Comment by fock
10 days ago
we pay millions to Oracle. We hit a bug and it took 6months for them to reproduce and acknowledge there is a bug. they now seem to be on the lookout for someone being able to produce a fix: sales and indian after-sales can't do that... curious!
Oracle seems just a moneygrabbing shell company at this point and I suppose the whole hyperscaler-cloud is developing towards that point with the leaders of those corporations repeating exactly the same talking points...
Why are you still on Oracle? (genuine question, no snark)
Because Oracle gives their manager premium baseball tickets on the regular.
They make a great database?
From my anecdotal experience: no. It is arcane, user hostile and buggy. And performance for many workloads is roughly in line with open source databases.
Some of the tooling around it is nice and it has some nice features but I would not recommend it even if it was free.
Edit: unless the great database is MySQL, they are actually decent stewards of it and while I still strongly prefer PostgreSQL MySQL is pretty good these days.
It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org).
As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.
10 replies →
Another curious question: what use case can only be served by an Oracle DB?
6 replies →
Because of architectural decisions made a very long time ago (finance industry) and the potential risk of migrating to another platform.
It seems like an even bigger risk to not migrate.
as others have mentioned
- institutional inertia - some weird consultant style people in key roles (this happens around cloudy stuff too) - the DBA-team - "we can't move everything!" - "we just migrated off solaris!"
however every new project with sane leadership seems to decide against oracle.