
Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies - daamien
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CANNMO++6tPiwBv2OKcy-HhiYmByhL+XSSUH3NDvOs3G1VVg++g@mail.gmail.com
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chris_wot
Oracle is beginning to find they are in trouble. Here's a small example: I'm
hearing from a fairly reliable source that quite a few large Australian banks
are replacing Oracle (my source didn't say with what). They are citing the
enormous cost of the licenses, along with difficulty getting adequate support
without paying a fortune. My contact himself is in upper management of a large
corporation and Oracle screwed him on licensing, forcing him to pay a huge
amount of money from his budget that he badly needed to spend on other
projects. This delayed these projects by about 3 months, and put a bit of
pressure on the area of the business he oversaw. He's also investigating the
best way of quietly getting rid of Oracle as fast as possible. That will take
some time, but he's at the point of rejecting any new solutions that require
Oracle products.

I'm not at all surprised. Medium sized businesses used to use Oracle due to
perceived reliability and features, however there have been a number of things
that are making them reconsider:

* A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don't need.

* difficulty in getting support - Oracle are notorious for not responding in a timely fashion to tickets, and a willingness by the CSO to completely ignore serious security flaws.

I experienced this myself four years ago when my boss put me in charge of a
clear Unicode bug in their OLEDB driver - the bug had been open for 2 years
and by the time I left a year later Oracle had almost wilfully ignored
everything we wrote, even ignoring a program we built in .NET that showed the
problem. Throughout the ticket we dealt with something like 4 support people,
each of whom didn't understand Unicode and who needed a basic backgrounder on
how UTF8 works.

* license costs are ridiculous, and frankly not worth it.

* it can often be hard to find people who can troubleshoot performance issues. Even highly skilled people face a black box when they work on improving query performance as the CBO is largely a black box that can change from version to version. Without a clear explanation of how the CBO actually makes decisions it's often a bit of a crapshoot when tuning queries.

* Oracle DBAs are very expensive, compared to how much you can pay an equivalent skilled DBA who knows Postgres or even SQL Server.

* there are few features most medium sized businesses need that can't be done in Postgres.

~~~
jl6
I work for a major bank and Oracle is on its way out here. Trouble is, when
it's running your general ledger and is tightly coupled to your core banking
operations, migration to another platform can be a decade-long process.

~~~
chris_wot
Yeah, but on the bright side once your excised Oracle and replaced it with
something better Oracle won't be coming back any time soon :-)

~~~
jl6
Unfortunately I didn't say we're moving to something better _cough_ SAP :(

~~~
chris_wot
My sympathies.

------
praptak
Why do companies choose Oracle nowadays? I mean valid technical reasons, not
being clueless or stuck in the abusive relationship of vendor lock-in.

~~~
manyxcxi
Honestly (having been through plenty of meetings where this type of stuff
happens) it's because Oracle has someone out there spreading the word to The
decision makers. The Oracle sales team isn't converting developers, they're in
the ear of the person who signs the check.

Nobody is out there on the Postgres side doing the same, so that decision
maker doesn't even know who they are. Then when someone suggests pgsql for
something, the first question is, "Where do we get support?" Everyone then
looks around the room and starts searching the web for support.

There is no question if and who will support you with Oracle (which is why _I_
will never choose them).

~~~
pbasista
But should not the decision makers be smart enough to see through this? If
they sign contracts, they should do a _proper_ research first.

Just believing a well-known company which presents their product as "the
solution to all your problems" does not seem very clever to me.

~~~
manyxcxi
I'd say it's less 'smart' and more due diligence. I agree that you should know
at least SOME alternative options to things. We're seeing more tech
Managers/Directors/VPs/whatever that used to be engineers or architects and I
think we'll have more people that fairly recently (or still do) had their
hands dirty in project work. The new wave of leaders are much more technical
than the previous wave of leaders. But the problem still remains that once
you've been away from the daily low level work, things move on without you.
There will always be some disconnect. I think the new wave of leadership will
better know that and hopefully respond a little better by having people
propose alternatives to them, personally finding alternatives, etc.

I know that when I don't have the knowledge in a particular area, say payment
processing, and I can only think of a vendor or two off the top of my head, it
becomes someone's assignment to bring me the pros and cons of the major
vendors and maybe a couple of the upstarts- including getting on the phone
with them if necessary. The ultimate decision will be a combination of that
person's recommendation vs. any business problems that may prevent a
relationship (say some certification or SLA forced on us by the client).

There is also the psychology aspect of a well known name. They must be a well
known giant because they are good, provide the best, or provide something the
others can't- right? Now, WE know that mostly Oracle doesn't do these things.
There are a few cases where they have kind of engineered a way to be the only
one who does the thing (then got someone to make it a requirement in their
project). We know they're generally abusive, and awful to work with. A not
very technical decision maker just knows Oracle is a big name. Just like SAP.
I'm not saying it's an excuse, it just is.

------
davidgerard
Let me say again how our workplace conversion from Oracle to Postgres has made
EVERYTHING SO MUCH BETTER. Not just from never having to talk to Oracle ever
again - but the fact that we can give every app its own PG clustered pair
without ever having to think the word "license". _Nothing has to play nice
with anything else._

(We also have some MySQL - from old in-house apps and from third-party things
like Drupal, Magento, WordPress and MediaWiki - and some MongoDB, which we're
pushing to get converted to Postgres because it does key-value comparably fast
and means one less dependency, though that's nothing like as urgent as getting
off Oracle was.)

~~~
chris_wot
Yeah, until MySQL gets a corrupted LSN that points into the future and you
have to dump the table then reimport it... :P

~~~
davidgerard
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Chris is referring to this: [http://rationalwiki.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/mysql-
database-pr...](http://rationalwiki.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/mysql-database-
problems-work-in-progress.html) which I eventually resolved by carefully hand-
exporting the corrupt table to CSV and reimporting it. I think we lost one
revision from 2008. I HATE MYSQL SO MUCH.

(unfortunately, MediaWiki is one of those things where MySQL or preferably
MariaDB is the only realistic option - other DBs are hypothetically supported,
but in practice not well enough unless you want to do the heavy lifting
yourself.)

------
vamur
Postgresql's greatest advantage - no headache from dealing with BS from Oracle
or MS.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
Pay hundreds of thousands in support contracts, get peanuts (and/or worse
advice than the documentation).

~~~
vetinari
Using Oracle product in a non-Oracle VM?

Now you get the privilege to pay licensing for all the cores in your
environment where you can migrate the VM to.

With such a policy, what could possibly go wrong?

------
kafkaesq
Hmm, this part:

 _It 's poorly written in terms of Russian grammar,_

suggests that rather than being a "rogue" effort by an overseas affiliate
(which Oracle will no doubt try to spin it as, once this turd floats to the to
the top of the English-speaking business press, as it hopefully will), it's
more likely that someone directly with Oracle provided a few "talking points"
in English, and these were hastily translated into Russian by someone local
(i.e. using GT or some other tool, and carelessly edited).

------
code_research
Would be very interesting to have an open document listing alternatives from
the PostgreSQL universe to every point in that document (a gitbook maybe?). A
few minutes ago I was thinking that "database firewall" could be a problem,
but then I found [0] immediately.

[0]
[https://github.com/uptimejp/sql_firewall](https://github.com/uptimejp/sql_firewall)

------
revelation
I love that chart on the second to last page. The axis are labeled
"Completeness of vision" and "Ability to execute".

~~~
athrun
This is Gartner's famous "Magic Quadrant".

~~~
chris_wot
Which is largely used for propaganda and often doesn't exactly mean very much.

~~~
scholia
The Magic Quadrant is just the eye-catching bit of what is generally a fairly
substantial (15,000-25,000 word) report.

------
ioltas
I would be curious to see the evolution of the revenue of Oracle in Russia for
2016 Q1, including its Y2Y growth and the direct effects of the introduction
of this law. The sole existence of this letter is proving that revenue took a
serious hit.

------
iamcreasy
This semester I am taking a DBMS course and the instructor works at one of
NASA's NSSDCA center in South Dakota.

He mentioned in that class that, this NSSDCA center is in the process of
moving away from Oracle to PostgreSQL. The transfer process is going on for
over 2 years.

Even the book we are following changed their focus from Oracle to MySQL from
recent edition.

~~~
chris_wot
I'd be asking the lecturer to change yo a different textbook...

~~~
iamcreasy
What's wrong with the current book?

This is what we are reading : Database Systems: Design, Implementation, &
Management 11th Edition

~~~
chris_wot
Anything that uses MySQL as a teaching example is just plain wrong.

~~~
brianwawok
Why? It demos the basic concepts fine. Maybe they can use MariaDB instead?

~~~
chris_wot
It also encourages students to use MySQL. If they were concerned with cost,
they should have just picked Postgres.

------
daamien
direct link to the PDF : [http://www.postgresql.org/message-
id/attachment/43080/Postgr...](http://www.postgresql.org/message-
id/attachment/43080/PostgreSQL_Oracle.pdf)

~~~
metachris
This is the PDF in English (via Google Translate):
[https://www.metachris.com/download/PostgreSQL_Oracle_en.pdf](https://www.metachris.com/download/PostgreSQL_Oracle_en.pdf)

~~~
chris_wot
So their argument is that Postgres is not feature complete with Oracle due to
this new law? Yeah, that's not going to fly. All the register needs to show
are the few things Oracle can do that Postgres can't and then Oracle will
_only_ be allowed to be used in those limited scenarios.

------
je42
Oracle gets desperate ;)

~~~
Sven7
This has been Oracle's (i.e. Larry Ellison's) sales and marketing M.O. since
forever. Read up on why Raymond Lane left the company. And sad part is it
works.

~~~
chris_wot
Only till it doesn't. One day they'll try this tactic and discover that
they've burned so many folks early in their career that a majority will see
through the tactic. Or alternatively decision makers will consult with staff
that advise them directly and THEY will have been burned.

And the third thing that can happen, which happened with a friend of mine, is
that a really bad solution is implemented at a very large ongoing cost, the
executive who made the decision leaves (which is what often happens with
incompetent executives) and their replacement walks in, sees the disaster,
doesn't care about saving his predecessors stupidity and decides to remove the
bad solution, and makes sure that the vendor who caused the headache goes to
the bottom of the pile when it considerating them during tenders for new
business.

You know what they say: it costs less to keep existing business (especially in
a saturated marketplace where you are the market leader) than it costs to drum
up new business.

Believe me, this is a very short to medium term sales solution. When it goes
wrong it's not easy to recover from. When competitors start taking market
share from Oracle they'll find it very hard to recover their market share
without immense upheaval and systemic change throughout their business.
Microsoft learned this the hard way. Oracle's time will come! Can't come soon
enough.

------
postila
Thank you guys for all thoughts here (a lot of interesting ones, as usual on
HN)! I'm going to analyze them and create a compilation.

Meanwhile PostgresPro (extended PostgreSQL version, distributed by Oleg
Bartunov's company "Postgres Professional") officially included to the Russian
Software Registry:
[https://reestr.minsvyaz.ru/reestr/65273/](https://reestr.minsvyaz.ru/reestr/65273/)
[ru]

~~ Nikolay Samokhvalov

------
jgalt212
Are there consultancies that specialize in Oracle -> (Postgress, MySQL, SQL
server, et al) migrations?

I mean, I'm sure there are but, when coupled with a skill set that helps you
counter "license reviews" that could be quite a business.

------
needusername
Fun bit:

PostgreS "ships" a Java 8/JDBC 4.2 driver, Oracle does not.

------
boksiora
boo, they are afraid

------
ivanceras

      First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
      (Gandhi)
    

Hits hard

~~~
xiaq
This.

My first reaction to the news is that it is a clear evidence that PostgreSQL
is now fully on par with Oracle in terms of everything average IT companies
need to be concerned with. If I were Oracle and my product is still ahead of
PostgreSQL at least in some areas, I wouldn't be so upset.

~~~
lucb1e
Yeah I was thinking the same, if it's clearly subpar then there would be no
reason to send the letter in the first place. That's logic managers without
technical knowledge can understand.

