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Comment by uli00 | Hacker News Reader

Oracle is not a tech driven firm. It is sales driven, meaning their sales teams are world class at ingratiating themselves with decision makers at "big stodgy companies". How do you explain why they survived all this time. Very very few of the top Tech firms use any Oracle software for atleast the last 10-12 years now. Some even have internal procurement bans!

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They USED to have world class software. Compare Oracle DB to the competitors 10 years ago. They were at least GOOD. Lots of good features for giant companies.

Competitors have gotten a lot better over the last 10 years. Oracle has mostly just raised pricing. It works for a while, but at the current path I don't see Oracle the company existing in 20 years.

I would say arguably they ARE still world class. It is just most people don't need or cant justify their price tag when competition has caught on with clear Roadmap and sustainability.

So basically they have a shrinking value proposition and they are rising prices. ( Why does that sound so much like Apple, Now I am worried )

I love my earpods and I think it shows they still are at the top when it comes to innovating on consumer devices.

Using Apple Pay also makes so much sense for the consumer as it limits your CC data being at every retailer since Apple Pay tokenizes the sensitive information.

If you want to see where Apple is going, checkout the Apple Healthkit API:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/samples/...

While it is too soon to say that Apple will own the market, Apple is the only big tech company that has positioned itself for privacy and trust, giving it the best chance to own this market of the big four.

“Good” depends on the use case. I used Oracle once, about ten years ago. The client library was so big and bloated that just loading it took the majority of the total running time of my not-terribly-long-running program.

Not to mention that figuring out the connection strings is so miserably complicated that you basically need a trained expert to figure it out. The docs were worthless.

I think I can spin up an entire blank MySQL instance faster than I could connect to an existing Oracle database back then.

Well if you don’t need the features then clearly you are not the target. The oracle DB is going to support many different things compared to your MySQL cluster.

I was most definitely not the target. But having such a miserable experience just accomplishing the basics did not make me at all inclined to consider Oracle for future projects.

>>> Very very few of the top Tech firms use any Oracle software for atleast the last 10-12 years now.

I think you missed the word "new" in there. Amazon finally is cutting ties with its Oracle DB this year. While I won't be surprised if AWS starts offering "migrate off Oracle" as a consulting service, Oracle was still the standard through the 2000s. I think they have built up so much negative goodwill though that no startup would ever consider using Oracle even if they gave the first five years away for free.

> While I won't be surprised if AWS starts offering "migrate off Oracle" as a consulting service

If AWS can offer a database that satisfies the Mongo API (DocumentDB), then why couldn't Amazon offer a database that satisfies the Oracle DB API, complete with automatic migration?

The day that happens is the day Oracle stock goes straight in the toilet.

I suspect that would resurrect something like the Oracle vs Google lawsuit, where an API signature is somehow a thing you can copyright.

Mongo was open source. They copied the api under that license.

My understanding, and I’m not a lawyer so don’t consider this legal advice, is that you can’t copy a commercial api or it’s infringing on their intellectual property.

The mongo example is a bit odd since the open source license was AGPL. Sounds like you can copy an AGPL API signature without releasing your own source?

The copyrightability of APIs (specifically Oracle’s APIs, even!) is at the heart of a lengthy and still-ongoing legal battle, with several decisions in both directions.

I thought the copyright law had an exemption for compatibility?

See https://www.eff.org/cases/oracle-v-google

Oracle won the last round, Google asked the Supreme court to look at it in January. Guess we'll know some time soon.

The "API" is doable. Being binary compatible is not at all. Oracle DB is complex because of historical choices (the patch picking, compatibility flags) etc... inbuilt JVM and PL/SQL.

Those things that make working on OracleDB today difficult is what made it so dependable for people with money in the last 20 years.

It also runs on a lot of architectures that today's software is not really running on anymore.

It would probably turn into the ultimate cigar butt stock though as long as they didn't keep spending money on crazy acquisitions and the stock fell 40% on the news.

I would have to think so many organizations have random scripts, etc. that the risk vs. reward still won still be high er than you think, especially when say the CTO of JPMorgan's job depends on "knowing Oracle."

Personally, I think IBM will likely crash and burn way before Oracle does.

Sure, not disputing how they got where they are. I'm speculating that none of that helps them from here. Big stodgy companies, their bread and butter, are now tired of Oracle's shit. And, they now have lots of credible options.

How are they doing their financials?

The entire Amazon retail business is on Oracle DB.

It was migrated away to aurora

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