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Comment by elgabogringo | Hacker News Reader

Everybody hates Oracle, but people still give them so much money! One has to wonder when it will end now that there are alternatives.

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Remember that sales is mostly about relationships. Your CEO will hand a few million to someone they trust. Oracle projects an image of being the large company that other large companies trust. SAP has a similar vibe. Your C-Level people don't want to play dice with tech because to them it's often a cost center whose disruption can be terrible for business.

You'll notice most engineering focused companies don't use Oracle because they decide on tech based on different criteria and allow more input from engineering and don't mind building things. They have to bet on tech or else they have no reason to exist.

Last time I looked around it seemed a lot of "engineering focused companies" like tech startups were using garbage like MongoDB, the famously lossy database. I wouldn't assume that big companies are automatically incompetent and "tech focused companies" ignore Oracle for good reasons. It can as well be just fashion and/or groupthink and/or cost reasons.

Web development and engineering are different. I believe we're in agreement.

The DB is an excellent product. It is not just sales and/or execs relations. I've used ORACLE, Postgre, MySql, SQlite, MS-Sql, and also Firebird. From the bunch, ORACLE is not only the expensive one, it also delivers.

Maybe but Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, eBay, etc... work very well without this database.

Google and Facebook use Oracle, not for their main product but for their back-office.

eBay also used Oracle in the past (if you dig back in the past of their architecture/design of eBay).

....mostly because they have big enough engineering teams to roll their own and/or re-engineer an existing database to keep up with their workload.

Oracle SQL might be the fastest, most robust out of the box database, but for a huge deployment like Google/Facebook/Twitter, even out of the box Oracle SQL won't be good enough. It's kind of an unfair comparison.

That's not to say I'm defending Oracle's bullshit, but you gotta put these things in perspective.

Oracle's entire business model is based on sales people talking to middle- / upper-management and convincing them that Oracle is the best tool for the job even if their developers don't agree. There's a lot of "Oracle has a service contract" CYA reasoning, and there may even be kick-backs for the decision-makers for choosing Oracle[1].

[1] To be fair, I think this sort of thing permeates this type of "let's talk over lunch" sales model.

They solve business problems.

Developers hate Oracle, but enterprises give them money.

I've worked with a lot of software that uses Oracle on the backend. Our company wasn't buying Oracle, but I'm sure the company we were paying for the software was giving Oracle a lot of money. However, I don't think this is the biggest reason that Oracle is the behemoth they are. I think it's the US government. I expect that everything in the federal government runs on an Oracle server. Just a guess, though. I just can't fathom how enterprise sales can float a company that everyone supposedly hates.

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