Oracle Surprised by the Present

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2012/11/20/oracle-surprised-by-the-present.aspx

by MarlonPro • 14 years ago

106 48 14 years ago

blogs.technet.com

jarito• 14 years ago

This is surprisingly strong language for a couple of supposedly mature companies. I think Microsoft would have been better off with a light-hearted response that would have highlighted Oracle's reaction of being over the top and unprofessional.

As it is, it just seems like two children throwing sand at each other.

jspaur3• 14 years ago

As a former 'softie, I view it as a 'rally the troops' tone. Us against them with an undcurrent of 'they're scared'.

Definitely a different tone than what MSFT normally has, but they're confident, and in a world of 7 figure license deals, it's motivation and tone setting for re-selling partners and field staff.

crypto5• 14 years ago

What kind of technology is behind Present? In my understanding it's easy to place all data to DB/FS buffers with any DB engine and get superfast operations.

wmf• 14 years ago

If the data is guaranteed to be in memory you can use different data structures that are even more efficient — sometimes 10x more efficient. Ask the TimesTen, SolidDB, or VoltDB folks.

sciurus• 14 years ago

Don't miss the real gem here - Ksvin Closson's investigation into what "in-memory database" versus "database in-memory" means.

https://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/2012/11/04/oracle-exadata...

purephase3• 14 years ago

Odd tone to the blog post.

That being said, I'm always a bit surprised that SQL Server doesn't get the recognition that (IMO) it deserves. It is a pretty solid product. I was in a position to use it for years and saw it mature such that it eventually replaced legacy DB2/Adabas environments. It performed admirably and for a fraction of the price.

If the powers that be hadn't decided Oracle at all costs (and literally at all costs) against my counsel, they would have saved a lot of $$ and I might still be working there.

egwor• 14 years ago

the problem is that you have to install hotfixes and windows patches every weekend to keep the thing running.

mey• 14 years ago

Keep it running no, keep it secure yes. That is true of any production system, regardless of vendor, or should be.

Your system/business setups simply reflect this, either through clustering or planned outages.

Not sure why I'm providing a rational opinion to a snarky jab at Mircosoft, but imo, they have made fantastic progress on the security front over the past decade.

purephase3• 14 years ago

Once a month actually, and only if the patches were applicable. It really is not as bad in the MS world as you think. They made great strides in both stability and security over the past 8-9 years in the server OS area.

And, I say this as someone who has literally nothing to do with them on a daily basis anymore.

stephenhuey• 14 years ago

Back in 2004, a seasoned DBA was contracted to help our team set up an Oracle cluster. He said SQL Server was pretty good, but that the problem was you had to run it on Windows. In the past, he'd been in a team of 3 DBAs who kept 100 Oracle instances running on Solaris machines in a large company. After that, he helped a small financial company with their big database problems. They had 3 full-time DBAs constantly firefighting because they were running 3 Oracle instances on Windows. After he switched them over to Linux, their problems declined dramatically.

Anecdotal, but that guy saved us a lot of time and effort because he knew what he was doing, and I'd take his real life experiences over any sales rep! I'd probably also enjoy the awesome SQL Server GUI in a *nix environment if I could have that. :)

jspaur3• 14 years ago

So 2004...that experience was probably running a mix of Windows Server 2000/NT. OS's that would be teenagers/in college now. It really is a different world in the server OS space (especially in the enterprise datacenter space) now.

edge17• 14 years ago

that's funny that you noticed the tone. It's the tone of database guys firing shots at database guys. in another life i sat through lots of these kinds of meetings

jspaur3• 14 years ago

Agreed (and as mentioned below), a bit of a rally the troops when it comes to re-selling partners and field sales.

jamesaguilar• 14 years ago

You wouldn't think they'd let the database guys write the blog posts though. ;) Especially at Microsoft, home to some of the most sanitized corp-speak I've ever read.

meaty4• 14 years ago

I'm always a bit surprised that SQL Server doesn't get the recognition that (IMO) it deserves

As someone who has spent 13 years with it and has dragged himself through multiple certification cycles, the reason it doesn't get recognition is that it's an insanely deep money pit when you have to scale it. By the time you've forked out for the (now suddenly per core rather than CPU[1]!) enterprise license, all the 3rd party backup and restore tools, numerous windows licenses and had your arse audited for license compliance, you're down a lot of cash.

Not only that, from a technical perspective, it's an absolute bastard to administer, particularly if something goes snap. It requires significantly more meat popsicles to run than a similar sized Postgres or MySQL cluster.

To be honest, it's cheaper to solve all the problems that SQL Server solves at an architectural level these days. It's no longer something special (was it ever?).

The only thing going for it these days is that it's better than Oracle.

[1] This properly fucks us on the 2008->2012 upgrade cycle as our primary machines are 4x 8 core Xeons. So that's from 4 licensable CPUs to 32 licensable CPUs. We have 4 of those machines. Bastards!

incision• 14 years ago

>By the time you've forked out for the (now suddenly per core rather than CPU[1]!) enterprise license, all the 3rd party backup and restore tools, numerous windows licenses and had your arse audited for license compliance, you're down a lot of cash.

SQL Server licensing is pure madness.

I will never forget sitting across from a cadre of regional level Microsoft folks who had just finished explaining the intricacies of SQL virtualization licensing.

The seemingly straightforward design we envisioned to cost perhaps $120K under any sort of reasonable, logical licensing structure attached to per socket price of SQL would actually run upwards of $1.3M to properly comply with the Microsoft licensing terms.

It wasn't even the absurd total or the ridiculous terms that were so memorable. It was the fact the Microsoft folks seemed to be as shocked at our incredulity as we were at their terms.

I got the impression they weren't used to providing more than "It's cheaper than Oracle" as justification to receive millions of dollars.

kenjackson• 14 years ago

By the time you've forked out for the (now suddenly per core rather than CPU[1]!) enterprise license

1] This properly fucks us on the 2008->2012 upgrade cycle as our primary machines are 4x 8 core Xeons. So that's from 4 licensable CPUs to 32 licensable CPUs. We have 4 of those machines. Bastards!

But the Core pricing is 1/4 the CPU pricing, so you're going from 4 licensable CPUs to the equivalent of 8 licensable CPUs.

xradionut2• 14 years ago

"Not only that, from a technical perspective, it's an absolute bastard to administer, particularly if something goes snap. It requires significantly more meat popsicles to run than a similar sized Postgres or MySQL cluster."

Really? If you have some pro DBAs in charge you don't need mass quantities of warm bodies. (The problem is that 90% of the folks that claim to be experienced can't tell a clustered index from a cluster f__k.) You can automate 95% of the job and spend the rest of the time helping users do better.

"To be honest, it's cheaper to solve all the problems that SQL Server solves at an architectural level these days. It's no longer something special (was it ever?)."

Bullshit. I'm dealing with clients that insist on writing custom applications to do complex ETL instead of using SSIS or decent third party tool. Or wasting months writing code that reinvents SQL that's been around for decades.

matwood• 14 years ago

It requires significantly more meat popsicles to run than a similar sized Postgres or MySQL cluster. To be honest, it's cheaper to solve all the problems that SQL Server solves at an architectural level these days. It's no longer something special (was it ever?).

The problem wasn't finding a replacement for MSSQL, but a replacement for all the tools that come bundled. SSIS, MSAS, SSRS are just a few of the products that make MSSQL a powerful tool. The ability to build and process cubes in MSAS that can be browsed as pivot tables using an Excel plugin made data analysis easily accessible to the analysts at my old company.

I agree that licensing is outrageous and I tried hard to move us onto something else, but replacing the other products would have taken too much time.

Shivetya• 14 years ago

I think I will stick with DB2. One person, four machines, multiple logical partitions, and nearly a hundred terabytes of data. Oh, I have a backup person.

Administration, monitoring, maintenance, and such, is all like, yeah its done.

Really I read these comments here about SQL and DB on other platforms and I cannot fathom it, I simply never experience it. The AIX/Oracle gang has half a dozen people or more doing the same work as I for their platform and I don't see the benefit.

runT1ME• 14 years ago

Interesting. I'm consulting on a project for a heavy traffic website and the SQL Server was chosen. I'm not the DB expert on the project, but when I asked about SQL Server's equivalent to Oracle RAC, I was told there wasn't anything like that. From our experience on the project SQL Server's clustering technology was pretty amateur compared to Oracle's...

chris_wot• 14 years ago

It is crazy how many add-ons you need to buy from Oracle. I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft, but they score a pretty telling point on this issue.

MattRogish2• 14 years ago

Although I'm not a huge fan of Windows, Exchange, and the like, I am a huge supporter (although not current a user - was a SQL Server DBA for a few years) of SQL Server. It is probably Microsoft's finest engineering product. Not only is it a super reliable and scalable system T-SQL is actually a user-friendly SQL dialect, and SQL Server Enterprise Manager (or whatever it's called today) is very user-friendly, too.

Although I'm a true-blue PostgreSQL believer, I give major props to the SQL Server team. In comparison, Oracle is a disaster (I was reluctant/forced Oracle 8i/9i DBA, too).

ams6110• 14 years ago

The folks at Sybase appreciate your complements.

MattRogish2• 14 years ago

I actually was a Sybase ASE DBA for quite some time, too (spent a lot of time in the DBA trenches - Sybase ASE is my favorite SQL DBMS) and it's my understanding that SQL Server around the 2000/2005 mark was completely rewritten. Although the origins of T-SQL are Sybase, the rest of the product isn't (some of the philosophy and core architecture still is a carry-over from ASE).

juiceandjuice• 14 years ago

Why would you not like exchange? Do you like to wait a few before you get your emails or something?

shabble• 14 years ago

Seems like the Oracle rebuttal published in Forbes is 404ing (Taken down, or just moved?), but appears to be in google cache still:

page 1: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

page 2: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

I have to say, the tone of both articles seems strangely...petty, for such huge enterprise organisations. Odd.

jacques_chester2• 14 years ago

Microsoft is playing its usual strategy here: start with a "toy" and slowly ascend the features/quality ladder with each release; all the while undercutting the competition on price.

That said, pretty much every enterprise database vendor will soak you for every cent you have.

Whenever folk tell me that "relational doesn't scale", I explain that it's been scaled up and out for decades. Don't believe me? Ring any Fortune 500 and ask.

... and then ask how much it's costing them. Be prepared for sticker shock.

SideburnsOfDoom• 14 years ago

SQL Server stopped being a "toy" a long time ago. If it ever was.

jacques_chester2• 14 years ago

True, but I don't set the "impressions" that old hands have of new entrants to a market.

wrath• 14 years ago

It's interesting that when companies like Microsoft are politically correct, we get blast because of it. The on the flip side when they seem pretty aggressive we blast them because of it also.

Personally I like seeing facts not just words. If you're going to be aggressive about your product, fine by me, but.... where's the proof? Where are the un-bias comparison graphs? What use case are you using to prove your point? Without data they all come off looking like two politicians.

All this said, I love SQL Server but never used it at a super large scale though. What I prefer most about it are it's tools which seem to be much more user friendly then Oracles. I'm no DBA though.

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

This kind of BS is why I jumped off the SQL ship as soon as I could. I use mongo primarily now, and postgres when SQL is necessary.

malkia• 14 years ago

I think I was the only one that read it as "Oracal Surprised by the President" (?!?!?!)

sunjain• 14 years ago

In the long run what is going to hurt SQL server is the fact that it is on Windows only. And if you look at the technology trends for databases - big/midsize IT shops are gravitating towards integrated solutions(Exadata e.g) where Microsoft still relies on third party for hardware. Small shops/startups are gravitating towards commodity hardware(primarily linux based), where trend is more towards MySQL/Postgre/NoSQL, where Microsoft is lacking. And then the cloud (where Microsoft does have an early presence, but then Amazon has been there long before and Oracle is there in too)....In that context this In-Memory database technology tussle is playing out, which was clearly ignited by SAPs Hana (even though oracle had times-ten long before SAP came out with Hana). So looking at future market direction, things are not looking very good for SQL server, even though it is probably one of the best products to come out of Microsoft and currently is doing great.

Oracle Surprised by the Present

Related Stories