Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-11/oracle-sales-eroded-as-startups-embrace-souped-up-free-software

by velodrome • 11 years ago

177 137 11 years ago

r00fus• 11 years ago

Article fails to identify if the sales figures are limited to database or whether they include the enterprise apps (i.e., EBS/Fusion).

Regardless - the quote "Does the cloud-related business grow quickly enough to offset any long-term weakness in new software licenses? To us the answer is yes" seems to indicate that this is all sales for ORCL.

Oracle relying on cloud is pitting them against some more entrenched cloud-only vendors (e.g.: Workday, Salesforce) and disrupts the business model for their main cash cows. Typical innovator's dilemma territory if that's their play.

toyg2• 11 years ago

They seem to be approaching this by offering very reduced functionality on the cloud, so that "real" enterprise businesses will still buy apps to self-host (hopefully on Exa boxes). At least this is what I'm seeing in Middleware.

It's long been known that Database would eventually see a decline, which is why they bought loads of products to ring-fence it (as well as attacking SAP). I just wish their support was still worth the money -- in most cases it's not. That's the real problem IMHO.

calgoo2• 11 years ago

I think SAP is stealing a lot of Oracles non-db business ATM. From the last few years, all i hear is SAP hosting, SAP consultants, etc. Oracle has taken a backseat, with the only new Oracle software I have seen being their crappy hosted services.

The mayor problem with using open source in the Corp. world, is that many companies put rules such as:

"Any new technology product MUST have a multi million dollar company with 24/7 support available."

It never made any difference that it would be cheaper to hire two or three techs to do the job, as they come from different budgets (CAPEX vs OPEX).

pinaceae• 11 years ago

Salesforce.com runs on Oracle DBs, is in fact the largest customer. Benioff was a SVP at Oracle before he founded SFDC.

rbanffy• 11 years ago

Is it surprising startups no longer buy as many Oracle licenses as they did in the 90's?

DrStalker• 11 years ago

It's hard to think of a situation where a new startup would use Oracle; it's a massive cost compared to alternatives and while it does offer some advantages over other DB choices those advantages are not very compelling for most uses.

For example, we did some rough testing recently and found that Oracle was faster for report generation than MSSQL but we can double the processing power assigned to the MSQQL to get equivalent performance for a fraction of the cost of Oracle licensing.

Yeroc• 11 years ago

If you're a startup selling services to large enterprises you may be forced to use Oracle because it gives your customers more confidence in your solution (assuming you're offering a service where you storing information on important assets on behalf of the enterprise).

philippnagel• 11 years ago

The average startup probably can't afford any Oracle licenses. Therefor most of them turn to a very mature FOSS eco-system.

CyberDildonics• 11 years ago

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are. A $10,000 dollar computer running postgres can serve a ridiculous amount of queries.

I suspect the general idea is to spend huge amount of money to run incredibly inefficient SQL queries.

hkmurakami• 11 years ago

I don't even know how Oracle is still the juggernaut that they are.

Their existing massive install base, aggressive salesforce, and being perceived as a "safe" choice by customers is a strong position to be in.

bradleyankrom• 11 years ago

That, and enterprise-grade product support is often a requirement.

jlarocco• 11 years ago

It doesn't hurt that their database is actually really good.

hendzen• 11 years ago

Can Postgres do distributed transactions? Oracle can.

Sanddancer• 11 years ago

Yes. Federated tables was added in Postgres 9.3.

chrismarlow92• 11 years ago

So much legacy still runs on it. I've seen many projects at the top of very very large companies (think telcos) that still use Oracle DB. The cost to upgrade these systems with full end to end testing is not worth the investment. Every system I've seen that has this setup is extremely archaic in every way. We're talking java applets in the browser to show a form where you choose options that compose a query in the background and every option you would want is in the interface, however there is no direct query access. Imagine creating a UI that represents everything you can possibly do in a sql query, building it in a java applet, and powering it with a database that costs a buttload of money.

Also oracle has a very large reach with salesforce so I've seen many former employees pitch oracle products heavily. Seems like once you work there you're part of the forever cult of ellison.

rodgerd3• 11 years ago

Seems like once you work there you're part of the forever cult of Ellison.

Not just working at Oracle. Once Oracle bought Sun our Oracle DBAs started relentlessly agitating for us to buy SPARC servers because they were now the best, obviously, and a failure to use them meant we clearly were doing it wrong.

donw• 11 years ago

A number of reasons that form an important lesson in sales at the enterprise level:

1. Oracle does provide value. They have clustering and high-availability offerings that Postgres just can't touch, and those come with service and support personnel as part of the contract. A one-stop solution is a powerful sales pitch.

2. They have a massive existing install base within the Fortune 500, which spend amounts of money that the average hacker just can't grasp. Somebody that I know very recently worked on an enterprise project to create more-or-less a web page that had a $1,000,000 budget. Oracle is not asking for unreasonable amounts of money, by enterprise standards.

3. Companies value safety over risk, and Oracle has a long track record at the executive level of providing safety. The mindset goes something like: Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike. Oracle is telling the story their customers want to hear.

4. Because Oracle has such a large install base and so many success stories at the enterprise level, they are one of a very few number of default choices that an enterprise will make. They have spent decades building up sales momentum.

Business decisions usually have very little do to with the underlaying technology.

chatmasta2• 11 years ago

Companies value safety over risk

Yes. In the case of a database, "safety" is safety from downtime, data loss, data theft. So companies want a database that is fault tolerant and secure.

Postgres might be good enough for Imgur or Joe Bob's Bait Shack And Social Network, but neither of those is a bank, healthcare provider, or an entity capable of ordering an air strike.

Banks and healthcare providers strike me as far more insecure than tech companies, and especially more insecure than the large computing platforms like EC2, Google Cloud, etc. Any cloud can host a postgres database, and many of them offer database-specific services.

Oracle is competing not just with Postgres, but with literally every other database offering, many from leading tech companies.

The cloud extracts value by utility billing a large customer base. Oracle extracts value by overbilling a small customer base. Which model seems more sustainable? Eventually EC2, Google Cloud, etc will overtake Oracle completely. Maybe if Oracle is lucky they can provide the overpriced consultants to manage their client's EC2 boxes.

blinkingled• 11 years ago

Exactly right. They have a really good product with great reputation, a ton of support resources and skill availability. Besides the features like RAC, RAT, Various security stuff (redaction, encryption etc) that enterprise customers demand are not in any open source database I know of.

needusername• 11 years ago

Oracle does provide value.

I don't know why people always mention clustering. It provides so many downsides and complications that it hardly ever seems worth it. I don't know my people never mention instrumentation, monitoring and plan management. These things are there you help you when you need them.

datashovel• 11 years ago

Historically speaking I would agree. Oracle, at one point in history, did offer a compelling value proposition.

I attribute their slow but inevitable death to a slow learning curve in Fortune 500 companies.

Also I imagine they're likely involved in a large number of government contracts.

pjc50• 11 years ago

Somebody that I know very recently worked on an enterprise project to create more-or-less a web page that had a $1,000,000 budget.

This is uncomfortably close to the truth, and the reason why government procurement projects often overrun so badly with so much spent is that the budget is set high in the first place. This creates an opportunity to pile on consultants and complexity which can all be billed for.

The size of the budget determines the size of the solution, not the other way round.

toyg2• 11 years ago

the general idea is

... to choose an established vendor with a big name and large resources, so that you won't get fired if things don't work out. Even if your project goes down in flames, you can blame the vendor, snatch a "compensation" discount or freebie on some other license renewal, and you'll be fine.

Nobody in the enterprise space will ever get fired for choosing IBM, Oracle, Microsoft or SAP.

tl• 11 years ago

The handful of companies that I've dealt with using Oracle bought into a product that Oracle sells (like payroll) that runs on an Oracle database (obviously). Oracle convinces them to pay for way more than they need for that application and in-house development ends up being done using Oracle rather than MySQL, SQL Server, etc...

Spooky232• 11 years ago

They sell solutions to business problems at the CEO/COO/CFO level. The database as outrageous as it is, is just a sideshow.

I think New York spent something like $40M for a general ledger system. There is ridiculous amounts of money in these projects.

parasubvert2• 11 years ago

$40m is quite affordable. I've seen not super complicated SAP implementations of GL and FICA hit $100m+... Let's not forget telecom billing systems where Amdocs easily charges $200m and up in customization.

What is this money spent on? Well, if you consider knowledge a scarce resource.... Capital is a poor substitute but all you've got when you're clueless.

rdtsc• 11 years ago

Simple -- the crowd who picks and buys Oracle doesn't hang out on HN. So if you are on HN then you think everyone runs Docker, Kubernetes, RethinkDB, Go, and something...something Reactive.

travjones• 11 years ago

This is spot on. "Enterprise" dev life is way different than HN dev life.

deciplex• 11 years ago

Picks and buys, perhaps, but some of us who have to use the stuff are here :-)

jacquesm• 11 years ago

Exactly. There is a huge world of professional IT that HN is almost blind to. Though I'd wager that there is someone on HN from just about every niche in IT.

pjmlp• 11 years ago

We do hang around here, but technologies are adopted on "business value" not "geek factor".

thrillgore• 11 years ago

.gov. PeopleSoft was such a windfall for them entirely because of this.

noonespecial• 11 years ago

You don't pay Oracle for a database. You pay them for a kind of lawsuit insurance policy that just happens to come with a database.

It looks like they sell software but I think it closer to the truth to say that they are an insurance company.

davidgerard7• 11 years ago

Straddling the fine line between "insurance company" and "protection racket".

ams6110• 11 years ago

If you really need Oracle, no open source products can replace it. That said, there are a lot of people who buy Oracle but don't actually need it: they just use it as a fairly simple-minded CRUD database. That is just wasting money.

hboon• 11 years ago

Besides purely political and technical reasons, the more you move towards enterprise software, the more the database will need to be required to work with other enterprise software. E.g. if you run data warehousing, you might find that the solution you picked only supports Oracle DB.

pierre• 11 years ago

For what I see in the entreprise world they play it like that :

1. lock entreprise in a 5 year contract. 2. when contract is about to expire lower prices to match wathever other companies are offering for the next 5 years + migration cost. 3. Win the deal as you offer the best value for the money : same ammount + no risk. 4. repeat

This is the main reason why you can see companies running on mainframe in 2015.

radicalbyte• 11 years ago

5. threaten a compliancy audit unless they re-sign.

dagw3• 11 years ago

There are a lot of large third party enterprise applications that only support Oracle. I know several places that I deal with that are still on Oracle, not because replacing Oracle with Postgres is particularly hard per se. but because replacing everything that talks to the Oracle database is too hard.

vidarh• 11 years ago

For starters, consider that Oracle does not just sell the Oracle RDBS but a huge range of other enterprise software.

yxhuvud• 11 years ago

They do what they always have done - they buy companies that are behind their prime time and then provide legacy support for their systems. That is their bread and butter. If sales go down? Buy some more faded companies and watch sales improve again.

Queries per second is simply not a relevant question.

ccvannorman• 11 years ago

From what I've heard about how Oracle treats their customers and the industry, this is good news. We need to move away from juggernauts who try to control things, and towards a more distributed, robust methodology.

smlacy• 11 years ago

You mean that it should be more like a Bazaar and less like a Cathedral? Wow, great idea!

meesterdude• 11 years ago

My reaction to this article: Mwahahaha.

Although surprised it is Cassandra, and not mysql thats taking the market share. Is there some technical reason for this? I'm not intimate with what Cassandra offers.

coolsunglasses• 11 years ago

Probably because of the DataStax OLTP/OLAP/All-Singing/All-Dancing platform that uses Cassandra.

MySQL alone doesn't cover the same bases.

StevePerkins• 11 years ago

Cassandra is a distributed database that easily scales more or less to infinity. As you add more nodes to a cluster, it automatically redistributes data throughout the cluster. It "just works", and that's pretty exciting. So Cassandra at the moment seems to be enjoying a bit of the hype cycle that MongoDB enjoyed 5 or 6 years ago. It's the thing that everyone wants to try out and get onto their resume at the moment.

However, like all "NoSQL" databases, the trade-offs come with the usual severe limitations (e.g. no joins, no foreign keys, no transactions in the usual sense of the term, eventual consistency, etc). Curious people diving into Cassandra (or most NoSQL databases for that matter) typically have zero understanding of these trade-offs at first, and think that they will be easier to work with. It isn't, and it isn't supposed to be. It's harder to work with, and has fewer features, because that's the trade-off you're making for scalability. There's little reason to use it if you don't need to scale like that.

So, curiosity and RDD ("resume-driven development") aside, I don't think there are many situations in which one would be choosing from Cassandra or MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL. If you are working with multiple terabytes or more of data, then there is seldom a good reason to consider a relational database. If you are working with less than a terabyte of data, then there is seldom a good reason to consider anything OTHER than a relational database. I just don't see much overlap in which these technologies seriously compete against each other.

acchow• 11 years ago

Cassandra "just works"

It's hard for me to believe statements like this. At this point, I think the only things that "just work" are gravity, relativity, and modern CPUs.

I recommend this talk on Scaling Pinterest http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Pinterest

pmontra• 11 years ago

Another trade off is speed vs data duplication.

http://blog.websudos.com/2014/08/16/a-series-on-cassandra-pa...

"Duplication of data is not only possible, but it’s also encouraged and often the only way to model the SQL equivalent."

mappingbabeljc• 11 years ago

Hiya. I wrote the article (for verification see Twitter handle @mappingbabel). In poll of 20 $1bn> startups vast majority used MySQL, though I saw a few mentions of Cassandra and MongoDB. Additionally (though not really DBMS) tons of ElasticSearch and Redis. We pull out Cassandra DB specifically because we were able to find a reasonable price comparison example for it (most people I spoke to were just rolling their own MySQL rather than going to a vendor).

davidgerard7• 11 years ago

Postgres is at last eating Oracle from the bottom up, doing what MySQL tried to do fifteen years ago and wasn't quite technically up to.

We're busy replacing our Oracle with Postgres. It's just ridiculously more agile. Actually-good databases without having to think about licensing? Heresy!

bane• 11 years ago

Good.

Now my concern is to see what database platform all the architect astronauts end of gravitating their ridiculously over-engineered solutions towards.

5 years ago, the default choice for my government clients was Oracle, Oracle, Oracle.

I just finished up a year-long engagement and Oracle wasn't brought up even once.

Spooky232• 11 years ago

I've noticed a lot of MS SqlServer being thrown at larger systems.

matchagaucho• 11 years ago

Difficult to know if that 3% loss in new revenue wasn't offset by deferred cloud revenue.

bitwize• 11 years ago

Well, there's always:

1) Squeezing your enterprise customers for money.

2) Lawsuits. With the right incentives to lawyers and politicians, Oracle might be able to get Lotus v. Borland effectively reversed; then they could start licensing the use of SQL itself!

rodgerd3• 11 years ago

2) Lawsuits. With the right incentives to lawyers and politicians, Oracle might be able to get Lotus v. Borland effectively reversed; then they could start licensing the use of SQL itself!

That's what they're very close to achieving with Oracle v Google.

However, I don't think Oracle would be the winner in the "Who owns SQL?" conversation.

logicchains3• 11 years ago

If that happened and IBM said to Oracle "We want 30% of your database revenue if you wish to keep using our SQL API", would there be anything Oracle could do?

dangerboysteve• 11 years ago

The first thing I thought when I saw the heading was. "They will just milk existing customers with higher maintenance contracts and fees". Sure enough, went to the article and the first graph shows declining sales but increasing fees.

ralmidani• 11 years ago

It's good that more companies are adopting free software, but most of them do not, in turn, release their core applications as free software. This indicates they do not value freedom more than they value saving money.

CleanCut• 11 years ago

This is the headline I expected to see 10 years ago.

adventured• 11 years ago

That headline was prevalent back then. Oracle responded to the threat by eating the ecosystem around them. Had they not done that, their financial picture would be drastically worse today. It's entirely plausible that Oracle would have unraveled as a major enterprise player if they hadn't acquired so much of the industry. Ellison knew what was happening, his acquisition moves were meant to guarantee Oracle's long-term survival. It was: become a monster, or eventually be eaten by one.

jccooper• 11 years ago

Judging by the graph there was a serious inflection point in 2008. Which seems about right from what I remember. So it probably should have been a headline long before now.

dredmorbius• 11 years ago

The 2008 inflection would have come from the financial crisis. Lots of large firms got hit by that, and a few went under. Since the plot is of _new_ licenses, it suggests that companies weighing the benefits of Oracle vs. one of the alternatives (Postgresql, NoSQL), went with cheaper.

outside1234• 11 years ago

"Doesn't cost anything": This is a meme that is largely false.

Any large organization will buy support for open source software which can sometimes be actually more than the cost of a database license (see Datastax and Cassandra).

License, support, take your pick. It takes people to keep systems running.

davidgerard7• 11 years ago

We're moving from Oracle to Postgres. From three huge Oracle instances to, pretty much, a cloud of Postgres boxes, a pair per application. Because we can.

Oracle is a superlative database, but it's the polar opposite of agile. This turns out to be important.

scriptproof• 11 years ago

In the article it is said by moving from Oracle to Datastax support, the cost was down from $500 000 to $90 000. Oracle support has a cost too.

turingbook• 11 years ago

In China, there is a hot trend called de-IOE (to remove IBM，Oracle and EMC or other big foreign IT companies' technologies and products from IT systems) in enterprise IT.

Instead, we use open sources, or cloud/ X as a Service, or local technologies.

I wonder if it is the same in USA or other countries?

acosmism• 11 years ago

at the same time they block github.

balac• 11 years ago

The government is blocking github, not those tech companies..

logicchains3• 11 years ago

Is that why Go is so popular in China? The "Our well-known customers" section on the Beego framework homepage (http://beego.me/) seems to list most of the largest Chinese internet companies, for instance.

elementai• 11 years ago

There's a kind of similar trend in Russia.

capkutay• 11 years ago

I'm not sure if 'new sales' vs 'upgrades' is a useful metric for a company like oracle. They're already prevalent in the enterprise infrastructure of the Global 2000. Oracle's new in-memory database with columnar compression is considered an 'upgrade' to their flagship DB product.

bhahn• 11 years ago

  “It only costs us 6 percent of revenue, and that’s nothing,” Nelson said.

This seems high. Is this normal for big companies?

ldayley• 11 years ago

Wait, doesn't Ellison and/or Oracle own a huge chunk of Netsuite? Nelson is basically doing PR work for them in this quote.

suyash• 11 years ago

Doesn't matter, there are several other tech companies that pay big bucks to Oracle for it's products and services - they are not fools.

anaolykarpov• 11 years ago

I see this phrase repeated over and over: nobody got fired for chosing Oracle, ibm, or Microsoft. I wonder: did anyone got fired for chosing Postgres, Linux, or even new and risky stuff like Mongodb or nodejs? And being told at their exit interview "you should've decided to use Oracle"? I guess tech people are fired for lack of talent in hustling company politics much often than they are for chosing a technology.

logicchains3• 11 years ago

I'd love to read a blog post by someone fired for not using MongoDB; I suspect the justification their employer gave for the firing decision would be quite entertaining.

tsotha2• 11 years ago

It's not so much that someone will say "you should've used Oracle". It's that when your application is down for two days they'll say "you should've picked a vendor with 24 hour support and good penetration in the job market".

Now, your Oracle-hosted application might go down for two days as well, but then people would shrug and say "sometimes this happens."

To be fair to Oracle, though, it does seem to happen less often.

davidgerard7• 11 years ago

Oracle's database itself is superlative. It's just everything else about dealing with Oracle.

INTPenis2• 11 years ago

From first hand experience, it is much harder to maintain a FOSS environment. It feels like putting more on the line. And I cannot deny that I do it partly out of ideological reasons.

So I can totally imagine people being fired for getting in over their heads and messing something up, maybe repeatedly.

On the other hand, I've seen techs be banned from a client environment while dealing solely with proprietary software too.

davidgerard7• 11 years ago

We're doing an Oracle->PG move at present.

I would disagree it's harder. It's trepidatious, but that's not the same.

We're in the middle of taking all our internal apps talking to a single huge Oracle database, and giving each app its own cluster of two PG boxes. Nothing has to play nice with anything else - that alone suddenly makes life ridiculously easier.

We have expensive paid Oracle support, who do PG as a sideline. But we've yet to have occasion to call them about PG.

s5e• 11 years ago

Someone should note that Larry Ellison owns about half of Netsuite. Quite the bias towards Oracle with the last source.

nl382• 11 years ago

I've heard rumors Bloomberg is trying hard to dump Oracle and move to OS like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

So it's interesting they published this article.

daniel_iversen• 11 years ago

This article is a bit sensationalist and misleading.

It mainly talks about the database whereas Oracle does many other things these days (amongst other things some high value SaaS applications in the marketing space that can't be replaced by open source.

Also, the article criticises their growth but come on! They're the 2nd largest enterprise software company in the world - they aren't going to have the kind of 100% YoY growth that a small startup could have.

My prediction is oracle will eventually tighten down and freshen up a bit, cut some of the fat and continue to be a juggernaut for another 10 or so years at least.

(Disclaimer: I liked oracle for many years and recently used to work for and still have a soft spot for them somewhere despite their challenges :) ) Sent from mobile

skc• 11 years ago

Wonder why Microsofts server business seems to still be going strong then.

drawkbox• 11 years ago

Oracle never really cared about the developer experience. Eventually that wears out whatever market lead a company might have.

Oracle can be very fast and well setup but the tools to work with are not good and the general optimization now is not as needed with cheaper hardware and more horizontal systems.

There are so many other options out there now. PostgreSQL is great to work with and is so good now that it just might be the leader. Oracle was late to embrace usage on cloud instances and licensing models in that environment don't do as well, that is why Microsoft created Azure and it is their new platform essentially.

mikegioia• 11 years ago

Postgres is great, but sadly it's not really in contention for being the RDBMS leader right now: http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/relational+dbms, but it is steadily climbing.

TylerE• 11 years ago

That's ridiculous. By that type of metric Comcast is the #1 isp.

cwyers• 11 years ago

I need to bookmark this page for the next time I see someone say MySQL is dead and everyone uses MariaDB now.

bsdpython• 11 years ago

Look at the YOY change - if the trend continues Postgresql will be right up there in 3-4 years

phd643• 11 years ago

Oracle Sales are far from eroding, and the opposite is true. Very misleading article and analysis, and questioning which vendor is in writers pocket? "Figures don't lie but liars do figure"

According to the leading analysts, Oracle has grown software revenues by over ~2.5% in 2014 vs 2013 and Oracle has grown Database revenue as well having a world wide DBMS share above 40% with growth of over 4% in 2014. If you look at who's got the most popular database(s) in the world, by ranking, Oracle Database is ranked #1 and Oracle MySQL is ranked #2. http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

While the article infers fewer licenses sold means Oracle is eroding, article doesn’t mention that Oracle is showing growth in software upgrades, DBAAS, and overall, growth in cloud- private, hybrid and public. The “c” in “Oracle DB 12c” stands for “cloud”. Oracle has over 400,000 customers, where over 310,000 are Database customers according to the Oracle Fact sheet http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219....

You say Oracle Database is expensive-compared to what? Its all about what level of business value you require? Oracle sells several editions of Oracle DB from Oracle Database Personal Edition that starts at $92 per named user license to Oracle Database Standard Edition One with License costing as little as US$180.00 to the Oracle Database Standard Edition version starting at $350 per User license. Not everyone requires the enterprise features of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Database&p2=Or...

Theres no such thing as free software unless you consider peoples time free, from administration, patching, management, support, upgrading, etc. You can surely download any open source Database but no ones going to support it for free. If you’re an enterprise, you're surely seeing your OPEX budgets sky-rocket, and a lot of that is due to "free" software and commodity hardware and the integration and management of a very complex, multi-vendor stack requiring armies of people to get it and keep it running.

Roboprog2• 11 years ago

I won't argue that support is not a necessary cost of doing business. Of course it is.

It's nice to be "free" to spin up a handful of disposable test instances of a database when doing test driven / agile type development.

Oracle is difficult and arcane to create a DB instance. I had the sys admin at work help me to try to set up an instance (he insisted it was "easy"). It takes MANY steps, some of which were shown to me in tools that did not lend themselves to scripting.

I have a script that can create a ready to rock PostgreSQL instance in 5 seconds, no "Mother, may I???" required to run it. Well, ready to run a schema creation / migration, but the "tablespace" and schema name with admin/app user were in and ready to go.

If you are twiddling a few lines in a legacy app, this doesn't matter. If you are doing a big chunk of new development, automated regression testing data sources matter.

tuyguntn• 11 years ago

Here is follow up to the discussion, how do you describe your experience with each of RDBMS's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705135

Htsthbjig• 11 years ago

I disagree. Startups have always embraced Free software since I know of this field.

What changes is when those startups become mature business, and they realize they don't need Oracle as much as "Mammoth" companies do.

It is the reason a company that disrespect geeks has not a good future.

When years ago I went to a geek convention and everybody had a mac, I instantly thought: Microsoft future is not good and bought Apple stock, even when people doubt about the company. It was a great decision.

Oracle has this attitude of "You are shit if you don't bring me a million dollars". They are not even neutral, they are hostile to startups. But startups grow and they don't forget how Oracle treated them.

phd643• 11 years ago

Oracle doesn't care about the developer experience? Oracle doesn't care about startups? Disrespect geeks? Huh? Do you have any real justifications to these or are you just basing this on your perceptions? Why would Oracle continue driving developments in JAVA, MySQL, OpenSTACK, etc and many other open source projects if it wasn't after the developer community? And have you seen the latest Software in Silicon Cloud Development platform that’s free? https://swisdev.oracle.com

And did you know that Oracle has the Oracle Database Personal Edition which is designed to provide software developers a cost effective, yet full featured Oracle Database environment on which to develop, test and run custom or packaged applications?

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=dstore:product:0::NO:...

robert_foss• 11 years ago

Oracle just like Microsoft just aren't trusted by the community at large.

History tells us why. And there are good reasons:

[1] Oracle tells Open Document founders to leave the project

[2] Oracle takes over KSplice and stops providing it for free to competitors of Oracles Linux Distribution.

[3] Oracle suing to maintain the position that APIs are copyrightable.

---

[1] https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....

Roboprog2• 11 years ago

I think the MySQL strategy is something like this: Oracle knows MySQL is defective, so they promote it as THE open source database, in the hopes that serious customers will get frustrated and just buy a license for a real (Oracle) database.

Elsewhere on this thread, somebody posted a link to a DB use survey which showed PostgreSQL as the #4 DB, behind Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server. Can't let that leak out, though.

sybase46• 11 years ago

As a 15 year Sybase, SQL server and Oracle DBA. Oracle compared to the 2 mentioned requires a platoon of DBAs because of the complexities involved. We have all 3 RDBMS and 1 Sybase SQL server DBA can administer 10x what our Oracle DBA can. I'm not even including tyhe Monster OEM 12c Cloud which takes complexity to a new level to include a Gigantic resource Hog. Add cost, Human resources and Oracle is a Huge over glutton Pig!

Oracle Sales Erode as Startups Embrace Free Software

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