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Comment by paulbaumgart | Hacker News Reader

A lot of big software companies seem to put significant effort into maintaining a good relationship with the developer/technical community, presumably in large part to keep the recruitment pipeline (especially of top people) flowing along.

Oracle, by contrast, doesn't seem to give a shit and gets away with it[1].

Why?

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

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It probably doesn't matter much to Oracle to stay on good terms w/ the technical community since technical people aren't their customers.

The people who have the budgetary authority to buy Oracle's very expensive products very likely haven't been doing anything technical for many years, if they ever did. Programmers in organizations that use Oracle aren't asked if they want to use Oracle, they're told they're going to use Oracle...

Unless you get your kicks from working on a 30-year-old database written in 80's style C, I don't think there's much appeal to working for Oracle as a programmer.

Working for Oracle as a programmer _most often means_ working for innumerable number of ERP and middleware solutions they offer, not the database itself.

I don't think that has too much appeal either. Quite frankly, I would prefer the 80's C to that.

I don't disagree. :) That was why I quit it, in the first place.

Not arguing with the rest of your post, but what would you write a large-scale DBMS with, these days? Surely not jpython?

Perhaps with 2010 style C ;-)

But maybe, just maybe, I would first connect Oracle's prodigious moneyduct into a team writing a kick-ass Lisp compiler and then writing the best RDBMS using Lisp.

One can dream...

Not an RDBMS, but AllegoGraph is in Lisp and is the most high-end NoSQL out there. Literally, the Oracle of object stores.

If you have an Oracle to hand, have a look at TNSNAMES.ORA and LISTENER.ORA. Greenspun's law applies...

Fair point. I didn't intend to diss C, and if one were to write Oracle from scratch today, C is (sadly?) still probably the best option given its performance and portability constraints.

What I had in mind was that for anyone who is technically capable of maintaining the core Oracle DB code base, there are more interesting and rewarding things they could be doing instead.

I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety. Then I would check the performance bottlenecks and rewrite them in C if needed.

Then I would use a more programmer friendly language on top of that. Something like Scheme, Ruby, Python and the like.

Stratified design, basically.

> I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety

I am not sure about Haskell, but, from my limited experience, Erlang runs at levels very close to C (my C, at least)

In terms of speed? Erlang's not even in the ballpark that C is in. I'm pretty sure Haskell significantly outperforms Erlang as well.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

Well... At least my C is regarded as very readable ;-)

as has been stated before in other threads in this topic, the decision to use oracle products is rarely a technical one. its a business one, made by business/managerial types. and so that is who oracle plays to. if you build a product that treats the client's developers as interchangeable incidentals, you're going to do the same to your own developers.

I don't know much about this sector, but how does Oracle compare to its direct competitors? E.g. is SAP friendlier with the developer/technical community?

IBM with its DB2 product is a direct competitor, and seems to do a bit better, blue suits & company hymns notwithstanding.

SAP is a special case, as it has a more limited target audience. The financial environment has a heavy, erm, taint on the typical SAP developer. Most of them are in it for the money, so I don't think a lot of them care all that much. College students in Germany often joke about selling your soul to become a SAP consultant… Whereas most Oracle developers or DBAs I've met are still more engineers than business types.

Some companies just don't need a flourishing developer community. I think Oracle – especially after buying Sun – isn't one where this would seem advisable, but apparently they think different. Wonder how that will work out…

Yes. If it is a situation to side the customer or the developer, SAP would side the developer, Oracle most definitely the customer.

Other than the aforementioned DB2, the only other competitor out there for Oracle is SQL Server.

That has some big customers -- a large part of Disney's online infrastructure relies on SQL Server, for example.

Oracle the database isn't really Oracle's main product. They're real product is a bunch of industry specific applications and middleware (and related consulting services) that happens to need a Oracle database to run. So as such they're not really directly competing with SQL server (or postgres or whatever)

That's a good point. I suppose I should have specifically labelled DB2 and SQL Server as competitors to Oracle 10x or whatever their current DBMS version is. :)

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