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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

I remember that comment and thinking that the author is complaining about a kind of success.

Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure.

Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process.

A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations.

Etc…

The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.

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I agree somewhat, but it took me a bit to articulate to myself. It is nuanced.

Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!?

But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests.

It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.

> unimaginable amount of technical debt

"That's life" in the RDBMS space. All of the major vendors are drowning in tech debt and there's (almost) nothing they can do about it because of backward compatibility limitations.

For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 will create new databases with default settings that are unchanged from SQL 7 -- from the previous century!

Requiring backward compatibility doesn't imply the code quality needs to be low. Nothing prevents them from improving their code base except the organization itself - the incentives, promotion driven development etc.

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