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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

Oracle's core business is healthy as fuck. It can't default. It could get into a long period of low R&D since all profits would be directed to serve their debt and that could hurt their product line, but they'd definitely can't just vanish into thin air.

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Oh they certainly could default. They make $70B a year in revenue and $17B in profit. Their current interest payments are $5.7B a year!! Their debt is only 1 grade above junk.

But the truest measure of their potential to default, their credit default swaps, are pricing in a 20-22% chance to default before 2031.

What is their core business today? I remember when it was the enterprise database server product, but I can't imagine that is true anymore.

They're basically trying to make themselves into the likes of Azure, GCP and AWS. Now you might think that there's no way Oracle will ever be that big, but half of their revenue for the 2026 fiscal year is from their cloud infrastructure, which, trust me, surprised even me.

Oracle is the last company I'd setup shop with.

I dislike Oracle as much as anyone, but Google is the last company I would use as a cloud provider.

Both companies are awful to customers. But the Oracle cloud product is truly terrible.

I had significant free credits for their cloud product. It was not even useful at a 0 pricepoint. I had to escalate repeatedly until I was doing screenshares with very high level engineers, to show them that their VM's, the more core offering, literally would not start.

They did have those Ampere arm chips which we mildly interesting for a hot minute a few years ago but seem to have disappeared somewhere.

I think we are in agreement here.

Google is worse, hmm, what are some of the reasons why? How could they be worse then endless software audits. I have heard of the endless pain of google killing something you depend on.

Because they can ban your entire corporate account, as a paying customer, for one developer that's flagged in their system joining your org.

And there's no human in the loop you can talk with when that happens. Just one automated response after another.

The only appeal possible is to become viral and force their hand to check your case.

Honestly, I would avoid both.

The painful banning that google does with automated takedowns and no humans to easily talk to is a real impediment. That feels like a perfectly legit complaint. That policy is so self destructive. I think all auto bans without human review should end, but instead we are just making this worse with more and more automated systems.

They are notoriously difficult to contact if your company is banned, or someone within your company is banned. That's it, poof, gone, everything you have.

Is it actually from the cloud section or are they doing like IBM where the marching orders came down that cloud was the way and every mid level manager saw which way the wind was blowing and then worked real hard to get their calculator app moved into the cloud silo.

I think it is probably either:

1. Companies wanting to go cloud, and depend on something like RAC that Oracle refuses to licence to other scalers.

2. Companies beliving in "multi-cloud", and some corrupt exec deciding that Oracle should be one of the options.

I know that a few gigs ago I had to deal with them as part of the multi-cloud enterprise strategy for these reasons.

Indeed, Oracle refuses RAC for example in Azure but we build an HA solution on Azure VMs that is highly reliable and has redundancy for both instance and storage using data guard. Not exactly RAC but very close and highly reliable with proper apps connection configurations databases switchover are transparent for the apps and all this for a fraction of price we would pay if went to Oracle Cloud. We developed automated patching solution on top of that and now we have reliability higher than we had on Exadata. And of course much cheaper. You can guess that Oracle does not like that as they need to sell you as much licenses and Cloud resources as they can.

Government contracting. It doesn't matter what the government wants to do, if it involves computers then Oracle is trying to be the supplier.

Buddy works at a public university. Can confirm oracle has their greedy hands in all of the crevices of that place. Slows down the tech stuff so much, since they have to work on top of all this proprietary junk.

Claude, build me a copy of Oracle RDBMS. Make no mistakes

ChatGPT, check Claude's work. Once verified, focus on identifying elegant solutions to the shockingly large list of expensive pain points that we encountered with Oracle RDBMS. Run benchmarks using production data. Work on improvements until all database benchmark metrics are equal or better. Make no mistakes

This is depressing. Is this really what software engineering has come to? I should have been a doctor. At least until Optimus do surgery on these guy's brain. Unitree, verify Optimus's work

I've been thinking AI writing the software would get us to huge messes of software stacks that kind of work and no one really understands how they work. Like a giant magic software tower than no one can touch or understand, just hope it keeps working.

> software stacks that kind of work and no one really understands how they work

We've been heading that way for a long time before AI. AI is definitely making it worse in many cases, by lowering the bar to getting something that "works".

Like, you could write a web server in R. You'd need to bang your head against a wall for a while, which might make you think again, but with LLMs it's just a machine that is insanely goal oriented working very quickly.

We've been heading that way for a long time before AI. AI is definitely making it worse in many cases, by lowering the bar to getting something that "works".

Yes, it's very important that only the high priests speak the shibboleths and hold the keys to the Holy of Holies.

This attitude is what the PC revolution was fought to overcome. Talk about living long enough to see yourself become the villain...

> This attitude is what the PC revolution was fought to overcome. Talk about living long enough to see yourself become the villain...

Look, I'm not really expressing distaste for this, I think more people writing stuff for themselves and others is a really good thing.

But it's true that software quality tends to get de-prioritised by lots of orgs, and AI makes it easier to pretend this doesn't matter.

That's fine for one person/small team tools, but gets problematic when people are relying on accuracy.

I'm just noting it, rather than condemning it.

And I'm just a mere data person, so probably wouldn't make it if we were to stop "unqualified" people coding.

Claude, sue anyone who isn't paying me until they are paying me.

Here is a copy of an Oracle RDBMS.

> Gives you a licence washed MySQL

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