[HN Gopher] IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can expl...
___________________________________________________________________
IBM creates 24-core Power chip so customers can exploit Oracle
database license
Author : jerryjerryjerry
Score : 220 points
Date : 2022-12-16 06:53 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| ggm wrote:
| If the sell works well enough, Oracle will alter the licence
| terms.
| mrweasel wrote:
| IBM must have felt that there is a market, and one that would
| be able to justify the upgrade. Some spreadsheet must have the
| number that says "This is how how many core at this price
| point, where this product makes more sense than dealing with
| Oracles licensing".
|
| The article does conclude with this interesting observation:
| Be aware that the SE2 license does not offer access to all
| Oracle database features. Oracle's EE license offers
| access to more, and more powerful, features. Which
| makes IBM's statement of general direction a little odd:
| why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database? Big
| Blue still has not responded to our inquiry...
| taspeotis wrote:
| I assume Oracle will just fix this the same way Microsoft did ...
| newer on-prem version of SQL Server are licensed by pair of CPU
| cores.
| selcuka wrote:
| Tomorrow's headline: "Oracle Changes Database SE2 Licensing
| Terms"
| pulse7 wrote:
| You can do this for new license purchases, but not for already
| purchased ones...
| joshspankit wrote:
| I don't have access to the text of the license, but I almost
| guarantee they have a clause in there that specifically says
| they are allowed to change it. Just like 90% of the terms of
| service.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Q: Hello, Oracle support? I'm seeing this bug after your
| latest update...
|
| A: Ah, yes, we are already offering a fix for that bug.
|
| Q: Great! How can I get it?
|
| A: It's in our new upgraded product, Oracle same-as-
| yesterday(TM). And we are offering it to our trusted existing
| customers - free of charge.
|
| Q: Free of charge? That's quite generous of you, how unusual.
|
| A: Yes, the customer is king here at Oracle. You just need to
| sign the license agreement and we can deploy it right away.
| IncRnd wrote:
| That seems like something that happens with ad-hoc
| customers not so much with enterprise customers who have
| purchased support plans (for this reason among others).
| ilyt wrote:
| Do you _really_ think Oracle lawyers didn 't put a clause
| that allows them to do what they want ?
| pulse7 wrote:
| We will get all money from you - for free! ;)
| fomine3 wrote:
| Let's see SE1 drama
| chinabot wrote:
| My LG TV just stopped me using anything on it until I pressed
| agree on the license, nothing to stop Oracle or anyone doing
| this, in fact I guarantee they are drafting the new license
| now
| jzb wrote:
| I wonder if that's part of the point. Increase discontent with
| Oracle licensing practices and nudge some customers off Oracle.
| evilotto wrote:
| Oracle's real pricing model is to sell consulting services.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| How does this exploit Oracle database licensing?
|
| POWER has a 1x core multiple today (meaning, you have to license
| _every_ core).
|
| https://www.oracle.com/assets/processor-core-factor-table-07...
|
| EDIT: Note, I just re-read the article. This is for the Standard
| Edition of the database, which basically has no extra features.
| I've never heard of anyone running Standard Edition except for
| doing local development.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I always wondered, what is the rationale behind pricing certain
| software as "per-CPU"? Why not per machine? I'm guessing it's
| something to do with the size of datacenters and their use of
| virtualization?
| dragontamer wrote:
| The idea is to extract more money from people who can afford
| it.
|
| If someone has a 128-core AMD EPYC, they probably have more
| money that can be extracted than a person with a 16-core
| EPYC.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > The idea is to extract more money
|
| I'm not sure it should be characterized that way.
|
| It's pricing based on value. Clearly, someone running a
| database on a 128-core server is realizing way more value
| than someone running a 4-core server.
|
| So how do you charge where it's far pricing for both the
| 4-core server person and the 128-core server person.
| cduzz wrote:
| Yeah, reading that table, the "hack" would be to use "Intel(r)
| Xeon(r) Platinum 92XX" (or similar high throughput intel
| offering) with an 0.5 multiple.
|
| Does an oracle license pay attention to partial core things
| like hyperthreading or other speculative execution things? If
| so, you'd want to turn that off for the intel offerings.
|
| And run one socket to maximize memory bandwidth.
| fb03 wrote:
| Serious question: Can someone explain to me why would someone
| still be using Oracle in 2022 when we have equally capable or
| even superior open source alternatives like PostgreSQL, which
| have none of these shenanigans? Maybe legacy software that would
| be expensive to rewrite?
|
| I'm a backend developer and I regularly kickstart systems (and
| get to choose which components we are going to use in the stack)
| and I fail to grasp in what kind of project I'd need to be to
| even consider "this might need us to bring Oracle to the table".
| Again, honest to goodness question, looking to learn. Is there
| some edge to Oracle compared to the FOSS stuff that I'm not
| aware?
| buro9 wrote:
| I've seen things written in Oracle 20-30 years ago that I've
| still not seen PostgreSQL or SQL Server do.
|
| An example? A full credit card processor in stored procs. I
| really mean full, it handled the call outs to financial
| providers, managed the 2-phase commit, replied to the app, all
| within a single call (Stripe API is the closest I've seen to
| this in the 30 years since).
|
| It remains possible to do things that are crazy and powerful,
| very quickly.
|
| Whether the people here would want to is a different question.
| But if you are in a large corp and Oracle is available it is
| easy to do crazy things.
|
| Once these things are done, Oracle is going nowhere. They are
| now in your system for the life of your product.
| icedchai wrote:
| Oracle does have quite an impressive set of capabilities.
| However, for every company that absolutely _needs_ Oracle,
| there are probably 10+ that don 't and could work fine with
| PostgreSQL or SQL Server today (though maybe not 20 years
| ago.) I worked in an Oracle shop early in my career, and
| would never want to go back to that again.
| sprayk wrote:
| Curious: what is the version control story like for stored
| procs? The two that naively come to mind would be
|
| 1. Organized in some regular repo with some tooling to
| deploy/sync 2. Some way of tracking versions _in a DB_ and
| some magic set of queries that can deploy from said DB.
| zaphar wrote:
| Not only could you do that in Postgres, but you could do it
| in a real language of your choice. The reason you don't see
| it done is because the people who choose Postgres over Oracle
| know that it's kind of a terrible way to build it if you care
| about long term maintainability.
|
| That method of building fossilizes quicker than quickcrete.
| r00tanon wrote:
| Main reason would be they have a lot of legacy code written for
| Oracle.
|
| For new projects, the choices are wide open.
| cduzz wrote:
| There's a business model of "Give us enough money and we will
| solve all your Foo related problems." Oracle has a widget to
| solve any IT / Data related problem for a naive enterprise
| who's core business is not IT. One vendor, one bill, one
| support contract, assurance that if your board asks you to do
| some other thing (we need a thingawidgit for compliance for our
| peoplethinger! Oracle's got peoplethingerwidget !). Amazon's
| AWS is the same for IT these days. Need a queue? We've got 3!
|
| Interestingly, oracle where I work, where we have a lot of
| oracle, was only 2-3x the cost of our slack license. So either
| slack was absurdly expensive or oracle isn't actually that
| expensive, or possibly both. But we only use oracle DB + some
| support oracle DB widgets, not the whole oracle ecosystem. And
| for us, the oracle DB and the widgets have been actual
| facilitators in our enterprise. Need a CDC system? They've got
| 3!
| sidlls wrote:
| Or you just haven't undergone an Oracle audit yet. From what
| I saw, their business model is entirely predatory.
| csours wrote:
| Oracle offers some integrations that are not found in other
| DBMS products.
|
| If a software product uses those integrations it may be
| difficult to migrate.
|
| Bear in mind that DB code is often not unit tested or
| integration tested outside of manual tests.
|
| This makes moving off of Oracle a huge tech debt burden.
|
| ===
|
| Ask me how I know this
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Usually it's either because your company has built a practice
| around it, more commonly you need Oracle Financials, etc.
|
| Once you have the Oracle infrastructure for Financials,
| PeopleSoft, etc, the question is does it make sense to stand up
| services around the Oracle portion. The cost of the people to
| run Postgres or MS SQL server may be more than the marginal add
| of Oracle.
| plantain wrote:
| Oracle has a much more effective sales team than PostgreSQL. A
| few basketball tickets to the right managers makes all the
| difference.
| lazyfanatic wrote:
| This answer contains more truth in it than any technical
| answer ever will.
| fb03 wrote:
| I see. I guess you are right. The endless Samsara of people
| with a MBA and their churn to keep plates spinning.
| hgsgm wrote:
| sprayk wrote:
| We can all be so blind sometimes to the 8th layer of the OSI
| model.
| ch_123 wrote:
| While there may be reasons to pick Oracle for greenfield
| projects in 2022, I suspect most of the business comes from
| companies which have been on Oracle for a very long time and
| have huge amounts of critical data in it. Oracle has likely
| calibrated their pricing so that it's always slightly cheaper
| to stay on Oracle than to move elsewhere.
| homeland221 wrote:
| Doubt that calibration is the impetus to stay with Oracle.
| Most C-suites are quite dumb when it comes to technical
| stuff. They also don't value technical people more than it is
| just a replaceable organic "machinery". I have seen many
| instances IT advising moving away from Oracle but every
| additional budget to do so (even if it is just time and no
| direct dollars involve) even if just to test feasibility is
| shotdown. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of dollars they
| gladly pay as long as they freely grumble that their staff
| too dependent on Oracle tech.
| hgsgm wrote:
| cduzz wrote:
| Oracle and AWS offer the same offerings at different points
| in the product maturity lifecycle.
|
| Oracle absolutely solves very hard problems, provides
| stability and continuity and is 100% the right solution
| (cost inclusive) for some hard problems.
|
| I'd recommend you recalibrate your judgement of "all thems"
| iwillbenice wrote:
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| > provides stability and continuity and is 100% the right
| solution (cost inclusive) for some hard problems.
|
| What kinds of hard problems? I think a big part of the
| discussion here is centered around the fact that aside
| from legacy software that's exclusively compatible with
| oracle (in which case you're stuck with it) there isn't
| yet a compelling reason to use it otherwise vs. eg;
| postgres w/ a support contract or even something hosted.
|
| FWIW a lot of things people have tried to shoehorn into a
| traditional RDBMS can be accomplished other ways too.
| cdogl wrote:
| A large part of the workforce makes a living maintaining and
| extending systems, not building them. In fact, I call that
| success.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Legacy applications that use mountains of PL/SQL to run
| business logic. It's possible to refactor this, but these
| systems are usually the backbone of things like a semiconductor
| factory, so you don't get a lot of room to play around with
| alternatives. Paying a billion dollars to keep the current
| stack running is worth it for a lot of orgs.
| chasil wrote:
| I heard some time ago that Intel runs the VMS operating
| system on much of its production floor. DEC's relational
| database for this platform was Rdb.
|
| The Rdb database, originally written by DEC, was bought by
| Oracle in the '90s. It was actually the first commercial
| database to implement a "cost-based optimizer."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Rdb
|
| It was purchased by Oracle, is still maintained, and is
| likely on Intel's VMS systems.
|
| https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.htm.
| ..
|
| (I also have an account on a system that runs it.)
| eitland wrote:
| > Serious question: Can someone explain to me why would someone
| still be using Oracle in 2022 when we have equally capable or
| even superior open source alternatives like PostgreSQL, which
| have none of these shenanigans?
|
| Several years ago I asked this to a company that used Oracle
| databases in their products.
|
| I pointed out they could save $10 000 for each installation
| just in licensing, and probably 3 days of intense work to
| install it (yes, this was my main motivation. I was so good at
| it I had absolutely no problems with the advanced DBA training,
| but it still took 1-2 days to set it up the 20th time I did it,
| and if one missed a single step, like to stop one of the
| installers between step 2 and 3 to open a terminal and chmod
| one of the files the installer had just created, you often had
| to start from scratch.)
|
| The answer was enlightening and went something like this:
|
| "The first thing you don't consider is that the license cost is
| paid by our customers, and we get a cut. Switching to Postgres
| would cost us money.
|
| The second thing is that customers see Oracle as a sign of
| quality. It is easier to sell the product when we say it is
| built on Oracle "
| adrr wrote:
| It's not for new development but ERPs which require it. Oracle
| also makes a bunch of ERP platforms.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| You may expand to DB2, IMS etc. The question as usual IT is not
| everything. It is everything to us. But not to business.
|
| For new business.
|
| But most big business started long time ago. If it makes
| business sense to migrate they would. Business sense.
|
| Of course in some it does make sense but it did not. USA tax ?
| debarshri wrote:
| I can tell you from my past experiences, organisation who
| started out with Oracle databases and products have a hard time
| moving away from them to opensource alternatives. The migration
| risk and cost of reskilling is very high. There are actual
| Oracle product experts in organisations who also create
| resistance towards migration as well as rewriting lot of
| business logics and procedures is alot of risk. If you start a
| new company today I'm sure you won't use Oracle database there
| are better alternatives.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| We are using Oracle for something that could fit into SQLite. I
| am sure we overpay by 100x to 1000x. (To be fair, yes FOSS can
| be free as in beer, but big corps need/want to pay for support
| contracts, either directly with the vendor, or indirectly via
| RedHat, etc.) I agree 100% about PG. It is ridiculously good
| these days. To be fair, MariaDB is also very good for most use
| cases in 2022.
|
| I asked the same question at my office. The answer surprised
| me: We are a big corp who pays Oracle squillions of dollars for
| all kinds of licenses (DB, Java, hardware, other stuff). They
| said: If we cut our 20x global DBs from this project, probably
| Oracle will just increase license fees elsewhere. I was told we
| probably need total exit from Oracle DBs (whole company, which
| probably has 1000s of Oracle DBs). That is tough.
|
| Still, it is weird to me that we don't hire 2-5 (10!)
| ridiculously skilled (and expensive) "old school database
| consultants" -- you know what I mean: neckbeards (gents),
| librarian glasses with little chain around neck (ladies), big
| hair (both!), corduroy pants, jackets with elbow patches,
| turtlenecks... the full 1990s package. Move them from team to
| team over next 10 years. Step by step: Replace Oracle with PG
| or MariaDB. I am sure it would pay for itself 100x.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Where I work, our business is mainly based on using our in-
| house legacy system which uses Oracle database for storage.
| Migrating away from Oracle involves completely rewriting the
| legacy system (which I think should have been started many
| years ago) and that costs money. As it happens, we're
| specifically using Oracle Standard Edition in a RAC
| configuration which is nice and cheap. RAC on standard edition
| allows you to use up to 4 physical processor sockets without
| needing to go to Enterprise edition.
|
| One particularly annoying part of Oracle licensing is that if
| you run it on a virtual machine, they require licensing for
| every core on the virtual host - it makes no difference how
| many cores are allocated to the database instance itself.
| _visgean wrote:
| I had a friend working as a project manager for company using
| oracle, i asked him the same question, he said they looked into
| it - if they could get rid of 100m bill they would be happy to
| use anything else but some functionality was not really there.
| cypress66 wrote:
| There is basically 0% chance that they are doing something so
| unique that it is impossible to be done or workarounded with
| other databases.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I agree, but each migration has a small risk of introducing
| bugs. Sometimes subtle bugs. Who is going to be blamed?
| eliaspro wrote:
| It'd be probably a fraction of the costs to hire competent
| developers to implement the missing features in PostgreSQL.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| Given this is the platform we interact on, you are likely a
| competent developer right? Would you apply for that job?
|
| Non-tech company seeking competent developers to move 100s
| of thousands of lines of code and sql scripts written by
| juniors over twenty years from Oracle to Postgres. Must
| have plenty of Oracle experience but also Postgres
| experience. Will have to coordinate with DBAs across
| business units and coerce them to help you in (eventually)
| axing them.
|
| There is no amount of money that would get me to sign up!
| And also I wouldn't trust the current team to interview and
| recruit competent developers!
| twodave wrote:
| Heck yeah I'd sign up for that! Honestly, this is the
| kind of work that can sustain an entire consulting firm.
|
| - It's specialized, so you can charge more for it. And I
| mean come on, we're saving you millions of dollars. I can
| charge you a LOT and everyone still wins.
|
| - It's repetitive, so you can train people to do it and
| then start earning margins as they replicate the process
| across the organization.
|
| - It's even fulfilling. Yeah, I said it. Would you rather
| go work on another to-do app in [pick an obscure fruit or
| animal]-framework for your blog? Count me out of _that_
| crap. Any Oracle DB you work on in the wild is going to
| have an impact on thousands of people--a positive one if
| you do your job well.
| homeland221 wrote:
| "Project manager". That says it all. Do you think existing
| oracle DBAs willing to assist to kill their cushy jobs? Even
| if not complete replacement, partial replacement like
| postgresql would easily slash that 100m bill by several
| millions.....more than enough to hire developers to replicate
| those missing features.
| sidlls wrote:
| I'm not defending Oracle here--far from it, as their sales
| and follow-up audits when you ask for support are purely
| predatory--but a tiny fraction of companies are in a
| business where "hire developers" is a feasible or
| reasonable approach to a problem. You might argue that
| software runs everything, so every company of a size where
| it's reasonable to even consider something like Oracle is
| in that business whether they want to be or not, but that's
| just not how it works.
| nova22033 wrote:
| Lots of COTS products that depend on Oracle for a backend.
| Can't just upgrade to Postgres. The vendor may not have the $$
| to support multiple databases.
|
| Not just COTS...lots of in house systems
| KronisLV wrote:
| I've used Oracle in a number of projects and I'm inclined to
| say that it's passable, but if given the choice I would look at
| alternatives for new projects.
|
| One of the main reasons for this is that setting up local
| instances (even with Oracle XE) for development or CI processes
| (e.g. for full end to end tests, that test the actual database
| layer) is just not as easy as with the alternatives. It might
| scale up well, but it doesn't scale down that nicely at all.
|
| In addition, I had numerous things breaking when attempting to
| export and import some data and setup a local database instance
| for a project that hadn't really been developed with that in
| mind and up until then had just used a shared database for
| multiple developers.
|
| That said, Oracle has some nice features to it, such as
| automatic indexing (which oddly enough doesn't let you manually
| delete those indices, which is annoying), SQL Tuning Advisor in
| SQL Developer, some nice performance tracing and reporting
| functionality, a pretty good procedural language (PL/SQL is up
| there with PL/pgSQL), good performance in many cases (except
| I've had the query optimizer pick the wrong plan and have a
| query take 45 minutes instead of 3 seconds if a hint wasn't
| present) and a lot of enterprise oriented things I don't use or
| need, but someone else might.
|
| Tooling wise, I'd say that it's okay. The SQL Developer tooling
| is okay (maybe apart from their data modeler functionality,
| which corrupts files and breaks), though personally I like
| MySQL Workbench as well and dislike pgAdmin somewhat, so my
| opinions might not be very mainstream. The drivers are
| available and can be installed without too many issues, there
| are relatively few surprises there, outside of maybe how widely
| supported they are (or rather, are not) in certain third party
| open source tools out there, like various migration utilities.
|
| I suspect that many pick Oracle because that's what has worked
| for them in the past, some pick it due to the old adage of
| "Nobody got fired for picking IBM" which can hold true for
| Oracle in certain environments, others have a mindset of free
| being bad, or maybe they are perfectly justified in wanting
| some more support from the vendor.
|
| Frankly, pick whatever fits the task at hand best and is
| suitable for your own needs: be it PostgreSQL, SQL Server,
| Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB or something else altogether. If given
| the choice, I'll personally optimize for technologies that are
| likely to give me the least amount of headaches, as long as
| they still fit the project goals.
|
| That said, comments like this were interesting to behold:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
| cturner wrote:
| It's an enterprise thing. I have seen these dynamics with
| database vendors: databases are sticky, clever license
| agreements.
|
| A commercial database vendor system gave us several free
| licenses (or cores or something like that) for their platform
| as part of a deal. Sounds good at first glance. But when you
| shut down an instance, that returns a license to the free pool.
| As a result, nobody has incentive to ever do this work. Indeed,
| if you did free up a license, one of your colleagues might
| notice and use it on another project. After all, it's free.
|
| The way that databases are commonly used, they become an
| informal API for communication between systems. One codebase
| writes an order to the database, another reads it, and another
| reports on it. Once you this situation, it is difficult to
| remove. That would require coordination between multiple teams,
| and it doesn't generate revenue.
|
| For a piece of software like this, it only needs to get in the
| door once.
| nnurmanov wrote:
| There are differences as these two products have different
| backgrounds, but based on what I see there is strong movement
| from Oracle. It will take sometime for application vendors to
| port their products on open source databases, when this happens
| the landscape will be different.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| No CIO ever got fired for buying... Oracle?
| mickeyp wrote:
| Because despite its predatory pricing and quirks, it's actually
| a pretty good database?
|
| There's an enormous amount of larger businesses for whom the
| database _is_ the business. (Well, databases plural, they'll
| inevitably have many.)
|
| I've worked for places where the vendor of the software that
| sits on top of the DB is either defunct, gone AWOL or too
| pricey to consider upgrading what ever version of software we
| were using.
|
| I worked one place where we had to large hadron collide data
| from Sybase and Oracle together. Live. No batching. The whole
| thing had to plug into some decades old Delphi crud apps + some
| financial software somewhere else.
|
| Oracle + dblink made that possible. It even, as I recall, did
| proper two-phase across the dblink. I merely queried -- yes, I
| know PG kinda has the same feature nowadays -- across the
| database boundaries and wrote some pg/Sql to make things work.
| 10 minutes and $10k (or w/e the Sybase connector cost) later
| and we had a POC, and later that month, a working system.
|
| Pretty? No. But it worked well, and two disparate software
| products written in different eras that were never meant to
| talk to one another now did. And it saves us millions in
| licencing + bespoke software and expensive consultants.
|
| There are few limits to what you can do with Oracle, and that
| is its strength. When you have weirdo requirements, you can
| probably do it with Oracle + some skilled DBAs and be assured
| it'll still run in 20 years.
|
| As for PG: I love PG, and use it for everything greenfield. But
| its replication is still a planet-sized joke. There are more
| competing methods and processes than there are JS frameworks.
| With Oracle, you've got DBAs who know this stuff inside out,
| and it works, and it has a million-billion ways of matching the
| needs of your business. With PG? I don't even know _who to
| call_ if things are up the creek.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It's not really a good database. By most actual database-
| related metrics, it's worse than most of its competitors on
| durability, performance, cost, etc.
|
| It's just one that has people to call when it breaks.
| narrator wrote:
| You can get commercial support for PostgreSQL that's pretty
| good.
| frou_dh wrote:
| From this classic HN comment it sounds like working on the
| Oracle codebase is an exercise in clusterfuckery:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
| seanw444 wrote:
| Sounds like they spend 80% of their CPU cycles checking
| flags...
| nordsieck wrote:
| > it's worse than most of its competitors on durability,
| performance, cost, etc.
|
| When you say competitors, do you mean:
|
| 1. paid competitors like DB2/MSSQL
|
| 2. free competitors like Postgres/MariaDB
|
| 3. both
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I generally mean the free competitors, but also the
| "NewSQL" DBs, cloud company offerings, and data
| warehousing companies. The traditional "enterprise"
| databases like MSSQL and Oracle all look kind of silly
| (from a technical perspective) in comparison.
| trollied wrote:
| I don't think that's true. RAC/data guard are solid, and I
| don't think have any competition.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| RAC's PostgreSQL-based competitors are CockroachDB,
| Amazon Aurora, and Google's AlloyDB. I'm sure there will
| be an open-source PG plugin that does the same thing
| soon. These are all scale-out, globally consistent
| databases. Also, they have fewer bugs than Oracle.
| hans_castorp wrote:
| > I don't think that's true. RAC/data guard are solid,
| and I don't think have any competition.
|
| RAC does not indeed.
|
| But the equivalent of an active data guard can be setup
| in minutes (even less with the right tools) with
| Postgres. I am sure this is possible with other databases
| as well.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It can be setup, but will it work?
| ilyt wrote:
| All your example are pretty much "we already have some old
| ancient shit that works only with Oracle", not actual
| features anyone might miss...
|
| > With PG? I don't even know who to call if things are up the
| creek.
|
| The core developers literally sell support...
| acomjean wrote:
| My only experience with Oracle was we were using it at a
| startup at the turn of the century. I got tasked with
| asking them for a quote. They came back with one but
| offered pretty strong technical support. My boss, wise in
| the way of databases indicated that their support would
| involve using there apis locking us to them as opposed to
| the odbc drivers that let you switch databases easily.
| Those odbc drivers weren't great on Linux at the time.
|
| The startup ran out of money a couple months later..
| dagw wrote:
| _The core developers literally sell support..._
|
| One 'feature' Oracle has, that is very important to some
| large companies, is that they offer truly full stack
| support, from the hardware up to the application layer. If
| I buy support from some PG developers and they diagnose
| that the problem is actually with my RAID controller
| firmware or a bug in my inventory management software, will
| they still take responsibility for fixing it?
|
| Edit: Another aspect is how long will it take for one of
| those PG core developers to show up on site? Oracle already
| has a team of support engineers (either first or third
| party) in most major cities in the world.
| lazyfanatic wrote:
| Oracle Support has gotten absolutely terrible over the
| last four years. I support a full Oracle stack, and
| seeing all that beautiful Sun engineering turned to
| sludge because of poor support is really sad in many
| ways.
| nnurmanov wrote:
| It is true. I am building brainpick.co.uk as a
| Stackoverflow for enterprise. Yes, it is paid and the
| money goes to experts.
| pantulis wrote:
| Great insights there. I would add that enterprise CIOs paying
| Oracle through the nose are not idiots, and would have
| analysed the tradeoffs. Of course there is no company that
| does not have a migration plan for its workloads but, like
| mainframe migrations, this stuff is not easy and it could
| very possibly not make sense.
| cduzz wrote:
| For a large set of problem spaces you can replace "oracle"
| with "cisco" or "microsoft" or "AWS".
|
| These companies demand a premium over "rolling your own" or
| "integrating a pile of better at solving a specific
| problem" products. In some cases the premium is well
| earned, in others it's just rent-seeking monopolist
| behavior, depending on how mature the product space is.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Nitpick: Rent-seeking is an economic term that describes
| an actor that provides no value for end users. It is not
| a synonym for someone who rents you something.
|
| It's confusing because it can apply to landlords who also
| seek to restrict supply, and people then conflate the
| former with the term.
|
| Of those companies listed, maybe you can finger Oracle
| for their shenanigans with Java.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Of those companies listed, maybe you can finger Oracle
| for their shenanigans with Java.
|
| Oracle licensing on the cloud can be byzantine. In part
| because their sales people don't seem to all have the
| same understanding.
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/data-architecture-
| blo...
|
| (read the comments!)
|
| Of course, license true-ups in my experience are allowed
| the latitude of, "Whatever you can get them to agree to".
| I've heard a few times Oracle sales folks trying to
| pressure companies into buying licenses for all physical
| machine cores for the host underneath their VM's in the
| cloud. Which is, frankly, malarkey and not even supported
| by their own docs. (Apparently this is how it is licensed
| on-prem if you own a VMWare cluster or something, but
| they carve out an exemption specifically for cloud
| hosting in their docs - but they try anyways)
| cduzz wrote:
| The far end of this continuum is CA Technologies where
| they buy products with an entrenched customer base and
| squeeze them for money while putting the product on
| "sustaining engineering" (aka hospice care).
|
| On the continuum of "innovative product solving hard
| problem" to "Rent seeing monopoly" AWS is still in the
| "build the mouse trap" phase while oracle's half way to
| CA.
| api wrote:
| It reminds me of people who pay through the nose for cloud.
| They've done the spreadsheets and DIYing servers and
| infrastructure and hiring the people required to
| administrate it often comes out as more expensive. It's
| much worse for companies that are not tech companies with
| lots of in-house IT experience. They often lack the
| institutional expertise to even hire the right people to
| manage a DIY infrastructure. So it makes perfect sense to
| outsource to AWS and pay what seem like very high costs.
| You're not really buying the compute. You're buying the
| management.
| mickeyp wrote:
| Indeed. It's easy to laugh at CIOs and CTOs, but many of
| them try their best with the options they have available.
|
| I'm reminded of this anecdote I had with a colleague a
| while back. He was railing against MS Exchange's rise back
| in the 90s, and how Novell Netware was better and that he
| was forced to switch their org to MS Exchange, back then,
| solely because "His CIO read it was the future in a
| magazine."
|
| And so it was. Today, Netware's dead.
| ilyt wrote:
| Marketing to decision makers is true and tested method to
| make inferior product popular tho
| naasking wrote:
| > solely because "His CIO read it was the future in a
| magazine." And so it was. Today, Netware's dead.
|
| Could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, and not
| something that would have happened without CIOs reading
| that magazine.
| owl57 wrote:
| Could be. That would mean it was good judgement to read
| the magazine that the other CIOs were also reading.
| naasking wrote:
| I'm not sure sprinting towards a self-fulfilling prophecy
| should count as good judgment. It seems like there's a
| fallacy in there.
| aserafini wrote:
| It makes sense if the self-fulfilling prophecy is outside
| your control.
| pantulis wrote:
| Yeah, it's called "marketing" :D
| nradov wrote:
| The magazine wasn't wrong. NetWare was a real mess
| architecturally. The core file and printer sharing
| features worked great. But as an application server for
| email, database, or anything else it was a dead end. No
| memory protection, no real multitasking, bizarre
| proprietary API, terrible developer tools. One of the
| major relational database vendors did actually port their
| product to NetWare but it was a flop in the market.
|
| Novell eventually tried to catch up by grafting their
| proprietary networking features onto Unix but that was
| too little, too late. The CIOs who started migrating off
| of NetWare early were the smart ones.
| therealcamino wrote:
| I agree completely. But man, it was pretty amazing as a
| file server for DOS machines. You could boot a roomful of
| diskless PCs over ethernet from a 386 server, and for
| most uses the speed felt like you had a local hard drive
| in each one.
| hackandthink wrote:
| Novell was no fun.
|
| I ported a C++ server and struggled with the only
| available C++ Compiler for Novell (Watcom). Debugging
| meant staring at core dumps. Novell bought SUSE too late.
| hans_castorp wrote:
| > With PG? I don't even know who to call if things are up the
| creek.
|
| There are plenty of companies offering commercial support
| contracts. Most of them are also active contributors to
| Postgres so they do have the ability to create bug fixes and
| patches.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Existing systems. Migrating large mission critical systems with
| lots of SQL is surprisingly complex and expensive. Not only
| will they be tied to Oracle they are probably tied to a
| specific version that costs a fortune to be maintained.
| narrator wrote:
| I did a migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL and saved a ton
| of money. I'm happy to say that automated integration tests
| for everything made cutting over not too bad. The other thing
| that helped was PostgreSQL consultants to plan and execute
| the data migration.
| jrumbut wrote:
| It speaks to a marketing failure anyway. Shouldn't we be
| getting reminded of whatever that situation is where an Oracle
| database would be useful? Even if it's just compliance or
| political ("if you want a military contract, you'd better say
| you're using Oracle").
|
| I remember years ago certain features (materialized views,
| maybe?) were Oracle-only, but Postgres has more of those now
| and I'm not sure what's left.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| username_my1 wrote:
| The answer I got from a head of IT of a medium size traditional
| company is that they have shitloads of processes, scripts,
| server calls all running without anyone of the people who wrote
| them on board anymore... they all work perfectly together,
| transactions are always guaranteed.
|
| Their job is simply to understand the machine itself rather
| than the software and make sure they keep it running
| matchagaucho wrote:
| The "rip and replace" costs far exceed maintaining an existing
| Oracle stack for many businesses.
|
| Nouveau DB projects and tech companies undoubtedly lean towards
| FOSS options.
|
| The IBM solution is aimed at those maintaining an existing
| stack.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Do you have the same question about SQL Server, or is it just
| Oracle you're asking about?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| > honest to goodness question, looking to learn.
|
| Awesome. I have probably dozens of posts over the years about
| why one would choose Oracle, so I won't rehash it all right
| here, but I'll link some relevant ones. Briefly though:
|
| > in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open
| source alternatives
|
| This isn't really true. Postgres is a truly excellent RDBMS,
| but most people compare it at a rather superficial level,
| because many use only very superficial features. If you need to
| insert, select, update, and delete, you have a lot of
| compelling options. (This can easily veer off in another
| direction, but I astounds me how many people shun the database
| and chose to reimplement innate features in procedural code
| outside of the database.) For example: Oracle has an extremely
| richly featured, powerful, and stable data warehousing feature
| set that has no open source analog.
|
| A lot boils down to build vs buy. Some places build because
| it's exciting. Some don't even know that the thing being built
| has existed for three decades. This applies equally to open
| source. It's entirely possible that a materialized view will
| obviate your whole external caching infrastructure.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068341
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246208
| larrik wrote:
| My first time using Oracle, I was trying to migrate magazine
| articles to a different DB system. Oracle "helpfully" and
| silently truncated the magazine content at a certain size,
| leaving most of the articles unfinished. The Oracle experts
| were incapable of producing a dump or report of the raw
| articles. So, I tried myself. I tried multiple tools, and
| every single one would truncate the field regardless of my
| settings, except for one. The Java ODB driver gave me the
| whole thing. So, I had to write a Java program to extract it
| for me.
|
| In the end I learned that Oracle can't even output it's own
| data properly, even with the help of experts. I also got to
| learn what installing Oracle software was a really like (it
| was brutal).
|
| So, no, I would not recommend Oracle to anyone, ever.
| gcanyon wrote:
| Disclaimer: this happened over twenty years ago.
|
| 1. I worked with developers trying to implement a UI using
| Oracle's app-builder of the time (Oracle Forms? I don't
| remember). The devs spent an entire summer, _with Oracle
| support_ , just trying to get the system set up and
| configured to build "Hello World." They gave up and we
| abandoned the project.
|
| 2. I needed to install an Oracle product on my computer. I
| had an Oracle provided CD. The install was non-obvious:
| multiple install files with multiple options and ways to
| get it wrong. On the CD was a set of help files, with an
| app to view them. The app did not default to showing the
| help files: you had to select which base file to start
| with. The choice was not obvious. There were broken links
| in the help system -- meaning links that tried to point to
| other files _on the CD_ that weren 't there.
|
| In short: Oracle -- not even once.
| toast0 wrote:
| > This can easily veer off in another direction, but I
| astounds me how many people shun the database and chose to
| reimplement innate features in procedural code outside of the
| database.
|
| I've done this from time to time, and it's usually a question
| of the database clients are much easier to scale than the
| database. What can the clients do to reduce database i/o and
| cpu, because I can add more clients easily, but turning a
| database into a cluster is relatively more difficult, so
| database machines have to scale up instead.
|
| Otoh, the limits of machine scaling are quite high these
| days. You can get a single socket epyc with 64 cores and 3TB
| of ram and tons of lanes of nvme.
| mcronce wrote:
| 96 cores and 6TB per socket with Genoa!
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Ironically a factor in that scaling question historically
| has been cost of the database license. You may be able to
| technically scale the database server to handle the load
| but it will generate a multiple person-year type cost
| inflation of the license fee.
|
| Leading us perfectly back to the topic of this post!
| vgt wrote:
| Can you help us understand why one would use a data warehouse
| from Oracle as opposed to a plethora of arguably far better
| options like snowflake, BigQuery, and so on.
| dagw wrote:
| Aren't those both cloud only products that require you to
| send your data to third party servers (quite possibly in
| another country)? In some cases that is a hard no.
| vgt wrote:
| That's fair for some (I say niche) use cases. Both
| BigQuery and Snowflake have a plethora of security and
| compliance features (including ML-driven automatic PII
| identification, masking, and categorization), and they
| certainly do not move data to another country without
| your explicit direction.
| [deleted]
| dagw wrote:
| _they certainly do not move data to another country
| without your explicit direction._
|
| I was thinking more along the lines of them not having
| servers in my country, so I have to send my data abroad
| if I want to use the service at all.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| BigQuery can cost a fortune. Our data engineer messed up
| once by not time partioning the DB and it racked up a ~10K
| USD bill in a month due to the high number of queries that
| were running on it.
| vgt wrote:
| As a former PM on BigQuery, I'll offer my perspective:
|
| - I agree that, by default, the on-demand pricing model
| is pure consumption, and folks can and do mess up
| sometimes.
|
| - I had a habit of refunding folks when they asked, and
| if they made obvious mistakes, even though it took me an
| average of 3-4 hours to process each refund.
|
| - BigQuery has cost controls to prevent runaway costs,
| sounds like you must check it out ASAP
|
| - BigQuery also has a DDL option to require users to
| include a partition filter predicate in queries
|
| - BigQuery also has flat-rate pricing, on which the vast
| majority of folks above SMB on. There are no runaway
| costs with this one.
|
| I think generally BigQuery is a great example of an
| extreme serverless consumption-model. You have thousands
| of cores at your fingertips, and, well, if you do
| something that overuses, you are allowed, but you do pay
| for it.
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| Not to poop all over what you said, but I went through the
| history of some the previous comments you made to communicate
| the power and features of Oracle and I have simple question
| to ask you: Is it possible you are unfamiliar with the full
| features and capabilities of Postgresql?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Like what?
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| You seem to be talking about what Postgres doesn't have
| as an argument for choosing Oracle. This hasn't really
| shown why postgres was a poor choice or why Oracle was
| the better one.
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| Picking one of your previous comments at random where you
| use the examples of pattern matching and analytic
| functions... yea postgresql does that too.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Why did you leave out the thing it doesn't have? That's
| what we're talking about, after all.
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/DWHSG/sqlmodel.htm#D
| WHS...
| zaphar wrote:
| What thing, I looked briefly through your link and didn't
| see anything that I can't get via Postgres. I'm sure
| there are probably some very niche things that work
| differently and make Oracle a compelling choice,n but you
| haven't actually listed one yet.
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| They for some reason are refusing to prove the
| affirmative of their statement that there are things
| Oracle can do that Postgres cannot; which leads back to
| my original question, that they may simply not know
| Postgres.
| braingenious wrote:
| I think they mentioned SQL modelling being part of the
| core software.
| slt2021 wrote:
| 1. oracle's query planner/optimizer is smarter and more
| efficient, especially with complex query. postgres for
| quite some time did not do well with nested, lateral
| queries with CTEs that include views - it's performance
| would randomly degrade on complex queries, which is rarer
| thing in oracle world.
|
| CTE expression is an optimization fence in postgres,
| which is not the case in oracle.
|
| 2. oracle does not need vacuum, unlike postgres
|
| 3. postgres has problems with many concurrent
| connections, thats why you need workarounds like
| pgbouncer. Oracle doesnt need that.
|
| And same picture with almost any other feature - it is
| sort of "works" in postgres - but with
| crutches/workarounds, while in Oracle - stuff just works
| out of the box.
|
| You dont need to search and install some obscure
| opensource extension to get the thing you want working,
| like you do in postgres world. and then keep updating
| that extension with every new version, etc
| scalatohaskell wrote:
| > CTE expression is an optimization fence in postgres,
| which is not the case in oracle.
|
| generally not true since PG12
| Tsarbomb wrote:
| Just curious how you are certain of the better
| performance and behaviour of Oracle given that Oracle
| does not allow disclosing of benchmarks without prior
| consent from them?
| slt2021 wrote:
| > CTE is optimization fence in postgres, which is not the
| case in oracle
| carlmcqueen wrote:
| Oracle people tend to be heavy oracle people too.
|
| At the bank I worked before 2019 at I was on a advanced
| analytic team, we had this amazing teradata database and
| then there were these insanely fast (yet older) IBM DB2
| databases and then there was a few big oracle databases.
|
| We did amazing things with teradata + DB2 and then a
| leader who was tired of multiple databases asked us to
| vote, we chose teradata so we went with oracle and the
| migration was so bad I left.
| radiator wrote:
| This is most probable. Oracle specialists tend to be people
| who have been working with Oracle and Oracle only for the
| past years, if not decades. They could never possibly have
| a knowledge of the full functionality of Postgres, which
| coincidentally changes rapidly.
| rconti wrote:
| Couldn't this also be said about, say, Postgres
| specialists?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| On the move, but I'll respond shortly
| burnte wrote:
| > Awesome. I have probably dozens of posts over the years
| about why one would choose Oracle, so I won't rehash it all
| right here, but I'll link some relevant ones
|
| Unfortunately Oracle has become far to aggressive in lawsuit
| for a lot folks like me to ever be comfortable building
| anything with their products. Same for SalesForce, I just
| killed a project that we wasted $200k on but we'll save a lot
| more killing it rather than becoming dependent on SF next
| year. Oracle gets you over barrel, then charges you through
| the nose when they know you're in too deep to move. Their
| products are great, but the companies themselves are too
| dangerous to work with.
| oneplane wrote:
| I imagine that some of the choices to lean into the RDBMS
| specifics also come from application architectures and data
| complexities.
|
| If you have a few large monolithic applications that share
| multiple schemas (so no single-owner), and you then need to
| do classic OLAP, OLTP and cubing, you're essentially stuck
| with database solutions from the same era. Same goes for
| record-oriented software and mainframes or low level rtos
| software that requires real mode. The requirements never
| stand on their own (which is pretty much what you wrote
| anyway ;-)
|
| If a BI solution can do gRPC to a few specific services that
| contain the datasources for the dimensions you need, then
| nearly all OLAP-native features are irrelevant. It also means
| that the dynamic resource usage means that your overall cost
| in terms of energy and money are significantly lower.
|
| The big 'if' in all of those is going to be 'does the
| organisation have the skills and the willpower', and often
| the answer is no. Because hiring some MSP to do your BI, data
| management and have some single vendor do your ERP, EHRM, ESB
| on top of some RDBMS "sounds" good and means it's their
| responsibility, and when a user then sends them a support
| ticket about how crappy their UX is and how much the workflow
| sucks, they will get ignored and somewhere in some expensive
| place, old grey men shake hands on yet another successful
| quarter ;-)
| olivermuty wrote:
| Diplomatic preface: I think Oracle is a pretty darn good
| database just so thats said.
|
| Opinion: Why would you say there is no open source analog to
| the Oracle DWH setup? CitusDB has been able to replicate the
| mix and match of OLAP and OLTP for quite a while now. In my
| time as an architect in MSFT we were competing (and
| successfully too) with CitusDB and Postgres against bespoke
| complex Exadata setups already a few years ago, and CitusDB
| just keeps getting better as they integrate more and more
| options for working with columnar data.
|
| Oracle just straight up ignores all the goodness that has
| come out of modern operating systems and still tries to
| peddle Exadata setups with custom hardware nodes and whatnot
| when a large swathe of those problems can be solved
| horizontally instead of vertically.
|
| If your business is a thin layer around a finely tuned Oracle
| setup then ofc it becomes pretty stupid to suggest moving off
| that and into Postgres in any kind of less-than-five-years
| project. I would say though that for new projects it is most
| likely cheaper to either hire postgres experts to replace
| your oracle experts or just let your Oracle gurus forget all
| the vendor specific tuning you don't really focus that much
| on in Postgres than it is to pay for Oracle.
| dagw wrote:
| _Is there some edge to Oracle compared to the FOSS stuff that I
| 'm not aware?_
|
| One is that there is still a lot of third party (or in house)
| software out there that doesn't support any of the FOSS
| databases for its backend. So if you depend on one of those
| tools then you're not only replacing Oracle, but a bunch of
| additional software as well. In fact very few people choose
| Oracle in a vacuum. They 'choose' one of these software
| platforms and then end up with Oracle. Every time I've worked
| with Oracle it was because we wanted to/had to use some
| software that had to use Oracle.
|
| Another point is that there are very few really large
| PostgreSQL database deployments out there and very few people
| who have any experience working with huge Postgres databases,
| while Oracle has been doing that for a long time. If you need
| 100s of TB in a data warehouse there are hardly any FOSS
| systems out there with any sort of track record, while for
| Oracle it is their bread and butter.
|
| That being said, the only people I know still deploying new
| Oracle systems today are people supporting legacy systems. Even
| the former pro Oracle people I know are using Postgres these
| days for almost everything, if only to get away from Oracle's
| licensing bullshit.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I agree 100% with the "100s of TB" comment. More: If you find
| a bug in the database, they will fix it ASAP -- sometimes 24
| hours or less then will send a patch. (I have seen it more
| than once in my career, and I am not a super databasey
| person.) Of course, you pay dearly, but _that part_ is good
| value for businesses where "the DB is the biz". Businesses
| that come to mind are telco, utilities (elec, water, gas,
| etc.), retail/commercial banks, insurance, hospitals, pharma,
| universities, gov't. In the extreme, they can generate TBs of
| data _per day_.
| flaviut wrote:
| > If you find a bug in the database, they will fix it ASAP
| -- sometimes 24 hours or less then will send a patch
|
| On the other hand, there's this legendary description of
| what working at Oracle is like:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| what does that gotta do with what he said?
| flaviut wrote:
| How are they going to send a patch in 24 hours if their
| test suite takes 20 to 30 hours for a single execution,
| and any given change causes 100-1000 tests to fail?
| kneebonian wrote:
| Counterpoint. I had a client that used a non-DB oracle
| product that was a barely functional monstrosity that
| required the client to keep around a windows XP XM to run a
| version of IE that could access the console. They spent 3
| years trying to upgrade to the new version, even had Oracle
| professional services come in to help them with the
| migration, and they couldn't upgrade because the new
| version of the product was unusable because of bugs and
| performance, and the old version was a barely functional
| turd that had to be restarted multiple times a day.
|
| At the end of it all after a multi-year (expensive)
| engagement Oracle basically just said "That sucks LOL make
| sure your payment isn't late". So maybe for the DB they are
| responsive but generally I've found their willingness to
| help customers similar to a lions willingness to help a
| wounded gazelle.
| whatthesmack wrote:
| I'm right there with you on PostgreSQL's impressiveness... I
| love it and use it everywhere.
|
| However, having done a decent amount of database performance
| analysis, there is a very good reason I've seen to use Oracle
| instead of anything else:
|
| Oracle scales more consistently linearly on the biggest variety
| of workloads compared to any other RDBMS. Give it more cores
| and it is the RDBMS most likely to give you more performance no
| matter what you're doing.
| VHRanger wrote:
| There hasn't been reliable benchmarks to that effect.
|
| In fact, Oracle and MS SQL specifically disallow posting
| benchmark comparisons publicly
| bityard wrote:
| I imagine a lot of HNers don't really understand the scope of
| what Oracle offers in the enterprise setting. This question is
| like asking: why would anyone still be using AWS in 2022 when
| OpenStack is available for free?
|
| Yes, PostgreSQL is an impressive piece of software and it
| certainly deserves all the praise it gets. But the complexity
| of many mid- to large-sized businesses, particularly those in
| high-stakes finance and bio/medical tech is impossible to
| imagine until you've seen it.
|
| Years back, I worked in a mid-size finance company whose
| computing infrastructure was three identical datacenters
| scattered across the city. One hot, two standby for DR. All
| populated with big expensive IBM iron and storage with fast
| network and fiber channel links between them. All writes were
| continuously and automatically replicated to all three sites so
| that even a complete outage at one site meant the workloads
| could be shifted to another site with virtually no interruption
| to the business. All of the business logic was written in-house
| in a variety of languages (but mostly Java) and there were a
| half-dozen separate teams that existed ONLY to manage the
| infrastructure. An outage could legitimately cost the company
| millions of dollars (depending on the scope) in either lost
| opportunity, customer sales, or regulatory fines.
|
| I was on the Unix Admin team and not counting the toxic
| management, the scope of our jobs was relatively easy:
| provision computing resources as LPARs or VMs, manage storage,
| manage users and permissions, make sure backups worked,
| automate the shit out of whatever we could, troubleshoot
| issues, interface with vendors, etc.
|
| The DBAs who sat in the next row over had much harder jobs.
| They did many of the same things we did, but in the context of
| Oracle DBs. In addition, they also had to be experts in SQL and
| schema design, PLUS understand the business decisions
| underlying the data and structure of the databases they were
| responsible for. Which sometimes meant arguing with the
| application developers who didn't grok the platforms their code
| was running on had finite amounts of RAM, etc.
|
| I don't have any love for Oracle as a company, but they just
| don't have any competition when it comes to deep integration
| with highly complex enterprise systems like this.
| jmull wrote:
| For my company it's the massive cost and difficulty of
| rewriting a major portion of the codebase of a 20-something
| year old successful product.
|
| It's been attempted a few times over the years, but gets
| canceled once management realizes the actual cost and
| difficulty.
| friendzis wrote:
| 1. Sales. Oracle will sell you not only the database engine,
| but also spec hardware, Cloud Control and similar things.
| Essentially they sell consulting and appliance in one package.
| This can sound like a good deal to management, detached from
| boots on the ground, in larger companies.
|
| 2. Support and guarantees. Postgres comes with no exrpress
| liabilities while Oracle offers some guarantees. Data loss
| being "their problem" can be a nice clause for business people.
|
| 3. Legacy projects. Migrating schemas between engines is
| usually doable exercise. Migrating application logic can be
| multi-year project for a decently sized, capable team.
|
| 3.1. Cross-project dependencies. Exchanging data via database
| rather than APIs is more common than one might think. Changing
| database engine in such circumstances becomes exponentially
| harder the more projects are involved.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| AFAIK, Oracle also offers large discount/kickbacks for the
| chief, who knows to negotiate.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Exchanging data via database rather than APIs is more
| common than one might think.
|
| I heard Kevlin Henney call databases "one huge global
| variable"
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Vendor lockin. For example I know soutwest airlines uses oracle
| [clusters, relplicas, etc]. You are going to upgrade them to
| PostgreSQL? I just don't see that, happening, well, ever.
| exabrial wrote:
| > I regularly kickstart systems
|
| You should absolutely start with a minimal stack and Postgres
| is a good choice for that. Everyone likes to pretend that
| scaling is their problem because it's a sexy problem to have...
| but really their problem is that the product doesn't exist.
|
| Postgres cannot hold a candle to Oracle or even DB2 when it
| comes to scale. I've worked at two places did real-time
| transaction processing on gigunda IBM mainframes. One was
| Oracle and the other was DB2... This was 15 years ago and the
| databases were terabytes in size back then... all queryable in
| milliseconds. Backups, restoration, and schema changes while
| the system is running is not an issue... And these systems
| simply did not go down, ever.
| kubota wrote:
| FWIW there are several horizontally scaleable relational
| databases out there (Cockroach, Yugabyte) compatible with pg
| wire protocol. So you can mostly keep your application
| queries / driver the same and move to a horizontal solution
| easier than if you were on Oracle. I don't think Oracle has a
| horizontally scaling solution. Might be wrong though.
| elorant wrote:
| Because when something doesn't work you can pick up the phone
| and call someone at Oracle. Who would you call when you have
| problems with Postgres?
| bombcar wrote:
| People say you can buy commercial support for Postgres - and
| you can - buy someone who has not seen full enterprise
| support from the likes of Oracle or even IBM would be amazed.
|
| When your database is down and you're a major bank and losing
| millions a minute, Oracle can respond appropriately.
| HunOL wrote:
| If core of your business is not IT you can not be fired for
| selecting Oracle.
| cerved wrote:
| Large companies typically run ERP and related systems on
| Oracle. Supply chain, finance, hr etc. These system were often
| implemented decades ago and companies are reluctant to poke
| around that.
|
| It's also very likely implemented by some consultants and I
| wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of weird Oracle specific
| functionality used. Convoluted stored procedures that nobody
| understands and nobody touches because then it probably breaks.
|
| Oracle also has a very aggressive sales organization. They will
| defend their accounts. That might be with carrots like
| discounts. It may also be with sticks, like licensing audits.
| xmcqdpt2 wrote:
| Often the consulting was done... by Oracle itself!
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| I've seen Oracle 1000 times for ERP.
| bombcar wrote:
| Anyone who hasn't used an ERP would be amazed in good and
| bad ways by it.
|
| We think people using the slightly older version of HTTPS
| is weird - ERP systems are often so old that the grandkids
| of whoever started writing it are retiring.
|
| Oracle has things like "pretend to be a version of the
| database from 20 years ago so this weird load-bearing piece
| of software doesn't break."
|
| The only thing I know of that comes close is Windows itself
| with its shins and Linus's absolute refusal to break
| userspace.
| benreesman wrote:
| I think it's less interesting that a bunch of people hate Oracle
| and more interesting that IBM is still making good chips.
| sprayk wrote:
| Indeed. They are pretty big into cutting edge CPU design. I've
| seen some pretty cool system architecture coming from them as
| well. e.g. their cache setups on z mainframes[0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6u_oNIXFuU&t=577s
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Indeed, if I had the time to run two workstations side-by-side,
| I'd be looking at building a POWER9 workstation.
| matja wrote:
| I hoped this would explain the anomaly in AMD EPYC 3rd gen Milan
| pricing for the 24 core "F" (frequency optimized) parts being
| cheaper than the 16 core ones, but I still can't see any hint to
| the reason: model | cores | price |
| 73F3 | 16 | $3521 | 74F3 | 24 | $2900 | <-
| cheapest 75F3 | 32 | $4860 |
|
| Same for 4th gen Genoa : model | cores | price
| | 9174F | 16 | $3850 | 9274F | 24 | $3060
| | <- cheapest 9374F | 32 | $4850 |
|
| The 24-core parts have the same number of CCDs, and thus same
| total L3 cache, and a higher turbo than the 32-core parts.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Just use Postgres lol
| steve1977 wrote:
| Are there many customers running Oracle on POWER systems? My gut
| feeling would have been these are typically DB2 customers.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| My previous employer ran Oracle on POWER. Is still running,
| actually.
| ido wrote:
| I'm surprised anyone is even use POWER at all still, I assumed
| it's all x64 or custom ARM (like Amazon's) by now!
| jimnotgym wrote:
| I would say you would find a significant number of Oracle DBs
| still running on SPARC, so why not POWER!
| steve1977 wrote:
| Because SPARC is kind of home turf for Oracle. POWER is
| enemy territory ;)
| dagw wrote:
| IBM at least used to be the second biggest Oracle
| reseller/consulting/support shop, after Oracle itself.
| IBM just wants your money and will give you anything you
| ask for.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| It isn't the chip architecture that people are buying. It is
| the hardware that gets asymptotically close to Tandem- and
| System z-like features that you cannot yet get on x86- and
| ARM-based gear. Lots of HN folks like to throw shade on AIX,
| but if you have someone who is dead serious on obtaining
| near-mainframe-grade RAS on "a Unix" and is willing to write
| the checks for it, the check is smaller on POWER systems
| running AIX than trying to effectively roll your own under
| x86 or ARM systems running whatever Linux distribution you
| care to choose.
|
| It just so happens that in the vast majority of use cases,
| x86 or ARM systems running Linux are good enough for the
| business purposes. The first few times you run into the
| situation, you'd be amazed what losses and risks business
| will tolerate when faced with the costs to mitigate that last
| 0.1% of profit optimization.
|
| In absolute numbers there are way more commas than the
| average HN'er retirement portfolio in that last 0.1%. But
| when it will cost almost the same in the first 3-5 years of
| migrating to AIX than that number, the IRR payout timeline is
| way longer than most businesses will tolerate. And most
| managers are savvy enough to understand the teething pains in
| the meantime are a career-limiting move.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I mean I get it if you want to run AIX for some reason, but
| with Oracle RAC, you get the availability basically with
| commodity hardware - that was the whole selling point of
| RAC initially.
| steve1977 wrote:
| PS: Of those who do run it on POWER, how many have only a SE2
| license (where the number of cores is not relevant)?
| jerryjerryjerry wrote:
| I like the subtitle LOL: "Big Red doesn't charge more when users
| add cores, so Big Blue plans to triple the count. Because why
| not?"
| bayindirh wrote:
| This is classic The Register tone, which I like a lot. Also, I
| missed these kinds of moves between vendors...
|
| BTW, BOFH[0] is a great The Register series if you want more of
| it.
|
| [0]: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/
| e3bc54b2 wrote:
| Thanks for BOFH. Whole series is genius!
| chasil wrote:
| BOFH is older than the Register.
|
| "The BOFH stories were originally posted in 1992 to
| Usenet..."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell
|
| "The Register was founded in London as an email newsletter
| called Chip Connection. In 1998 The Register became a daily
| online news source."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Register
| bitwize wrote:
| Kind of reminds me of tech Variety:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egpWCC2svVo
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I remember the old joke about oracle pricing spreadsheets. Lots
| of sliders to adjust the parameters. But no matter what you did
| the price would always increase.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I think i saw a flash cartoon with something like that... turn
| the slider right, price goes up, move the slider back left,
| price goes even higher :)
| intelVISA wrote:
| Flash cartoon? That's the front-end for Oracle Cloud.
| privateprofile wrote:
| I have the opposite experience, where Oracle would allow/offer
| discounts up to 80% of their price list, making the actual list
| pretty much useless...
| j_not_j wrote:
| Initial price is discounted yes.
|
| But annual "support" fees are still 20% (or is it 25% now?)
| of list price.
| Havoc wrote:
| Always thought this was a joke until I tried oracle cloud. You
| could create SKUs that don't exist on the PDF price list,
| multiple versions of said PDFs and ultimately the most reliable
| source of pricing was a community compiled list on some shitty
| forum.
|
| 200bn market cap company ladies & gents
|
| In fairness though - they have a great free tier (if you can
| live with the arbitrary account terminations)
| toyg wrote:
| _> 200bn market cap company ladies & gents_
|
| This is precisely _how_ they are such a giant.
|
| Rule n.1 of sales: you should charge the highest price the
| customer can bear. By keeping things fuzzy, they can
| bamboozle you at will, making you pay not what you expect,
| but what you _can_.
| bionsystem wrote:
| We've had a bunch of VMWare clusters consisting of 5-6 servers
| each, maybe something like 2x16 cores or 2x32 cores for each
| server and 384 to 768Go of RAM, I'm not sure about the
| specifics.
|
| We had VMs running a few Oracle databases, nothing much more
| than 2 cores 16Gb or 4 cores 32Gb, the vast majority (90%+) of
| our databases were running Sybase, and half the resources were
| for the app, so something like 5% of those clusters were Oracle
| dbs.
|
| We were paying Sybase maybe 100k a year for the entire
| datacenter, and so we expected to pay something between 10k and
| 100k for Oracle (remember, for 1/20th of the compute and with a
| developer license because we were not hosting client
| production).
|
| We asked for a quote to Oracle, they came back a week later
| with a 520 million dollar bill, more than the revenue of our
| entire company. It was never paid of course but this shows how
| absolutely ridiculous their template is for billing. The
| reasoning is well known now, a 2 core database can run on
| potentially 6 servers * 32 cores * 2 threads per core = 384
| possible cores, so if you have 2 or 3 databases you can
| potentially get billed a license for 1000 cores (and actually
| running 6 non-production database = 0 service on their part
| because if it breaks you just redeploy it, it's faster than
| opening a support ticket).
| bombcar wrote:
| Part of that is playing the game; Oracle knows to come in
| high on the quote so the CTO can negotiate them down from
| batshit insane to simply eye wateringly painful. Looks great
| on the year end report!
| userbinator wrote:
| This reminds me of the QDI TwinMagic, an adapter that would let
| you use two CPUs in a single-socket motherboard:
| http://www.hardware-one.com/img1/mb7.jpg
| thomasfl wrote:
| I'd rather prefer to use the IvorySQL open source Oracle
| compatible PostgreSQL distribution.
| ilyt wrote:
| Yeah Oracle will just change license if that would in any way
| impact their bottom line
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Remember when people used Oracle for databases? Pepperidge Farm
| remembers.
| swarnie wrote:
| I still do for almost everything, a lot of middleware
| applications too.
|
| Good PL/SQL devs are getting a little rarer these days but its
| manageable.
| abraae wrote:
| Same, it all depends on your costs, if you are SaaS and have
| a dev team that knows Oracle then why not use it, it's not
| going anywhere, it's hugely reliable and it will definitely
| scale up vertically as high as anyone. And plsql is a much
| underrated technology.
|
| On the other hand if your product involves on-site deployment
| then Oracle is most likely not going to stack up.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Probably the same people still do, but the tech industry has
| expanded, and most of the new things (startups) are better
| served with a Postgres cluster.
| tnolet wrote:
| When I was a bit younger I worked on quite some high profile
| (for my country) web apps. Think e-commerce, travel. Couple
| million users. We used Oracle on big fat metal server stacks
| for this.
|
| I honestly thought this was needed because RAC and some other
| stuff. Uptime!
|
| Now, a little older and wiser, I know all of these projects
| would have been fine on Postgres on some hosted provider.
| pmontra wrote:
| When companies were moving to the internet in my part of the
| world, second half of the 90s, their preferred stack was a
| Windows NT 3.5 server, Java and an Oracle DB communicating by
| file exports/imports with some AS 400 or an actual IBM
| mainframe.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Most banks, telcos, insurances, many private and government
| sectors are using it, and will keep using it for decades to
| come. The people who think otherwise don't have much experience
| in real world (TM) outside of startups and small shops.
|
| I don't think that ie Postgres has immediate onsite 24/7
| support globally, which is much more important for business
| than pure performance per dollar or similar metrics and they
| are happy to pay for it. Also trying to find top notch DBAs in
| Oracle vs Postgres gives, at least here in Switzerland, very
| different numbers of resources available.
|
| Ie for banks its usually part of their core banking packages
| and performance-wise not much can replace that (but you need a
| small army of plsql experts to tame it, although there are
| plenty of those in the industry).
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Allegedly 90% of the world's biggest banks run their core
| systems on mainframes. Oracle did offer their database on
| mainframe but stopped and the last supported release went EOL
| in 2013. There's still possibly extended support being paid
| for, but sounds like they possibly don't have a lot of the
| bank-on-mainframe market.
|
| I wonder what those banks use for their databases. IMS or DB2
| maybe?
|
| Not so say your comment is wrong, there are thousands of
| banks and average assets of few hundred million. Unlikely
| they would fork out millions for mainframe setups. Majority
| of those could be on Oracle as you say.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I know that one of our biggest national banks still run on
| mainframes for their core banking infrastructure, but
| there's so many satellite systems which are way more modern
| and use separate systems and servers.
|
| In these cases generally DBs are migrated to external
| clusters of their own (like HPE Superdome, Exadata or
| similarly tailored hardware) and connect via IB or IB like
| low latency, high performance networking.
|
| AFAIK, the bank I'm talking of is working with "Don't fix
| what is not broken" motto, and only move what's necessary
| to modern or external systems.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Huh. You mean the bank running the mainframe has moved
| database to a cluster of other systems? What does the
| mainframe run then? Business logic / applications in
| COBOL or ABAP or whatever?
| bayindirh wrote:
| It handles the torrent of banking transactions. Generally
| money movements, interest rates and such.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Also, I'm not sure that you can buy off the shelf hardware
| from top vendors which guarantees transaction performance and
| reliability for PostgreSQL either.
|
| HPE, Dell, IBM, Oracle itself is building and selling systems
| designed and optimized for running Oracle databases, for at
| least a decade now?
| bogomipz wrote:
| Can someone say why the Power chips have seemed to not really
| gain traction outside of IBM? There was a moment a few years back
| where it seemed that Google might be getting behind the Power9
| chips but then we heard very little outside of some press
| releases. [1]
|
| I remember there was speculation that this was little more than
| ploy to use as a negotiation tactic with Intel. I'm not sure if
| that was true or not.
|
| [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3052811/ibms-power-
| chi...
| jimnotgym wrote:
| The last SUN/SPARC server I bought (maybe 5 years ago?) had the
| same thing going on. 1 cpu, huge number of cores. Sun was already
| owned by Oracle at this point, so I would guess they are not as
| concerned about IBM's move as you might imagine!
| rconti wrote:
| Yeah, I seem to recall the machines we were buying 6 years ago
| (Oracle-branded machines, that is!) were 288 threads... out of
| something like 6 processors.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database?
|
| Oh Register, never change.
| jdsully wrote:
| After AMD's 96 core processor, a 24 core chip just doesn't sound
| all that impressive. The article doesn't address why you wouldn't
| run Oracle on X86 with more cores.
| Symmetry wrote:
| It's a little known fact that IBM creates its SMT-8 cores by
| taking two of its SMT-4 cores, having one stand on the other's
| shoulders, and draping a trenchcoat over them so they count as
| one core for Oracle licensing. The trenchcoat being a _de
| minimis_ ability to reschedule work from one half to the other.
| Seriously the per-thread performance you get from 1 thread on
| an SMT-4 core, 1 thread on a SMT-8 core, and 2 threads on an
| SMT-8 core are all extremely close together.
| jdsully wrote:
| Very interesting use case of SMT.
| bogwog wrote:
| I'd guess that some software is stuck on Power, so a bigger
| multi-core chip for those cases is probably cheaper than both
| porting to x86, or buying a higher tier Oracle license.
| abridgett wrote:
| IIRC they did something related a long time ago when you could
| get a 8 CPU box which was physically restricted to 6 CPUs purely
| so that it didn't fit into the "can have 8 CPU" Oracle license.
| About 2/3rds of the servers we sold at the time probably went to
| run Oracle and it gave us a massive TCO (total cost of ownership)
| advantage compared with other vendors, especially as the POWER
| chips were faster than the competition too. When most of the cost
| is in the software, the choice of hardware can still make a big
| difference.
| paulmd wrote:
| Wide SMT/CMT is also favored by Oracle's billing system - you
| aren't billed (afaik) per-thread but actually per-core, so
| 4-wide SMT or 8-wide SMT gives you an advantage over x86's
| 2-wide SMT.
|
| In theory the "core multipliers" are supposed to offset this,
| so a "core multiplier" for POWER or SPARC should be higher -
| but Oracle also likes to push you towards their own products,
| so there is a bit of a "bundle discount" particularly on
| SPARC's core multiplier.
| kkz wrote:
| ,,why create a powerful CPU for a low-end database? Big Blue
| still has not responded to our inquiry..."
|
| Bahaha, savage :)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Bahaha, savage :)_
|
| Is it really "savage?"
|
| The article was posted long after business hours at IBM. You
| posted your comment long before business hours at IBM.
|
| It might amaze certain types of people to believe that IBM
| doesn't have a fleet of PR people sitting around at midnight
| the week before Christmas to respond to rando online articles.
|
| It's entirely possible that El Reg submitted its query to IBM a
| week ago and waited for a response that never arrived. But
| considering the state of internet "journalism" these days,
| usually they send a Twitter DM and if they don't get a response
| in the time it takes to finish a Starbucks, they consider it
| unanswered.
| mathgorges wrote:
| I believe the comment you're responding to was saying that
| the dig at Oracle[1] was savage, not IBM's lack of response.
|
| [1] "why create a powerful CPU _for a low-end database_?"
| tssva wrote:
| I believe "low-end database" wasn't a knock at Oracle
| either. The pricing advantage you get with multiple cores
| for a single socket applies to standard edition which is
| their low-end database product. I have never seen it used
| in production.
| mattpallissard wrote:
| Exploit is a really, really strong word. The way oracle refuses
| to acknowledge any software processor boundaries other than their
| own is more exploitative.
|
| It's been several years, but if I remember correctly if you
| wanted to run an Oracle DB on a 2vcpu VM you couldn't just
| license 2 cores, you had to license every core on every
| hypervisor the VM could run on.
|
| It basically means you have to get off oracle or buy oracle
| hardware. For large enterprises with old hardware running decades
| worth of business logic captured in stored procedures it's
| becomes a rock and a hard place situation.
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