Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals

http://www.techcrunch.com/2013/03/24/oracle-is-bleeding-at-the-hands-of-database-rivals

by mitmads • 13 years ago

27 33 13 years ago

Congratulations to Datastax's PR team, they did a wonderful job getting this reporter to pit them against almighty Oracle. In reality Oracle will die from a thousand cuts, not just NoSQL but other cheaper (and more reliable) alternatives such as SQL Server, Postgres, etc.

ramanujan• 13 years ago

Datastax, Datastax. Must have appeared 20 times in the piece. I'm sure they are a great company but Oracle's real problem is Postgres (and, to a lesser extent, SQLite and the various MySQL forks). Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs to sidetrack development for a few years like they did with MySQL.

masklinn• 13 years ago

> Oracle might want to consider paying $1B to the Postgres devs

There's no single Postgres dev, it's been community-driven from the start and the various postgres companies mostly provide support. So there's nobody to pay $1bn to really.

If you look at the contributors page[0], out of 6 "core devs" there are 5 different companies, with EnterpriseDB being "overrepresented" at 2 core from the company, plus a pair of "major contributors" out of a truckload.

And these people are probably Postgres devs first and foremost. Not Tom Lane or Josh Berkus, but even if Oracle bought out EnterpriseDB they might just cash in and work on Postgres from an other company.

[0] http://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/

mbesto• 13 years ago

MySQL is a very very small drop in the ocean that is Oracle. Competing with Postgres is a non-issue for them. Oracle's big problem is SAP.[1]

[1]http://www.informationweek.co.uk/software/enterprise-applica...

Toshio4• 13 years ago

Somehow

- sql server

and

- reliable

don't really belong in the same sentence.

ghshephard• 13 years ago

Do you have any citations or information to indicate that? My understanding from the sqlserver DBAs that I know that the platform is rock solid. Have you heard otherwise? Genuinely interested.

chris_wot• 13 years ago

This is what happens with companies who get too slow to innovate. Oracles best days are behind them, I feel.

ebiester2• 13 years ago

I don't even know if it's that Oracle has slowed, but rather their product has become too complex for them to sustainably innovate. They tried acquiring other options for the low end, but it hasn't worked. (Berkeley DB is theirs, for example.)

That said, there will always been a need for the product Oracle provides in the largest of companies. NoSQL isn't going to be running reports on the fortune 500 anytime in the next two decades, and neither is Postgres, as much as I like it.

Death by a thousand cuts will probably still be profitable for decades.

taligent2• 13 years ago

I work for an enterprise company (10K employees) and you are spot on.

Oracle will forever dominant HR, Payroll, SCM, Billing, FM etc type systems where more often than not they have custom software on top of it that has been built exclusively for Oracle. There is simply no good reason to switch. If anything the threat to Oracle will come from hosted apps e.g. Salesforce.

But what I've been seeing in our company is MongoDB dominating front end web apps and Datastax/Cassandra for more of the big data, analytics type workloads.

Oracle should be far more concerned with Amazon Web Services.

taligent2• 13 years ago

Actually I suspect the reason Datastax is growing is less because of Cassandra but more because they are one of the only cohesive enterprise class database, analytics and search platforms around. Having Cassandra, Hadoop and Solr in a tightly coupled, well supported package is pretty compelling.

3pt14159• 13 years ago

See an article about that would actually be compelling, instead of inspiring nerd rage when citing Datastax (founded in 2010) for the coming downfall of Oracle.

Vivtek• 13 years ago

It couldn't happen to nicer people... After my last upgrade of the Java virtual machine on my laptop, I found the installer had kindly installed the Ask toolbar on all my browsers, too. It left me with quite the bad taste in my mouth.

nodata• 13 years ago

Oracle isn't a database company anymore.

wereHamster• 13 years ago

A law firm perhaps?

arethuza• 13 years ago

Applications and services.

lominming• 13 years ago

This is obviously a PR article. Oracle is not just a database company anymore. Comparing Oracle to a 100 people company does not make much sense either.

gizzlon• 13 years ago

As much as I dislike Oracle, this article is pure crap. It's only general speculation with no information or value. Then it starts talking about Datastax like they are the ones causing these (made up?) problems for Orcale.

account_taken• 13 years ago

All I can say is DBase IV. If you don't innovate, you will get replaced. They're trying to do too much. Stick to your bread and butter.

OGinparadise• 13 years ago

Unless I made a mistake, Datastax was mentioned 11 times in an article about the "bleeding" of Oracle. Now Oracle has a gazillion other competitors so I am wondering.

Considering how ethical Techcruch is...let's not say it.

pavs• 13 years ago

This is nothing but a PR piece by Datastax, from TC.

Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals

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