was responsible for testing that the backups worked?

Sounds like it was equally a process failure (not verifying backups worked) as
a technical one.

> I'd genuinely love to know if postgres is as reliable as Oracle. Not just in
> day to day use, but on that once in a blue moon occasion when you really
> need it to be.

If you follow best practices for postgres, have a streaming replica and
streaming wal archiving (e.g. to barman) then I firmly believe it's basically
bullet proof.

If the master shits itself you have the very latest transaction logs available
on replica and point in time recovery servers.

Postgres also introduced support recently for native multi-master servers.
This has been supported for a while by third party extensions like bucardo,
but thanks to the work of 2nd quadrent there's now a multi-master
implementation provided by postgres itself.

If you want a case study of a large business using postgres, look at Zalando
(EU online clothing retailer) and their work with it.

~~~
chris_wot
That's kind of missing the point a bit. He is really looking for what all IT
managers are looking for at companies of a certain size: someone to pull his
kahones from the fire when and as where needed.

The real answer is: yes, there are people who can give you this level of
support if you use Postgres, at I suspect cheaper rates and likely with a
faster response time.

For the situation to occur that he describes with an Oracle database then a
truly terrifying sequence of catastrophic events must have occurred, because
Oracle is quite recoverable. But then again, so is Postgres. And under normal
circumstances, Oracle support is absolutely dreadful, so I shudder to think
what sort of money they paid Oracle to recover from this event!

~~~
amake
*cojones

~~~
chris_wot
Thank you :-)

------
kev009
I can't help but wonder what would have been different had IBM been successful
in the Sun acquisition. It would have been a strange marriage, and there were
a lot more staffing and product redundancies that would have still hurt
customers and employees. On the other hand, IBM is often aloof but never
callous like Oracle is.

IBM's acquisition of Sequent might be a reasonable starting place to guess.
Sequent customers got a fairly abrupt EoL. There was a lot of drama with
Itanium hype and even the x450/x455, then IBM fleeing that IA64 sinking ship.
And of course Project Monterrey and the SCO lawsuit. But I'm not so sure how
sad the world was to lose Dynix/PTX and instead Linux got RCU and a ton of
general NUMA scalability know how.

Anyway, hindsight being 20/20, most of us should have probably switched to
OpenSolaris back in 2005 and figured out how to wrestle it out of Sun's
control for their own good.

------
joeblau
Meanwhile the Oracle yacht racing team still seems to be going strong[1].

[1] - [http://oracle-team-usa.americascup.com/en/news.html](http://oracle-
team-usa.americascup.com/en/news.html)

~~~
tlrobinson
Isn't that mostly Larry Ellison's personal hobby? (Allegedly a $300 million
hobby...)

Not sure how much (if any) Oracle itself put into it.

~~~
Jdam
I think this is more a private competition between Larry (Oracle) and Hasso
Plattner (SAP)

[http://sapextremesailing.com/](http://sapextremesailing.com/)

~~~
freddyc
Different events, although both are now contested in foiling cats.

The America's Cup, which Oracle currently holds, is the oldest sporting trophy
in the world with a long history of billionaires falling over themselves to
win (Koch, Bertelli, Bertarelli, Fay). The Cup is generally contested every
four years, with the next event happening in Bermuda this year.

The ESS, on the other hand, is a more recent series and is contested every
year. While less prestigious than the AC, the ESS still attracts some big
names and arguably produces better racing but less intrigue.

------
pfarnsworth
Back in the day (2000-2005), Oracle on Solaris was rock solid. There was
basically no better platform or database configuration that was better than
this, including SQL Server/Windows 2000/2003, etc.

It's a shame that Solaris is basically dead, but Linux killed them swiftly by
being "good enough" on commodity hardware, and then Oracle did a coup de grace
with their death-embrace by buying them. It's a shame, because so many great
things were being done by Sun.

~~~
snw
Oracle Solaris might be dying, and Linux sure has a large market share, but
illumos as the open source continuation of OpenSolaris is doing very well.

If you enjoyed ZFS, Zones, DTrace and so on in the past there is a good chance
that you'd like OmniOS, one of the illumos distributions for classic server
environments.

There are more distributions like SmartOS that tkae a more innovative approach
as cloud-hypervisor that is just a slim live system.

Most of the original ZFS Developers are now working on OpenZFS in illumos.
Beeing open source also means collaborations with other OS projects like
FreeBSD (bootloader and more), NetBSD (pkgsrc) is happening.

This is all independent of Oracle.

~~~
otterley
I'm concerned that all the open-source Solaris forks will lose all the
reference documentation (see, e.g,
[http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/solaris-11-1...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/solaris-11-192991.html))
if/when Oracle pulls the plug on Solaris.

Is there a way for this tragedy to be avoided?

~~~
snw
The Oracle docs are not really the reference documentation for the open-source
stuff, since illumos and Oracle Solaris have diverged quite a bit by now. Some
things are implemented in different ways. OpenZFS in illumos has many features
not in the closed oracle zfs.

The real reference docs are the man pages [1]. Depending on the illumos
distribution there are more task-oriented guides for OmniOS [2], OpenIndiana
[3] or the SmartOS Wiki [4]. In-depth information (driver development, MDB,
DTrace) is written down in the "illumos books" [5]. These are not in danger
from oracle.

Sadly a lot of good historical documentation is already gone since oracle
broke all the sun.com links and not even archive.org has those. :(

[1] [https://illumos.org/man/](https://illumos.org/man/)

[2]
[https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/GeneralAdministration](https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/GeneralAdministration)

[3] [http://docs.openindiana.org/handbook/getting-
started/](http://docs.openindiana.org/handbook/getting-started/)

[4]
[https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Users+Guide](https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Users+Guide)

[5] [http://illumos.org/books/](http://illumos.org/books/)

------
ariwilson
This is why Facebook has Sun's logo on the back of its sign and Google
remembers it is based on SGI's old campus. Hubris destroys companies.

~~~
jclulow
Is there evidence that this was a conscious decision on the part of Facebook?

~~~
andyjohnson0
[http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-
back-o...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back-of-
facebooks-sign-2014-12)

I'm pretty sure that Facebook could have afforded a new sign if they'd wanted
to.

------
rayban
My group (libraries team) got the axe two weeks ago. ~50 people affected. We
had a good run but honestly I'm looking forward to finding a better gig.

~~~
kev009
What does libraries team entail? I run a FreeBSD kernel team, and am
interested in speaking with any Solaris kernel people you may know to fill
some additional roles.

------
Auzy
They also bought Dyn.com too. Not sure if that's new news, or just nobody
reported it.

No idea why Oracle hasn't been split apart

~~~
detaro
They bought Dyn 2 months ago or so, and at least on HN there were reports &
discussions about it.

~~~
jimnotgym
It was soon after Dyn took a beating by Mirai wasn't it? Maybe they chose not
to make a big noise because of that?

------
Quequau
I find this whole thing, as in Oracle itself I guess, hard to understand.

In their presentations at Hot Chips for the past couple of years they've
repeatedly highlighted hardware features which seemed to be only accessible
using next gen Oracle software running on an upcoming version of Oracle's
proprietary Solaris.

So if they're giving up on Solaris 12 development how are their customers
going to fully leverage this new hardware they're buying from Oracle? If
they're unable to use it, why buy/lease hardware from Oracle at significant
premium when you can just use commodity x86 compute... and if you're just
using commodity x86 compute why step up for the licensing costs of Oracle
software if there is _anything_ else on earth which might suffice?

------
chambo622
Does anyone track the frequency and size of layoffs from tech companies? It
certainly feels that there has been a notable uptick in layoff news over the
past 6-12 months.

~~~
dajohnson89
Perhaps HN needs a monthly "Who's firing?" thread.

~~~
who_is_firing
I have tried to start one from another alias (whoisfiring) but hacker news
shadow banned me after my 2nd submission so I created this one. Unfortunately
the latest thread didn't have many comments.

------
sengork
So going forward for corporate users it's going to be either Linux or AIX
considering the way HP-UX, Irix and now Solaris is slowly seemingly heading
to.

What I'd really like to see is harnessing of the knowledge, principles and
methods of solid system management and stability that have been built and
field tested on Unix platforms over the decades. This would benefit whichever
platforms remain (and are created/update) going forwards.

------
HillaryBriss
If it's any consolation, given the current climate, at least we can be
confident that Oracle won't move those jobs to a database factory in Mexico.

~~~
EduardoBautista
Oracle already employs IT workers in Mexico.

------
rch
Why didn't Google buy Sun?

~~~
kev009
From a sustaining Sun's business perspective, it would have been a very poor
fit. Sun had hardware product development as a principle effort, a variety of
support channels and organizations for hardware and software, professional
services, marketing, technical and executive sales etc. Basically many things
Google is anemic at. In a way, Google kind of hacked the requirements expected
of a business and it sort of works for many of the products they offer, but
you can see where they totally flop with the Motorola acquisition and other
ventures like Google Fiber. This stuff is hard, and it's really hard to find
people that really care and have the ability to execute instead of simply
being "qualified"

From a talent and technology acquisition perspective, it would have been
absolutely sage. Sun hardware folks could have shifted away from general
purpose CPUs to switching and packet processing. OpenSolaris was a tour de
force, especially with a legitimate hindsight comparison to where Linux was at
the time. If they could have cherry-picked parts of Sun and shed the
sustaining business around storage, commercial Solaris, SPARC etc that would
have been ideal.

