
Ask HN: Any startups using oracle? - Something1234
My professor for the database class says that oracle is the king of databases. It&#x27;s loved by big companies, but I can&#x27;t believe any startups out there are using it.
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CyberFonic
In the enterprise space DB2 and Oracle are the two big players. DB2 on IBM
hardware. Oracle made its mark on enterprise *nix hardware, e.g. Sun, HP and
even IBM - AIX systems. Recently MS SQL Server (which is derived from Sybase)
on Windows servers.

In big corporations you don't get fired for buying Oracle. BTW Oracle bought
Sun Microsystems because it was the most widely used hardware platform for
Oracle. On that basis Oracle could be considered the king of RDBMS. But it is
nothing special technically and it is very expensive to purchase and the
support contracts are eye watering. Larry Ellison can afford to lavishly play
at Admirals Cup on the licence income.

Several years ago a package was released that allows you to run apps that
expect Oracle on Postgres.

Of course startups do not use Oracle. In fact few even use Windows. Why spend
huge amounts of money when you can get better solutions for free? And there
are so many good choices, including noSQL solutions.

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ak39
Most enterprise software companies in the financial sector traditionally built
solutions on Oracle. This was because in the 80s and even early 90s, the holy
grail of financial systems (MVCC - multiversion concurrency control with
guaranteed transactions) was offered relatively cheaper by Oracle during that
period compared to IBM's big iron solutions. This was a winning strategy for
Oracle. They dominated new projects during the 90s client-server revolution.

Over time this didn't matter as many RDBMS offered advanced MVCC features and
transactional guarantees "on the cheap". (MS SQL and pgsql being late bloomers
to this club - there are many other good databases that do similar).

Your professor is probably a veteran from the heydays of Oracle's dominance.
The meme of Oracle (i.e. if the system is developed using Oracle being default
good) still carries in the minds of many financial execs and CTOs. But it is
fading fast.

I personally wouldn't touch Oracle for my enterprise startup which provides BI
solutions for asset managers. We use SQL Server and pgsql.

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ljoshua
Among small or early stage startups? No. Oracle charges kingly rates to go
along with their kingly title, rates which pretty much only big companies can
pay. Oracle DB setups often tie into other Oracle products as well, which can
be more useful to established and larger companies.

Your professor is correct in that it's widely used amongst such companies,
though other competitors are very often in place as well such as Sybase or
Microsoft SQL Server.

The right tool for the right job (or in the startup world, the tool you can
afford.)

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ismail
Previously commented on some issues regarding oracle products in general:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726012](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726012)

Oracle DB has some of the best tech. For e.g Partitioning of tables works
great. DB can be seriously tuned and is a workhorse for many different use
cases. They have easy access to use tools that make management super simple.

Though you pay a hefty price for all of this, often you can get similar things
done with open source with a bit more hacking and deep diving though you would
need to have much more technical skills than your typical oracle DBA.

Then you have what I call the 'propriety DB' tax. Which usually means your
open source tools typically support oracle DB as an afterthought. I often come
across an open source solution to solve some problem only to realize we need
to get data in or out of oracle with support either non existent or patchy at
best. PGSql/MySQL are mostly supported first.

For e.g

\- I recall getting cx_oracle(python DB API) was a serious pain in the ass.

\- Want to use a heroku build pack for your app to deploy to an open source
paas solution? Need to roll your own custom build pack

\- Need continuous integration, auto builds? Need to hack around their stupid
license agreement

\- Need a local dev db? You get a seriously limited version (XE) without
feature parity to what is most likely running in production. You have to write
specific code for local vs production in some cases - like accessing
partitions etc

Really I would be surprised if there were Serious SAAS startups that were
using it.

That $ could be invested elsewhere and open source is good enough.

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slowhand09
I've worked with Oracle versions 4,5,7,8,9,10,11, and 12. Worked as DBA,
developer, architect, and consultant. Also worked with most other major DB
players. Oracle has the besttech - period. Sure you'll find this or that
player who tries and maybe outdoes Oracle for some period in some niche.
Oracle isn't used by startups because they rarely have the funds or the
expertise to make it feasible. I've spent months building and fixing what
Oracle has out of the box. Referential Integrity for starters. People who
don't understand it, or its value, or have a need for it today will skip it. 3
years later they need it bad but can't afford to fix it, don't know how to fix
it, or have made so many bad decisions they need a redesign. If you can afford
it - use it. Data is typically the most valuable asset for a company.

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eb0la
It depends on what using Oracle means. As a backed? I seriously doubt it.
Oracle fees are huge for startup-style growth and non-oracle equivalents are
1) cheap and 2) have plenty of talent available.

If you're a start-up going after B2B market, and you want to offer on-prem
service, I suggest you get into the Oracle developer network and try as hard
as you can to make sure your product works with Oracle as a backend.

Just having it as an option for big corporations is worth the effort... But
not as a first time option (unless ORA funds you, which is another story).

