
Oracle kills third-party JD Edwards reference website - shrikant
http://jderef.com/
======
parasubvert
Looks to me like an overzealous lawyer at Oracle. There are plenty of 3rd
party reference sites for the Oracle database that don't get shut down, why
target a JDE reference?

Unless they really-really think their docs are superior? (Oracle's docs for
Middleware or Database usually are world-class, though I am not familiar if
this is true for JDE).

------
Shivetya
Oracle wants to push Peoplesoft. I think the bought JDE mostly to have a ready
source of new customers. There are two product lines in JDE, World and
OneWorld. World is based on minis (IBM i) and OneWorld is more PC/Server
oriented (good for smaller customers). Peoplesoft is mostly AIX/Oracle and
very people intensive and better yet, consultant friendly and a great revenue
stream.

So, yeah, shutting down a site which promotes software not a the top of their
list makes sense.

~~~
turnip1979
Tangential question: how do I learn about ERP software? I went to a strong CS
school but this wasn't covered. I don't think I even know anyone who knows
this stuff.

\- regular HN reader.

~~~
arethuza
It's hardly surprising that ERP systems aren't covered in a CS course - they
are primarily about business processes and concepts.

Having said that, ERPs systems are arguably mainly accounting systems with a
lot (and I really do mean a _lot_ ) of additional functionality bolted on, so
learning the basics of accounting wouldn't do any harm.

I count at least 4 different kinds of organizations that work with ERPs:

\- The vendors who write them (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and loads of others)

\- Vendors who write packages that integrate with ERP systems (again loads of
these - e. for reporting/data warehousing, document management, bar-code
handling)

\- People who work for professional services companies that help customer
implement ERP systems - often implementing custom code in the platform for the
ERP system (often in programming languages and environments that are specific
to that ERP product!)

\- Customer organizations

For a developer, I would aim for one of the first two although the
professional services side of things can be pretty lucrative.

~~~
chris_wot
And best of luck getting a demo system to try to learn on if you aren't a part
of a big company. SAP has a few demo systems, but you can't put it on your own
computer to understand.

~~~
turnip1979
Is it a licensing issue or that they need a whole bunch of machines to install
various components?

~~~
arethuza
Microsoft can give you a VM with a working instance of Dynamics AX 2012 and
the underlying SQL 2012 database - it's quite big and needs a fair bit of RAM
(I needed 48GB) but it does work pretty well.

Having said that, I think SAP is rather more complex than AX.

------
blueskin_
ORACLE: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

~~~
brudgers
Clever.

Since it is highly unlikely that Larry Ellison was in any way involved in
these decisions within Oracle, however, it adds nothing to our understanding
or interpretation of these events. Instead of broadening the context it
replaces it with raw _ad hominem_.

~~~
eloisant
Even if he's not involved in this particular decision, he certainly sets the
tone with which Oracle treats with third party (users, developers,
competitors, etc...)

~~~
brudgers
By that logic, he also is responsible for making software that people want and
for those people wanting it because using it is profitable. Oracle is hardly
the only company in Silicon Valley, much less the world, known for ruthlessly
pursuing intellectual property claims [it's hardly the only company in the
valley with a reputation for requiring developers to dance to its tune,
either].

It's not that I am greatly concerned that Larry Ellison's feelings will be
hurt. What I care about is that the post is a template for the sort of
comments which debase HN's discussions. It's mean for the sake of internet
points, and nobody is better informed or inspired to deeper insight for having
read it.

The meanness and shallowness of such posts only invites more meanness and
shallowness. There are lots of other places on the internet where that
provides the majority of entertainment value. It's not why people come to HN.

~~~
pessimizer
>Oracle is hardly the only company in Silicon Valley, much less the world,
known for ruthlessly pursuing intellectual property claims [it's hardly the
only company in the valley with a reputation for requiring developers to dance
to its tune, either].

Does a company have to be the only exemplar of a bad behavior for it to be
pointed out? That's a very hard standard to meet that would suppress any
discussion of corporate decisions.

~~~
brudgers
The fact that the original comment shies from a hard standard to meet for the
sake emotional appeal, is exactly my point.

------
jrockway
Looks like Oracle is on track to displace Microsoft as the most-hated-by-
programmers company ever.

~~~
josefresco
Do programmers hate Microsoft? I always thought/perceived that MS treated
their developer community well.

~~~
mel919
MS-hating opinions come from the old times of IE6 and practices like FUD, EEE.
A lot has changed since then but this hate still shows up sometimes.

There's an interesting article about this by Scott Hanselman titled "Microsoft
Killed My Pappy":
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx)

~~~
the_ancient
There are 2 types of programmers... Programmer that 100% embrace MS using the
.NET Stack, Visual Studio, and outlaying the Tens of Thousands of Dollars need
to support that development model

And programmers that want to use Open Source/Open Standards... The Open
Source/open Standards programmers hate MS because they MS views Open Source
has a threat and the enemy (although they are starting to be less hostile over
the last couple years)

~~~
jimmaswell
Sarcasm or something right

------
DiabloD3
This is extremely bad PR for Oracle. A company should strive to help their
customers.

~~~
binarymax
Because this is Oracle we are talking about, I am not sure if you are being
sarcastic. But just in case you are not, my experience with Oracle is quite
the opposite of what you describe. Oracle is sold on the golf course, and they
exist purely for profit. Most Oracle consultants I know (quite a few) who
actually develop software using the tools, gladly admit they work with Oracle
because they can charge high fees. In fact, if I asked them their opinion on
this specific incident they might actually approve - given the end result is
that their knowledge is safe from newcomers.

All this is anecdotal of course - but this is a good talk that gives a pretty
nice perspective on the whole thing:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=player_de...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=player_detailpage#t=2136s)

~~~
justthisonce12
I know it's a pretty popular view to skewer Oracle, considering how much money
they make from licensing and how little they seem to do.

From the other side, I work at a medium-sized consultancy that handles Oracle
databases as well as other products. I work with open source, big data
technologies (Hadoop, Mongo, Cassandra), and I talk to some of our top Oracle
guys sometimes. Oracle does everything, and it does it damn-near automatically
- look at the concepts guide
([http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e40540.pdf](http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e40540.pdf))
if you want to see how many types of JOIN an Oracle DB can choose from.
Exadata has more, I think, and half the performance stuff isn't even
documented, it's just buried in query plans. I'll tell an Oracle guy, "hey, we
just got hash-bucket joins", or skip scans, or some other enhancement, and
it's like the OSS competition is still in the 90s compared to what Oracle can
do.

You can complain that Oracle charges a lot of money, but in a lot of cases
it's NIH syndrone. Drop in Postgres instead, then spend 6 months tuning it, or
spend the difference buying extra hardware to scale out. Roll your own ERP,
and forever have a small dev team of 4 guys who cost you half a million
dollars to support it, because you didn't want to buy off-the-shelf, because
your pride as a developer stops you from learning someone else's tool.

~~~
kokey
I spent many years bashing Oracle. Sometimes it's for the pain of the
installer being different to deploying open source software, other times it's
for the bill the company had to pay to Oracle. Then I actually started working
with the database product, and this was to use Oracle to be a warehouse for
MongoDB data. The experience has made me fairly positive of the Oracle
product, fairly keen to avoid MongoDB in general, and has also spoiled my
experience of MySQL and Postgres since because of features I've been spoilt
with.

~~~
chris_wot
I can understand MongoDB and MySQL - but what features were missing from
Postgres?

~~~
hibikir
For me, it's mostly performance features: Last time I checked, Postgres' query
planning was based only on the rather configurable, yet completely static
stats tables and a few config parameters, and it didn't care very much about
its experience running queries. So if for some reason I can't add quite enough
stats gathering, and I know a often used query is still slow, my only choice
to fix it is to do some really terrifying things to the code so that the join
order is dictated by the query.

In Oracle, not only is the DB going to actually look at the query's real
performance by itself, but i can just tell it to change the way it runs at
runtime, if all else fails.

There's also data warehousing tricks that, AFAIK, Postgres does not support.
In Oracle, if I have a star pattern, I can make the queries run without
actually touching the fact table, only querying indices.

That said, exadata is voodoo, compared to how much more predictable Postgres'
behavior is. But there really is a case for it if you really are building the
DB equivalent of the Titanic.

~~~
joevandyk
Postgresql supports index-only scans now, since 9.2.

------
anton_gogolev
For those uninitiated, what is JD Edwards exactly so that jderef.com was so
valuable?

~~~
darbelo
From their site:

 _Oracle 's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is an integrated applications suite of
comprehensive enterprise resource planning software that combines business
value, standards-based technology, and deep industry experience into a
business solution with a low total cost of ownership._

Essentially, an ERP and set of buzzword-bingo cards in the same box.

~~~
anton_gogolev
Yeah, this is the reason I asked in the first place. I could not, for the life
of me, decipher this 100% buzzword-compliant description.

~~~
anigbrowl
_an integrated applications suite_ = bunch of software interfaces for...

 _of comprehensive enterprise resource planning software_ = your business
purchasing and maintenance problems

 _that combines business value_ = giving you the most bang for your buck,

 _standards-based technology_ = _not sure about this one..._ can be tweaked by
your IT department _OR_ helps you select products/services that meet
regulatory standards so that you won't get sued for cutting corners

 _deep industry experience_ = nobody got fired for picking something everyone
uses

 _into a business solution_ = we will unpack and assemble it for you, but you
should really buy the Gold Support Package or budget a lot more for your IT
department, because it isn't compatible with anything else

 _with a low total cost of ownership_ = we make most of our money on the Gold
Support Package, but will let you fool yourself into thinking that you won't
need it.

------
drivingmenuts
I get annoyed when people let bad actors off the hood by obscuring their names
with asterisks. We know who the overall "bad guy" is in this scenario, but
right up until the whole asterisk thing, we had a person whom we could point
to and request or demand an explanation from.

Then, it would be on them to pass the buck, call the police, whatever.

------
bakhy
well, OK. I guess I should cease and desist from complimenting the Oracle DB.
it is a great product, though it did always seem that they deliberately
obfuscate documentation and make friendly tools and resources unavailable just
to feed their army of dependent consultants.

BTW, I suppose Postgres is a perfectly adequate replacement?

~~~
dagw
_BTW, I suppose Postgres is a perfectly adequate replacement?_

If you're starting from zero, don't have any too obscure or extreme
requirements and don't have to integrate with third party tools that don't
support Postgres, then absolutely.

However if you already have a large Oracle based codebase and/or have to talk
to third party apps that don't support Postgres then your migration costs can
quickly swamp your license costs.

------
Sarkie
Well this is going to make integrating with JDE even harder than it is now.

Good work Oracle.

~~~
r00fus
Oracle's M.O. is to pushing their newer product lines and preventing customers
from keeping their investments (i.e., Fusion and surprisingly, still
Peoplesoft).

While this is a business-as-usual dick move, it's also completely expected -
see their legal actions against the TomorrowNow[1] organization purchased by
SAP, and their now-infamous legal attacks against Google for independently
implementing a JVM byte code interpreter.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TomorrowNow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TomorrowNow)

------
peapicker
Highly likely this is another case of the legal dept acting without even
talking to the dev organization internal to Oracle.

------
chazandchaz
There is no reason any site should shut down like this, if it is in fact a
very valuable resource. The owner could/should just move the site to a tor
hidden service. At very least offer up a dump of the data so someone else
could run with it.

------
duongkai
It's the habit of Oracle. It isn't strange

------
googamooga
Make world better place - abandon Oracle!

