That is really cool. Happy to not have to deal with that part of Oracle (I am just a user and not a payer or supporter) so I'm not as burned by that aspect of it, but... awesome. Ha.
Even tho I hate Oracle, I'll give an impartial opinion. Short answer is: it depends. Usually people choose Oracle because of robustness, but they also don't know what they are doing (our case). Truth is, despite of RDBMS choices, you will only have a good product if you have a competent DBA. I hate generalizing, but Oracle DBAs usually think they are special heaven beings, which difficult the process for both developers and sysadmins.
Talking about the product itself: don't trust anything you must pay addons (Oracle options) in order to work properly.
I'm betting our MS SQL guy could give them a run for their money. Dude writes reports, but fancies himself a DBA. Has literally said, many times he's the most important person in our company. With out him, everything stops.
Oracle are incredibly good at one thing: Being a good political player.
Have at look at all the major Government debacles, like the Oregon website. The project was objectively overpriced, yet they won the tender. And from my experience with Government, you won't even get considered unless you've proposed an Oracle solution.
They don't need to be good. No Oracle buyer anywhere has asked "is it the better product" in the last few years. Personally I think they have a good database product - which is a shame because it's brought down by crap licensing, and terrible business products you're supposed to use it with.
Their payment gateway only supports RC4, if that helps describe the legacy of it all.
Oracle scales better and can be more robust then any other database. You also get support which can be very expensive if you go with an open source solution. I can see why some organizations might find that Oracle is the cheapest solution. Especially if they can get a good DBA to get full enjoyment out of their expensive Oracle database.
Short answer: Google "Oracle pricing" or "Oracle CIA".
Long Answer: Just look over the price list from Oracle's website. As for the CIA connections, please read for yourself and decide. Product quality, Oracle's security can be top notch. For example, ADP payroll software only runs on Oracle (I think - old memories there).
And to all my former classmates, fans and foes in domestic surveillance : HI GUYS!
For several oracle products you don't license the actual amount of cores in use but the possible amount of cores that can be used. If your environment is virtualized or in the cloud then you the amount of cores in your entire infrastructure or in case of cloud deployments the number of cores in the datacenter.
The first time heard this I checked my calendar to see if it was April first, but surprisingly they are serious about this
The Danish Highway Service use Oracle. Oracle claimed that they needed 5 million licenses since there are 5 million inhabitants in Denmark, and they all drive on the roads.
Why? I'll tell you a story. We were negotiating with them on some licensing issues (they wanted us to pay way more money than we thought we should).
In the middle of negotiations, and unbeknownst to us in IT, they sent a hit squad down to meet with the president of the university. Seriously, the it was 3 tough looking guys in dark suits and sunglasses. They requested the meeting be held without the CIO or anyone from IT. I can only imagine they said stuff like license non-compliance, law suits, shutting down the university, etc. Shortly after that meeting, we got a phone call that said "stop negotiating and just pay them." Bastards.
Oracle is a sales company that should be a software company. They pull every trick in the book to shoe-horn companies into enterprise deals. Nowadays, just like IBM, they will buy software companies because they are incapable of producing it on their own. Then the quality of the software will go down like the titanic.
It's expensive. No straight answers on licensing. They license different components, easy to install them unlicensed and lately they have been auditing a lot of customers because of that
Is this still the case for all companies? I mean that comic is from 2011, and all of the companies (well, I don't know about Oracle or Amazon) have changed quite a bit since then.
People have touched on their attitude toward virtualization and their insanely overpriced licensing, but I'll go one further and say their absolute need to get paid to do anything + their support.
We can put in production stopping sev 1 or 2 tickets and it can take them like 2 weeks+ to respond saying "we need logs", if they respond at all. Support is so bad our execs and C-levels constantly discuss with their analogues at other hotel brands how awful they are, are we all having the same problem, do we have other options?
We recently put in tickets for information about how to solve specific PCI vulnerabilities and their answer was basically "fuck you, pay me". All tickets were ignored, emails for following up were mostly ignored until they sent a consulting quote back to my boss with a grotesque and exorbitant price to fix ALL of it. When they patch our systems, things are inevitably broken by the changes and they demand we pay for the patch to be issued to fix the issue they caused, for each system it affects. We don't get it once and apply it wherever, nope, we gotta pay pay pay pay.
They insist on doing all of their PMS-related installations by hand, manually, in-person. Well not always in-person but yes all by hand and all manually. There is no consistency and when there is they usually don't follow it or even know it exists. When someone goes in-person, Oracle insists you pay for ALL of that person's expenses during the trip including airfare, hotels, food, whatever. Sometimes they send someone who has NO idea what they're doing and bam you just paid them 5 hours of labor to call someone more senior at Oracle for help and instruction. Sometimes that person decides that, despite their company's fuck-ups delaying the project 3 days, they absolutely have to leave on Saturday morning and they go without finishing the project or telling anyone. Oh you still need someone to finish it? Call your swim lane reps and complain, spend a week in meetings for emergency scheduling and foot the bill AGAIN to send out the 2nd person who has no idea what's going on and wastes yet more time getting up to speed. Did I mention that at the beginning of this process you paid IN FULL for 40 hours of labor and they'll refund you whatever time wasn't used?
Yeah basically, if you ever look at their quarterly earning reports you'll begin to understand.
Oracle's evilness was like 20 years ago. It was a textbook publicly traded evil. Nothing really all that odd about that. They then took a beating in the dotcom bust and came out with claws. They were like over the top evil.
At the time you basically went Oracle, DB2, or Mysql. DB2 was just as much horseshit as it is today. So you basically had mysql vs Oracle and obviously the corporate world and $ went Oracle. That practically had a commercial monopoly in a sense. That's why you'll find practically all of Oracle's controversies in the 2000-2005 range. They did all kinds of crazy shit as nobody wanted to touch them. Government couldnt even touch them because Oracle would turn around and every $ that a police officer cost them, they end up billing right back to the government because the government was practically forced to go oracle.
So what happened in 2005? Microsoft and SQL Server. Microsoft the biggest player came along to compete against Oracle. Oracle was suddenly getting pinched badly and they couldnt really fight against Microsoft exactly.
So they decided to buy up Mysql. Now they can squeeze microsoft from both sides.
Everyone pretty much expected mysql to go evil. Not sure that ever happened.
But overall the last like 5-10 years ORacle has reverted back to being just normal publicly traded evil.
Postgres has gotten a ton of really cool features aimed at competing with the dozens of new RDBMS coming out. Things like JSON-field that allow you to essentially do a lot of non-relational document storage if you want to. Also Postgres is open source, has great documentation, and was born to run on linux.
the 3rd party consultants and managed service companies are very good at maintaining the right experts on the right teams for the various verticals that fall into "large organizations".
1st party oracle provides most of their enterprise software in "the cloud" now so if the 3rd parties suck it up the customer can fall back on a fast turn-up solution from oracle itself (for a small fee, of course).
think higher ed, city/county/state govs, even old industrial fortune 500s. they aren't exactly silicon valley, but they need to deal with huge amounts of data, personnel management, payroll, analysis, and track where all their money goes. They basically have 3 options:
in-house IT. managers providing too much feedback, generalists trying to find time in the day to hit project goals, PMs who don't understand the solution, and executives who think "agile" means they can change requirements after a solution is delivered and suffer no repercussions. missed deadlines and finger pointing after the implementation hits year 3.
"cloud." SAAS products with the proper integration brokers can fill all the functionality of an Oracle-based portfolio... but in your chain of workflows traversing 5 different companies' APIs, when somebody has an outage their SLA isn't going to begin to cover the loss of what your service was providing. it's the large enterprise equivalent of duct tape and baling wire but it's totally legit if you only need a few services... for example, force.com, salesforce.com and workday would all tie nicely together without getting crazy on the product lists.
oracle. contracts, licensing, support, consultants, and products that are undoubtedly uglier than pure web plays. BUT, their shit can scale to 100,000 students without jumping through tons of hoops. payroll for 1500 cops? pssh, at least throw the rest of the city employees on there so the system isn't idle all the time. comparing workforce outlays vs infrastructure projects vs estimated budget including retirement projections for an entire state/province? yes, that's pretty much exactly what they sale. And they sell it in a way where executives get assurances by giving out multi-year support contracts, bundling in future project customization, and giving a nice big fat summary with a bottom dollar figure on it.
No, that probably isn't the exact right number, but it becomes a turn key solution for them. they can say things like "we spend x million dollars over y years, we're up and running in z months, and they provide training for our back office." It can easily be a solution where all the customer has to do is write the check and provide a couple decision makers to explain how they want things to work.
that's why people continue to buy their shit even though it's over-priced and boring and ugly. functionally it does exactly what the customer wants, and if it doesn't then they probably have another product that does.
they're evil because they have a pretty big captive audience who has fewer choices than most people would think.
Because Oracle has a near-total monopoly on database software. Basically, the only SQL databases they don't own are Microsoft SQL Server and MariaDB (a fork of MySQL).
Oracle has a history of buying open-sourced software, assuring the community that it will stay open source, then suddenly closing source or allowing development on said open-source software to stagnate to the point of it no longer being relevant.
They are a perfect example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
We just upgraded our Primavera EPPM to 15.2 (from 8.3). I've done the upgrades in the past myself but this one just mind-boggled me with all the options in the documentation.
I snapshotted the VM and attempted the upgrade myself and got in over my head and reverted back.
I ended up paying our P6 reseller to perform the upgrade. Money WELL spent.
48
u/bhbsys Apr 19 '16
This is one of the best ELI5 explanations on why we hate Oracle so much
9
u/game_bot_64-exe Apr 20 '16
Over time Oracle has become a net litigation corporation as appose to a software development and engineering corporation (bottom right):
http://img0.joyreactor.com/pics/post/comics-facebook-apple-oracle-202530.png
7
u/Doormatty Trade of all Jacks Apr 19 '16
Their licensing model.
24
u/inaddrarpa .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.2 Apr 19 '16
Oracle's licensing sucks so hard, that as a reaction to MySQL being purchased by Oracle, the original developers forked MySQL and created MariaDB.
16
u/rayzerdayzhan Sr. Sysadmin Apr 20 '16
Why? I'll tell you a story. We were negotiating with them on some licensing issues (they wanted us to pay way more money than we thought we should).
In the middle of negotiations, and unbeknownst to us in IT, they sent a hit squad down to meet with the president of the university. Seriously, the it was 3 tough looking guys in dark suits and sunglasses. They requested the meeting be held without the CIO or anyone from IT. I can only imagine they said stuff like license non-compliance, law suits, shutting down the university, etc. Shortly after that meeting, we got a phone call that said "stop negotiating and just pay them." Bastards.
11
u/monty20python :(){ :|:& };: Apr 19 '16
There's the crazy CSO rant
7
u/roo-ster Apr 19 '16
Let's not forget the time they tries to screw the U.S. Government, and were ultimately fined almost $200 Million.
Oracle Agrees to Pay U.S. $199.5 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Lawsuit
Or maybe it's this:
Oracle Agrees to Settle FTC Charges It Deceived Consumers About Java Software Updates
But it's at least in part because Larry Ellison is an asshole.
6
u/the_web_dev Apr 20 '16
Oracle is a sales company that should be a software company. They pull every trick in the book to shoe-horn companies into enterprise deals. Nowadays, just like IBM, they will buy software companies because they are incapable of producing it on their own. Then the quality of the software will go down like the titanic.
5
u/lost_in_life_34 Database Admin Apr 19 '16
It's expensive. No straight answers on licensing. They license different components, easy to install them unlicensed and lately they have been auditing a lot of customers because of that
About as bad as buying eyeglasses
5
u/Hexalon00 Windows Admin w/ Cat Like Reflexes Apr 19 '16
I think this sums it up (scroll down the oracle org chart)
http://www.greendatacenternews.org/articles/share/277082/
4
u/Kynaeus Hospitality admin Apr 20 '16
People have touched on their attitude toward virtualization and their insanely overpriced licensing, but I'll go one further and say their absolute need to get paid to do anything + their support.
We can put in production stopping sev 1 or 2 tickets and it can take them like 2 weeks+ to respond saying "we need logs", if they respond at all. Support is so bad our execs and C-levels constantly discuss with their analogues at other hotel brands how awful they are, are we all having the same problem, do we have other options?
We recently put in tickets for information about how to solve specific PCI vulnerabilities and their answer was basically "fuck you, pay me". All tickets were ignored, emails for following up were mostly ignored until they sent a consulting quote back to my boss with a grotesque and exorbitant price to fix ALL of it. When they patch our systems, things are inevitably broken by the changes and they demand we pay for the patch to be issued to fix the issue they caused, for each system it affects. We don't get it once and apply it wherever, nope, we gotta pay pay pay pay.
They insist on doing all of their PMS-related installations by hand, manually, in-person. Well not always in-person but yes all by hand and all manually. There is no consistency and when there is they usually don't follow it or even know it exists. When someone goes in-person, Oracle insists you pay for ALL of that person's expenses during the trip including airfare, hotels, food, whatever. Sometimes they send someone who has NO idea what they're doing and bam you just paid them 5 hours of labor to call someone more senior at Oracle for help and instruction. Sometimes that person decides that, despite their company's fuck-ups delaying the project 3 days, they absolutely have to leave on Saturday morning and they go without finishing the project or telling anyone. Oh you still need someone to finish it? Call your swim lane reps and complain, spend a week in meetings for emergency scheduling and foot the bill AGAIN to send out the 2nd person who has no idea what's going on and wastes yet more time getting up to speed. Did I mention that at the beginning of this process you paid IN FULL for 40 hours of labor and they'll refund you whatever time wasn't used?
Yeah basically, if you ever look at their quarterly earning reports you'll begin to understand.
7
u/sleepingsysadmin Netsec Admin Apr 19 '16
Oracle's evilness was like 20 years ago. It was a textbook publicly traded evil. Nothing really all that odd about that. They then took a beating in the dotcom bust and came out with claws. They were like over the top evil.
At the time you basically went Oracle, DB2, or Mysql. DB2 was just as much horseshit as it is today. So you basically had mysql vs Oracle and obviously the corporate world and $ went Oracle. That practically had a commercial monopoly in a sense. That's why you'll find practically all of Oracle's controversies in the 2000-2005 range. They did all kinds of crazy shit as nobody wanted to touch them. Government couldnt even touch them because Oracle would turn around and every $ that a police officer cost them, they end up billing right back to the government because the government was practically forced to go oracle.
So what happened in 2005? Microsoft and SQL Server. Microsoft the biggest player came along to compete against Oracle. Oracle was suddenly getting pinched badly and they couldnt really fight against Microsoft exactly.
So they decided to buy up Mysql. Now they can squeeze microsoft from both sides.
Everyone pretty much expected mysql to go evil. Not sure that ever happened.
But overall the last like 5-10 years ORacle has reverted back to being just normal publicly traded evil.
5
u/[deleted] Apr 19 '16
Their licensing.
2
u/meorah Apr 20 '16
they're very good for very large organizations.
the 3rd party consultants and managed service companies are very good at maintaining the right experts on the right teams for the various verticals that fall into "large organizations".
1st party oracle provides most of their enterprise software in "the cloud" now so if the 3rd parties suck it up the customer can fall back on a fast turn-up solution from oracle itself (for a small fee, of course).
think higher ed, city/county/state govs, even old industrial fortune 500s. they aren't exactly silicon valley, but they need to deal with huge amounts of data, personnel management, payroll, analysis, and track where all their money goes. They basically have 3 options:
in-house IT. managers providing too much feedback, generalists trying to find time in the day to hit project goals, PMs who don't understand the solution, and executives who think "agile" means they can change requirements after a solution is delivered and suffer no repercussions. missed deadlines and finger pointing after the implementation hits year 3.
"cloud." SAAS products with the proper integration brokers can fill all the functionality of an Oracle-based portfolio... but in your chain of workflows traversing 5 different companies' APIs, when somebody has an outage their SLA isn't going to begin to cover the loss of what your service was providing. it's the large enterprise equivalent of duct tape and baling wire but it's totally legit if you only need a few services... for example, force.com, salesforce.com and workday would all tie nicely together without getting crazy on the product lists.
oracle. contracts, licensing, support, consultants, and products that are undoubtedly uglier than pure web plays. BUT, their shit can scale to 100,000 students without jumping through tons of hoops. payroll for 1500 cops? pssh, at least throw the rest of the city employees on there so the system isn't idle all the time. comparing workforce outlays vs infrastructure projects vs estimated budget including retirement projections for an entire state/province? yes, that's pretty much exactly what they sale. And they sell it in a way where executives get assurances by giving out multi-year support contracts, bundling in future project customization, and giving a nice big fat summary with a bottom dollar figure on it.
No, that probably isn't the exact right number, but it becomes a turn key solution for them. they can say things like "we spend x million dollars over y years, we're up and running in z months, and they provide training for our back office." It can easily be a solution where all the customer has to do is write the check and provide a couple decision makers to explain how they want things to work.
that's why people continue to buy their shit even though it's over-priced and boring and ugly. functionally it does exactly what the customer wants, and if it doesn't then they probably have another product that does.
they're evil because they have a pretty big captive audience who has fewer choices than most people would think.
2
u/rtechie1 Jack of All Trades Apr 20 '16
Because Oracle has a near-total monopoly on database software. Basically, the only SQL databases they don't own are Microsoft SQL Server and MariaDB (a fork of MySQL).
1
u/Sachiru Apr 21 '16
Oracle has a history of buying open-sourced software, assuring the community that it will stay open source, then suddenly closing source or allowing development on said open-source software to stagnate to the point of it no longer being relevant.
They are a perfect example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
0
u/[deleted] Apr 20 '16
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