Oracle kills third-party JD Edwards reference website

by shrikant • 12 years ago

189 90 12 years ago

DiabloD3• 12 years ago

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

binarymax• 12 years ago

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...

bananas• 12 years ago

I think you just described most corporations. Despite the PR otherwise, they're all rotten to the core like this.

However in this specific case, if Mozilla issued a takedown to w3schools, would we be up in arms about it? Vendors are generally pretty tight with documentation when it's a cut-throat sector.

MisterBastahrd• 12 years ago

Doesn't help that their own website is barely Web 1.0. It's damned near impossible to find anything in their documentation unless you've already memorized all the hoops you need to jump through.

rbanffy3• 12 years ago

Oracle is sold on the golf course

This is sadly true for most proprietary IT. What would be the solution? A rigid code of ethics that would prevent IT executives from meeting their vendors outside the office?

I once worked for a company that had its CTO fired because he accepted a trip to Paris (so he could speak at a vendor-sponsored event), but only after buying a couple million dollars of inadequate and overly expensive hardware. Now he's a senior exec at said vendor.

Hint to senior IT execs: if one of your providers names you "Executive of the Year", watch out: it's probably because you are their most profitable cash cow.

justthisonce12• 12 years ago

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) 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.

Gonzih• 12 years ago

I think this will not affect they reputation in any way. Solaris and MySQL stories are good proof that Oracle isn't about reputation, from perspective of market that they are targeting they are doing right thing.

rbanffy3• 12 years ago

You must be joking, of course. The people who'd need to access documentation are not the ones that sign the check. Oracle's client is not the company, their IT staff, not even their internal users. Oracle's client, the one they cultivate a relationship with, is the executive (IT or non-IT, it doesn't matter) authorized to sign seven-figure checks for licenses and services.

laumars2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if you've ever worked with Oracle, but they have a long history of making it hard for customers since a good proportion of their income comes from consultants.

Quite honestly, they're one of the worst anti-user companies ever.

przemoc• 12 years ago

Shouldn't it be "the best anti-user company"? Otherwise it sounds like the company being worst at enforcing anti-user policy, i.e. failing to do it right, i.e. being user-friendly after all.

Even better would be: "the most user-unfriendly company".

blueskin_2• 12 years ago

ORACLE: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.

brudgers4• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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...)

nemo• 12 years ago

Not an ad hominem.

anton_gogolev2• 12 years ago

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

darbelo• 12 years ago

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.

spikels• 12 years ago

Wow! That's hilarious. I must take a really skilled person to write something like that.

anton_gogolev2• 12 years ago

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.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

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

Isn't that redundant? ERPs always come with buzzword-bingo sets, its like a defining feature of the product class.

arethuza4• 12 years ago

It's a high-end ERP system (the jargon is "Tier 1" - this has nothing to do with how the software is structured) - so an SAP competitor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JD_Edwards

HillRat2• 12 years ago

JDE has a consistent, logical, and totally infuriating table and column naming convention that's a holdover from its System/34 days, so that you're always having to select GLAA from F0911 and so on.

Worse yet, the system doesn't store human-readable descriptions in a consistent manner, so you have to do half a dozen joins just to get to the object names. So JDERef would have provided a valuable service to anyone who needs to talk to a JDE database -- without a handy schema reference, it's just a pile of characters.

arethuza4• 12 years ago

Out of interest, how many tables does JDE have in its database?

Sarkie• 12 years ago

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

Good work Oracle.

r00fus• 12 years ago

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

Shivetya• 12 years ago

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.

turnip19792• 12 years ago

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.

arethuza4• 12 years ago

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.

Tobani2• 12 years ago

It makes sense that it wasn't covered. Its really specific to a non-CS domain (Business). You probably learned image-processing techniques, but not how to use photoshop. You might have learned how to use acid-compliant databases, not how to use quickbooks.

Designers might have classes on how to use photoshop. Accountants might have classes on how to use quickbooks.

You might find a business-related class that covers ERP-related topics?

davb2• 12 years ago

ERP software is often highly customised for individual businesses and their processes. There are commonalities across packages (JDE, PeopleSoft, SAP, Dynamics, etc) but for the most part they're different for each organisation. That's why ERP consultants can charge such high fees. Your SAP install is quite different from your rival's.

They often integrate with external systems (stock management, production equipment, third party accounting platforms, billing, user management), even when the ERP system itself offers functionality in a given area.

It's a huge subject area.

However, most ERP software itself is just a large CRUD application that calls out to third party services (via APIs, COM, libraries, etc).

If you really want to learn about ERP software, try go get a job working with it for a year or two. The technical knowledge you'll require to get such a position is fairly generic (database basics, user experience design, TCP/IP, Unix/Linux server management). What would really make you stand out as a candidate would be having an understanding of business process modelling and reengineering - that's all ERP software is, a mirror of business processes.

It's an interesting area to work in (perhaps not long-term unless you're really into the BPR side of things). You'll really understand how businesses work and how they see their processes. And when you're working at the enterprise scale, small improvements in the software people use daily to perform their main functions can make all the difference.

Source: I've build ERP software for the last 7+ yrs.

cafard• 12 years ago

You could have a look at http://www.erp5.com/ .

bdcravens• 12 years ago

Strictly speaking, ERP aligns more with MIS than CS. Moreover, ERP would be challenging to learn in a vendor-independent manner, which good or bad, is the way most CS courses are structured.

dpweb• 12 years ago

ERP Consultant here - of course experience is key - so to get your foot in the door, couple ways I would approach it. Your pitch ultimately needs to be, I'm THE guy for this single app, very focused and specific skill.

I would get hired at a company as a general dev or whatever and then try to transition to to a sys admin role (like "JDE Administrator"). Alot of guys work with me (me too) got in this way.

Get a year or two experience and then go be a contractor - just search for JDE contractor jobs. Or, get hired on full-time at one of the many small consulting firms that specialize in the app you're targeting.

You can come in with less experience if you can accept less salary, like at a full-time salary at a consulting co. if you can come in at 80-90k salary, that's low. I know guys got on with just minimal experience. Trust me on this, if you're smart, you'll pick up the skills.

pmorici• 12 years ago

It isn't something you really want to know about. PeopleSoft is horrendous at the last large organization I worked for I'm fairly certain that a number of good employees quit based in part on being forced to use the PeopleSoft implementation for many basic HR and Administrative tasks like performance reviews.

mindcrime• 12 years ago

At the risk of sounding sarcastic (I don't mean to be, really), the Wikipedia page really is a decent starting point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_resource_planning

Beyond that, you'll find textbooks on the topic as well. Courses on ERP (and related topics like MRP) are usually found in degree programs with names like "Management Information Systems" or something, not "Computer Science".

http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Resource-Planning-Bret-Wagn...

http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Enterprise-Resource-Planning-...

If you wanted to get your hands dirty, there are some open source ERP systems out there. One well known one is OFBiz, which is now an Apache project:

http://ofbiz.apache.org/

I'm not 100% sure I'd actually recommend anybody deploy OFBiz for a real business, but if you wanted to play around and get a feel for some of the concepts, it could be a useful starting point.

Finally, if you want to drink from a firehose, you could do something like this:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22enterprise+resource+plann...

bsder• 12 years ago

Go work for a consulting company like Accenture for a year or two. They'll pay you immensely, send you through training, send you around the country/world and burn you out after 24 months.

After that, you'll know ERP software.

ProAm3• 12 years ago

This is not true, JDE brings in WAY more revenue than Peoplesoft does for Oracle. When PeopleSoft purchased JDE originally they wanted to kill JDE, but after Oracle bought PeopleSoft they realized they could keep it alive and make a profit on it.

bakhy• 12 years ago

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?

ams61102• 12 years ago

Postgres would be an adequate replacement for Oracle in many cases, or the enhanced EnterpriseDB which is not free but is less expensive. At the very high end, if you need what Oracle is capable of, not much else can replace it.

dagw• 12 years ago

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.

jrockway• 12 years ago

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

josefresco• 12 years ago

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

johnlbevan2• 12 years ago

Yeah, I love MS. I hate their licensing (too complex), and think they've not had a spotless track record, but compared to Oracle and Apple they're definitely in the good guys camp.

mel919• 12 years ago

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

jbuzbee• 12 years ago

Yes. And they haven't changed. See their slimy Android extortion techniques which taxes millions of smartphones based on some highly questionable patents and also their recent FUD-based ad campaigns.

brudgers4• 12 years ago

    for ["Microsoft", "Oracle"]
      {print  "We hateses ~a. \n
              Dirty nasty stinking ~a took our precious."}

In days of yore, the big three personalities were Gates, Jobs, and Ellison because those with an interest in creating lists of villains and heroes were inclined to hedge there bets - Gates alone might not be enough a villain for their shining knight. But then, and even more so now, Oracle and Ellison never had enough popular culture mindshare to make the Slam Books of those who keep slam books but for a narrow segment of an echoing technical community much of which didn't like Java when it still lived under Sun, anyway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slam_book

hnriot• 12 years ago

at least get your programming right before throwing insults.

"Oracle and Ellison never had enough popular culture mindshare to make the Slam Books"

I suspect with countless billions he doesn't much give a damn about your "slam book"

jimmaswell2• 12 years ago

What language is that?

milesf• 12 years ago

It's worse than that. I don't hate Microsoft or Oracle anymore. I'm completely apathetic. In my work I never have to touch either of their products.

The opposite of love is not hate. It's apathy.

ivanca• 12 years ago

Then whats the opposite of hate?

duongkai• 12 years ago

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

chazandchaz• 12 years ago

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.

peapicker• 12 years ago

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

parasubvert• 12 years ago

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).

drivingmenuts• 12 years ago

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.

googamooga• 12 years ago

Make world better place - abandon Oracle!

Oracle kills third-party JD Edwards reference website

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