What's the Oracle Trial Against SAP Really About? 160
Ponca City writes "Chris O'Brien writes in the Merucry News that Larry Ellison's lawsuit against bitter rival SAP gives Ellison the opportunity to deliver the final humiliation to his company's greatest foe of the past decade while sending a blunt message to Oracle's next great enemy, Hewlett-Packard: 'This is who you are fighting. This is how determined we are to win. Get ready.' O'Brien writes that it's a crafty bit of psychological warfare that is already having the desired effect. When Oracle decided to subpoena former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker after he was appointed president and CEO of HP, Apotheker decided to stay out of the country to avoid testifying so now we have the bizarre spectacle of the new CEO of the largest technology company in the world unable to show his face in Silicon Valley. Ellison loves to fight. In gaining control of PeopleSoft, Ellison demonstrated the love of combat and confrontation that has made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He waged an 18-month hostile takeover bid to acquire the company, and fought off an effort by the US Department of Justice to torpedo the deal. 'Oracle probably could have settled this case [with SAP],' writes O'Brien. 'But why pass up a glorious chance to subpoena Apotheker and send your new opponent running in circles?'"
Larry Ellison's character (Score:3, Insightful)
I've known a few people like that, very combative types. They tend to wind up being very lonely and pathetic later in life.
Re:Larry Ellison's character (Score:5, Insightful)
See this book (Score:1)
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If you liked "The Art of War" then you'll love "What's the Difference betwee God and Larry Ellison" by Michael Lewis. The answer, of course, is obvious: God knows he's not Larry Ellison.
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The Prince was brilliant.
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That explains why it was in the fiction section. I just thought it was in the wrong section.
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"Business is war," as one founder of an early computer company used to say.
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Loneliness is being surrounded by psychophants.
With enough corporate income, one is fairly doomed to sycophant overload.
--
I for one welcome our new sycophant overlords.
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You are just jealous. All three people you mentioned created multi-billion companies out of nothing, employed hundreds of thousands of people, paid billions in taxes. They have each had more influence on your life than just about anybody else except perhaps your parents. Maybe you are right about the narcissism but it takes obsessive, driven types to do what they did even if they might not be the nicest people to hang out with.
Re:Larry Ellison's character (Score:5, Insightful)
Then don't characterize them by the money they mad (Score:2)
made. That is a side effect of creating a great business. All three created. Better yet, they created something that other people wanted. They influence millions through their work and some of them through their charity (see Gates, not so much the other two). To say they did not have influence in your life is absurd. Granted it is not on the level of your parents but all three influenced industry. All three pushed forward this business many of us work in.
I would be that many of their problems are not
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In principle I'd like to agree, but a "business entity that brings in a lot of pieces of green paper" means many thousands of people have jobs, feed their families, get to live in nice homes, have nice things, etc. All because of just one of these co's.
Businesses are not evil. Some people are.
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Re:Larry Ellison's character (Score:5, Insightful)
The subtext of your post there is that they should be worshipped and revered as a result. Despite behaving like sociopaths, despite (in the case of MS) anti-competitive, harmful actions, despite wasting a hell of a lot of taxpayer cash in the courtroom, despite being involved in the dirty and broken aspects of western democracy....
Yeah, I'd love to have all that money, but it's true that I don't have the instinct to fuck everyone else over to get there. I don't think that's a personality type that the rest of us should aspire to, let alone worship.
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He really had every advantage in life. This doesn't mean his accomplishments aren't real, but saying he cre
Re:Larry Ellison's character (Score:4, Interesting)
I've actually talked to the man on a few occasions - right time and right place for a 5'th level peasant in my case. The bit that most of this thread seems to miss is this guy *really* understands the technical details as well as the business end. If you ask why, he can and does answer. He will also make a decision - unlike many management of (former, now acquired) companies and even change course when something does not pan out. His play style, in the business world, reminds me of the Adaptive AI in SupCom:FA.
Honestly, he seemed human.
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What does it mean to be miserable without even realizing it? Is that even possible? Insufferable perhaps, but how can there be misery without awareness?
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Re:Larry Ellison's character (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and they try and fill it up with Japanese Zen gardens and big yachts. No amount of money can make you happy, it takes an ability to work with others and a comfort in one's abilities and successes, however small. Larry is like a really loud and obnoxious Richard "Beardy" Branson, only without any charisma, or charm, or wit, or courage, or sense of adventure, or fair play. Yes, nothing at all like Beardy Branson. Larry is just a really amazing, rich, successful, single-minded, asshole. :) And that's being kind. Solaris has paid my way thus far, and now I go on without Oracle. I'm much better off for it. It's motivate me to learn real computer languages like Perl and C. Glad I skipped Java, as that looks and sounds and smells like a big chunk of Oracle shit to me now. Being closed has many disadvantages. Not the least of which is their lack of goodwill. This will bite them in the ass in good time. Meanwhile... Linux, Perl, VMware awaits. But, if you have the $$ and the Oracle wares at your shop, I'll be glad to work them for you for a much heftier price... yes, suddenly working in an Oracle shop just got way fucking expensive... for them. Oracle, just pay my way and then get the fuck out of my way. I've got no time for lucky CEOs and their wacky horseshit behaviour.
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The saying goes, money does not buy happiness, but it lets you choose your own form of misery.
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If they survive.
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Agreed. We need fewer of these people on the planet. I can't tell if this is legal game playing or if this is just someone's interpretation of the events. But one thing for sure, this isn't "business." And Oracle is turning into quite a monster. I am sad to say that we will soon have their product in my IT shop soon. After seeing much of this going on, I would rather see MS SQL server installed.
Avoid Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's route around it. One way: Use PostgreSQL.
Some billionaires only care about being able to abuse people.
Many databases in the pond (Score:5, Insightful)
I would recommend Ingres (which is GPL) for the Data Warehouse environments, PostgreSQL for the mid-sized relational databases and Drizzle for the small-scale systems. (DO NOT support MySql as it is now an Oracle product -- support one of the official forks.)
Likewise, I would recommend using Libre Office (as soon as it hits a major release) over and above Oracle's OpenOffice.
For Java, I would recommend using IBM's JVM where possible (it's largely Oracle's but getting it from IBM will still kick dirt in Oracle's eyes). Where you're running a standalone Java application that can be compiled using GCJ, eliminate the JVM entirely and go native.
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Drizzle is a fork of MySQL from before it was Oracle-ified. It is therefore 100% compatible with anything actually in use for MySQL. However, it is lighter-weight and therefore faster. As such, it is ideal for a simple web site with PHP.
PostgreSQL is heaftier and if you need the extra functions is definitely superior to MySQL's attempts to add in all the extra features. PostgreSQL 9.x series has some amazing capabilities.
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We don't necessarily need to replace Tomcat, JBoss, etc, we merely need to be able to handle the ABI they expect -and- be able to run them without a virtual machine (ie: compile them to native form).
Ok, correction. We don't need to replace them - yet. If we use an intermediate step or two, where these existing tools are gradually moved onto a different language or replacements are developed, then the migration will be much less painful and much more likely to actually happen.
I like D. Mind you, I like lots
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guess what.. that's normal capitalist behavior. Companies actually have a DUTY to do that.
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Sybase (Score:1, Interesting)
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Oh, it quite likely is. Oracle doesn't like competition, and for SAP to have a database they can now tune to their products --- that's not something that will sit at all well with Oracle.
The real question (Score:3, Interesting)
HP - Largest Technology company? (Score:2)
By what measure?
Sounds wrong to me and I cant find a measure by which they would be the largest, but maybe there is one.
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Only one I see is Fortune 500 rank, which is probably the sketchiest measure of all. Largely, how much revenue they recently moved without regard for customer base or profits.
If going by $ profit, they trail companies including IBM.
If going by profit margin, obviously by above they lose to everyone they lose to above.
If going by market cap, they lose to IBM and Apple at least.
Apple or IBM depending on your opinion probably fairly could claim it.
I don't know about employee count, reliable public numbers are
Larry, what is best in life? (Score:1, Redundant)
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!
HP's biggest mistake (Score:2)
Re:HP's biggest mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
I dunno. Think about this. If HP's CEO "happens" to end up in a country with no corporate tax, the company can move its "official" HQ there. Instant tax haven - and one that any revision of tax laws couldn't do much about because it would involve the CEO and not just some unused office with only a janitor in it.
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Yea, I know! The saddest part of it, however, is that even if current MBA courses have stopped teaching the flawed theories used by Jack Welch (like cutting costs), there are still many MBAs from that age who still believe in them. Board of directors needs to stop giving them jobs as CEOs. Finance would I think be a better job for them.
Re:HP's biggest mistake (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't my area, but perennial cost cutting was the problem. After a solid start reducing fat and focusing on core missions, old Jack ended up going off the rails simply because the money kept rolling.
His philosophy shared a great deal in common with the a very unpopular practice in modern governance known as a strategy of tensions.
He wanted to keep up to 10% of the talent force on steady march out the door regardless of their performance and regardless of how well things were going. This cost cutting measure depends upon the other 90% not leaping to the conclusion that an arbitrary management will eventually come for them as well... And hoping that they instead believe there was something inferior about the 10%; hoping that they will strive to validate the faith of retention that their fearless leader has placed in them. Not a good situation.
Then there was the idea to cut all involvement in any endeavor where the company was not challenging for the crown of industry leader. This of course removes innovation and cross-pollination leaving the remaining servants absent vision and experience coming from outside their own little box.
Wikipedia claims he was known as Neutron Jack. I think that may be taking it a little too far, but you get the point.
slashdot unbiased? (Score:1)
[OT, sorry.] On doofus web surfers. (Score:1)
On /., asking how to find info (http://slashdot.org/help) on a website; "Brillant" [sic]. Their current user docs list mysql, but it's dated 2000.
Oh, and while I'm at it, that jerk who posted a complete ripoff of a BOFH http://www.theregister.co.uk/ [theregister.co.uk] article on with no attribution ought to be strung up by his earbeads (in comments on "Toy Robots Can Guard Your Home"; I was moderating so couldn't complain inthread).
Sigh, fsck. Carry on you shallow posters.
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Microsoft SQL Server?
What is it with technology companies? (Score:4, Interesting)
These companies are situated in the center of one of the largest changes in human history. Computers and software applications have enabled numerous advances in civilization and benefitted society in countless ways. Despite all the good that has come from computers, it seems like without exception, every single large computer company is lead by a bunch of douche bags who apparently have little concern for anything beyond themselves and their vision of how they want things to be.
Re:What is it with technology companies? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, because software that is designed by an unfocused group people with no direction is sooooooo useful.
Re:What is it with technology companies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you think the Roman empire grew to its size by being nice? Every group in history that gains considerable power is led by power-hungry people. Luckily for our species, most people are content with being in love, raising a family, and enjoying life with friends and loved ones.
A few individuals are cursed with a "vision", and have an overwhelming desire to force other people to play along. I'd wager they are extremely dissatisfied with life, despite their massive wealth and power.
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Do you think the Roman empire grew to its size by being nice?
No, I wouldn't say they were necessarily nice but one of the major reasons the Romans succeeded in creating such a vast empire was because they absorbed the culture of the people that they were conquering. This made the transition easier and made revolt far less likely because, in general, people don't care what ruler they are paying tribute (taxes) to; they only care if the amount goes up or it changes how they live their lives.
I think Oracle et al. could learn a lot from the Roman approach.
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I'm not sure what kind of fairy tails you've been reading, but the Romans were the most ruthless culture of their age. By looking at the remains of Sun, yes, we can say Oracle has learned from the Roman approach.
en.swpat.org (Score:5, Informative)
Rustling up a quick summary here for anyone looking for background:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Oracle_v._SAP_(2010,_USA) [swpat.org]
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Well, this seems to be about copyright, not patent infringement. I have edited the wiki.
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Thanks. That's always the right thing to do when there seems to be an error.
This lawsuit is about copyright *and* patents, so I've further edited the wiki to mention patents again.
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Well, I just read the final complaint and it has nothing to do with patents:
http://www.oracle.com/sapsuit/complaint.pdf [oracle.com]
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Hmm, that's very strange. I'm reading it now...
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My initial reading agrees with you.
I've made a section to document this. Either we should explain that the journalists are all wrong, or maybe we'll find that the court documents somehow avoid mentioning the object of the dispute (I know, that sounds unlikely).
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Oracle_v._SAP_(2010,_USA)#Help:_Is_it_about_patents.3F [swpat.org]
Peoplesoft (Score:2)
Why would anyone want Peoplesoft?
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They were a competitor, an obstacle to be removed. That's why.
Re:Peoplesoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. If Oracle owns all the names that the Pointy-Hair Bosses know about, Oracle rules the people with the money. Those who actually use the product? They have no say. Neither do any of the technical folk. So why would Oracle care about them?
However, it is a dangerous game to play. IBM tried the same trick in the 1970s and 80s. It nearly destroyed them when the playing-field shifted away from mainframes. It did destroy companies like Prime. Acorn tried the same stunt in the microcomputer field. They lasted a bit longer than the giants, but they're now only producing televisions, their PC division abandoned in the dirt.
Oracle will, eventually, fall the same way if they rely on destroying competition and propping up their brand name with buy-outs. The question is how much damage they will inflict on the markets in the meantime.
Re:Acorn (Score:2)
I thought Acorn did rather well.
They developed a CPU for their Archimedes PC and then licensed the design to everyone who wanted it.
Even Intel license Acorns CPU design they did that well.
Your iPod as a little tiny Acorn CPU inside it.
ARM - originally stood for Acorn Risc Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture [wikipedia.org]
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They did brilliantly for a while - but at some point they stagnated and abandoned ARM, followed by the Acorn PC (which was never finished).
RiscOS was infinitely superior to any other GUI of the time, but failed to keep pace. For whatever reason, Acorn became too insular.
When they did finally abandon their entire IT division, a breakaway group tried to continue to develop the Acorn PC. I don't know what happened there, but suspect Acorn got stubborn, given the press releases of the time from them.
What is this costing the taxpayer? (Score:3, Informative)
"SAP has offered to pay $40 million for the damage it caused and an additional $120 million to cover Oracle's legal bill."
But who pays the salary of the judge and other court personnel? The courthouse building isn't free and neither are its utilities. This can't be cheap.
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Duh, they (both parties) of course paid court fees.
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You'd be surprised how little taxes these litigants actually pay. The bigger they get, the more they seem to get away with paying essentially no taxes - or even end up being subsidised in various ways. Their employees pay taxes, sure, but that is not the same really - were it not for these companies those people would be employed elsewhere and pay taxes on whatever they make.
These is a lot of information to be found on the 'net ab
Knitting (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm becoming more and more convinced (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle is what Oracle has always been (Score:5, Insightful)
I was a DBA forever, and while I loved the 10 or so years I spent supporting Oracle I noted that consultants (for what its worth) seemed to uniformly hate the place (a note, I supported Peoplesoft Installations for awhile and we saw a lot of consultants come through from Oracle among other places..).
It's really a shame, but when 9 came out and Oracle co-opted java for the first time, they screwed it up and it hasn't really gotten any better since. I think a big reason for this is that the office culture of the place is a reflection of Ellison's arrogance, which is somewhat demotivating (even if only privately) to the people who work there, and their products suffer. So here we are with Oracle now owning java and, surprise surprise, Ellison is out to monetize it. Folks, that's what he does. There's a reason he's one of the richest men alive, he finds choke points in the software market and either buys or kills (and replaces) them.
He reminds me of the Wall Street people who see no moral issues with destroying everything in their path to turn a profit. It's sick, it's wrong, and this is America where for better or worse its legal. Ultimately, these super-arrogant folks will be the death of software as an industry because they simply have no concept of 'enough'. One guy told us (unconfirmed personally, but I have no reason to doubt it) that at Oracle, if you weren't in a position to replace your boss after the first year, your career there was basically over. Ellison calls this 'samurai management' or some such nonsense, but I call it bad business. It's this kind of crap that leads to workplace incivility, and this grudge-holding shit Emperor Larry is famous for is plain old simple hubris. It's ok though, he's getting too old to do it for much longer, and Oracle is rapidly becoming a product worth 1k$ instead of 100k$ per installation. Not that he'll ever be poor, but boy wouldn't it be fun to watch him be humbled.
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One guy told us (unconfirmed personally, but I have no reason to doubt it) that at Oracle, if you weren't in a position to replace your boss after the first year, your career there was basically over. Ellison calls this 'samurai management' or some such nonsense, but I call it bad business.
I'd call it "Sith Management".
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So here we are with Oracle now owning java and, surprise surprise, Ellison is out to monetize it.
Jrockit has existed for years, since they acquired BEA.
Re:Oracle is what Oracle has always been (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a lot of pressure, but you just need to know how to handle it, or push it back if necessary
You are welcome to defend your employer, and at Oracle I don't blame you for using AC to do it, but this is not exactly an observation I came up with out of the blue sky...
I'll just leave this here for you bud.
http://news.cnet.com/The-pitch-Inside-the-pressure-cooker/2009-1017_3-897414.html [cnet.com]
Please understand, I think Oracle is a great product at its core. It almost literally runs the world at this point, I just question from both public articles (such as linked) and personal experience (15 years as a DBA, architect, developer, and now Development Officer) Oracle's tactics. Even if they were the greatest employer EVER, it still wouldn't excuse they way they treat their customers. They routinely overcharge for services and pad consulting gigs.
I've been deposed by Oracle in court before (as part of a PS lawsuit), and watching them treat their customers like dogs speaks volumes. I refuse to believe anyone with the kind of sleazy ethics I watched performed (on more than one occasion I might add) can somehow magically be paradigms of humanity internally. On one particularly memorable occasion, I watched Peoplesoft almost destroy a company by trying to implement a beta version of a SQL Server based product(before Oracle bought them), and then got to watch Oracle (via the courts, after the PS buyout) trying to defend Microsoft as a perfectly viable platform. These weren't lawyers,by the way. When it's 25M$ or so of trainwreck, you get real life VP's to show up and lie.
Or... (Score:2)
Pretty Simple (Score:2)
What I really don't understand is if you're running a a database company, do you really want to trumpet how lousy your internal security is in federal court?
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The difference between what TomorrowNow did with Siebel software and what Larry did with Red Hat Linux is that RHEL is open; Siebel doesn't have a
"Merucry ": Taco typo (Score:2)
I see Taco is keeping his usual high editorial standards.
After all these years he still can't spellcheck? Christ, in my browser it's underlined in red.
Oracle was not a gift (Score:2)
Even Steve Jobs (Score:2)
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I strongly suspect you have left yourself crippled. Anyone who claims to be a long-time anything has failed to move forwards, has failed to adapt to the changing IT market. Nothing lasts forever and those who fail to keep up-to-date last no longer than the product they are fixed to. Oracle has moved forward. They support grid computing and clustered computing. These require a radically different mindset than those who grew up on monolithic client-server systems. Oracle will doubtless move forward again, exp
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Their RAC database is impressive in that there are no other major databases that support Infiniband, but other than that their software is ancient, slow, archaic and uncompetitive.
You don't seem to be particularly familiar with the merits of the Oracle database server, which is still at least a decade ahead of all of its competitors. I like PostgreSQL, but in most respects it is just starting to achieve the level of flexibility that Oracle had with the release of Oracle 7 some seventeen years ago.
The specia
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I like PostgreSQL, but in most respects it is just starting to achieve the level of flexibility that Oracle had with the release of Oracle 7 some seventeen years ago.
Can you elaborate? I have never really found a good explanation of how well PostgreSQL compares to the high end proprietary RDBMSs, or even of how well they compare to each other.
Re:Beautiful... (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, many of these things are only learned through hard experience, working on multiple database platforms and then trying to port what works on one to an alternative.
The biggest difference I already mentioned - symmetric multi-node scalability for a single database. So called "shared nothing" database clusters (different nodes host different tables or table partitions) have been common in proprietary databases for many years. I believe there are variants of PostgreSQL out there that can do that.
Oracle pioneered symmetric "shared everything" relational database clusters with Oracle Parallel Server in the late 80s. I understand IBM did the same thing on mainframes with DB2 on Parallel Sysplex a few years later. PostgreSQL doesn't do symmetric clustering yet, but I imagine it will a few years down the road.
On paper, DB2 (for example) is the rough equivalent of Oracle. In practice, developers and DBAs run into enough obstacles doing simple things like alter table operations that Oracle is much easier to administer once it is set up properly. In addition, in Oracle you can do all sorts of database administration operations online without interrupting running applications. More recent versions can rebuild an index while there are active transactions against a table, for example.
My PostgreSQL experience is a little old. The most annoying problem I had was that numeric types needed to match in queries for the optimizer to work properly. I would join a SMALLINT column to an INTEGER column or literal and the index would be ignored. That may be fixed, I don't know. Oracle by contrast uses a uniform NUMBER type comparable to DECIMAL in most databases for everything, which is very convenient. You can increase the numeric precision or scale of any column in constant time, for example. DB2 traditionally required a table export and reload to do this.
If you store integers in 16 bit fields, it is usually tricky to change them all to 32 bit fields without at least stopping all transactions and rewriting every row (which is what PostgreSQL does). Oracle uses variable precision BCD number storage for everything to avoid that problem. I don't know if active transactions can run against a PostgreSQL table while a column type is being altered or not. In any case, you get the idea.
Oracle has an outstanding cost based query optimizer, that can handle views that are built on top of several other layers of views without much of a problem. I haven't tested that in PostgreSQL lately, but what I could really use with the latter are updateable views that filter on session variables. Oracle has PL/SQL "packages" that can store session specific state. Views can refer to package variables such that they limit the rows delivered to a user in that session, which is extremely handy for making virtual private databases.
There are just lots of these kind of things which have been added to Oracle simply due to a very high end client base willing to pay very high rates for the latest and greatest "enterprise edition" stuff. If you don't need the EE stuff, and don't need lots of cores, Oracle is just about as expensive as any other proprietary database, including relatively weak databases like MySQL (now that Oracle owns it) or commercially supported/tweaked versions of PostgreSQL like EnterpriseDB.
Please mod parent up (Score:2)
This is one of, if not the most, informative posts that I've read on the subject. I burned up my mod points yesterday, unfortunately. :(
Re:Beautiful... (Score:5, Funny)
As I've seen elsewhere on /. :
Move over Darth Gates, it's time for Darth Ellison
ORACLE = One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
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Contrast that with virtually any Oracle issue which can be resolved within ten minutes on Metalink or if things really get hairy, within two hours via a support request.
In our experience it's "Oh, it's not a priority 1 issue (meaning we're suffering downtime in a production site)? We'll get to it when we feel like it".
Re:Beautiful... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
Because I work with closed source software from a vendor that gives me access to Technical Reference Manuals, complete descriptions of all fields and behaviors of the tables?
Is it because I enjoy having full access to the pl/sql code in triggers, stored procedures, workflows, forms and reports, which I can then modify to my own purposes and business objectives of my company?
Or is it that I think SAP acted like a bunch of greedy fucks who gave Oracle very reason to limit my access to the info?
c'mon anon, show me your mighty insight
Re:Beautiful... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
Because you are working with a company that would not hesitate to fuck you over the moment it was convenient or the moment you stopped paying up.
You are entitled to your masochism, but to most here working with oracle now would be akin to being a partner with microsoft of the 90's, sure, on paper you're working together.. expect to get fucked over (except with oracle they wouldn't do it technically, just 4-6 digit licensing fees you weren't expecting).
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Except for those of us that actually make money based on applications that the database drives.
Are you trying to say MySQL or Postgresql are equal to Oracle in performance, reliability, or documentation? While Oracle does suck as a company their database core business is rock solid for a lot of good reasons. Of course if you venture outside the one thing Oracle does well heaven help you.
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Are you trying to say MySQL or Postgresql are equal to Oracle in performance, reliability, or documentation?
I'm saying that oracle is becoming more and more irrelevant, as some high scale deployments [highscalability.com] of other software shows.
Some licensing schemes with oracle can wind up costing companies almost a million dollars [zdnet.com.au] per year. That equates to quite a few extra full time employed database administrators.. which would more than be able to make up for any perceived lack of documentation etc.
There really are very few scenarios left where you actually need oracle for your database.
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I think they can cost almost that much to administer. I once got involved in trying to work out how much the hell we owed them and it was huge PITA to just extract the stuff out of our sales system. This was partly our fault (we hadn't captured some of the relevant info before) but mainly theirs because we hadn't needed to under the simpler old method.
In fact it was mainly our management's fault. One, for
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The problem with your statement is that the reason it's news for Skype is because nobody has done it before. I have always considered Postgresql the best of the open source options out there but it has always been behind commercial options like Oracle and DB/2. Only recently has MS SQL caught up with enough features to start making them attractive but Postgresql is almost always a better choice in that tier.
It is routine for Oracle to handle large datasets. Everyone else that has done it with things like M
Re:Beautiful... (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree with the AC that you are a retard. But I have to comment on this:
Because I work with closed source software from a vendor that gives me access to Technical Reference Manuals, complete descriptions of all fields and behaviors of the tables? Is it because I enjoy having full access to the pl/sql code in triggers, stored procedures, workflows, forms and reports, which I can then modify to my own purposes and business objectives of my company?
A lot of companies/people seem to think that's one of the benefits of closed source software, you get to pay for the privilege of accessing some "Knowledgebase" (with "Technical Reference Manuals", FAQs, HOWTOs, whitepapers etc) and get "Support" etc.
When the fact is with stuff like Postgresql, you often don't need all that because you get to
1) See the technical details and similar stuff for free
2) Post a question on a mailing list, to which the developers reply without any marketing/PR bullshit involved.
I've dealt with OSS and closed source stuff. And there've been many times with the latter that they ask $$$ for access to find out something that would be found by Google if it was OSS.
Re:Beautiful... (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree with you on principle, Oracle documentation is second to none and that's better than having to post to some mailing list and then having to send configs along with version dependencies. I would so there are lots of pros and cons of both sides of this. Google is not a great way to get documentation on something specific. Just yesterday I was searching for the cause to one-way communication between an Asterisk 1.4 and an Asterisk 1.6 box that had been upgraded from 1.4 and was using the same config. It took a very long time. Contrast that with virtually any Oracle issue which can be resolved within ten minutes on Metalink or if things really get hairy, within two hours via a support request.
Often times you do get what you pay for even if you have to pay too much to get it. I'll agree most of that should be free and in the interest of adoption of product lines that would actually probably be a smart move from a business standpoint. I look at all the people running away from Sun servers because everything is hidden away now by Oracle so its easy to see that hiding the documentation just makes people look for something more open.
Oracle is in serious trouble these days despite their spending spree, they lack focus and it shows in their product line. I think most people would agree that you only use Oracle for the database, all of their other apps are simply a joke with open source alternatives being very attractive for reporting and collaboration. ERP options still appear to be lacking but the concept as a whole seems to going away anyway. That's probably why Oracle wanted Sun, to have a complete platform for their database completely supported from head to toe the way Apple does it.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you give an example of an Oracle issue that you solved with Metalink in 10 minutes, that a similar scale problem with Postgresql wouldn't be solved with a Google search? Or for the hairy things, wouldn't be solved by an email to the postgresql mailing list? The postgresql developers seem very responsive to me (assuming your email is reasonable and descriptive - and even so I've seen useful replies to pretty crappy emails
That said, from the Vendor's p
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't say anything couldn't be solved with a Google search, I merely said that it would take a lot longer. I've spent an hour on Google looking for Postgresql bits for installation, configuration, and maintanence, things that are all in a central location on Metalink for Oracle.
I'm constantly irritated that patches are hidden away as I see that as a giant negative against the company. If you sold me a defective product and you've done the work of fixing the defect you should distribute it to the rest of
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, let's say that there is some customization that I developed and it starts throwing ORA-6000 errors after an upgrade or patch, some optimized query starts runnin reeeeeeaaaaaaallllllyyyyy slow, or some basic functionality, well ceases to function.
First thing, I hit the alert log, or at least write down the full text of the original error message
I can do a few things at this point... search google, talk to my co-workers, maybe just get a cup of coffee and dig around in guts for a while.
What I have learn
Re: (Score:2)
And, in fairness, some of us have tried looking for something related to OSS only to find that the closest thing is a 6 year old question on a forum that nobody answered or some snot-nosed little git saying "RTFM".
Sometimes, chasing down the docs for OSS stuff is either impossible, or way more work than it should be. I can d
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
>The majority of Open Source projects have shitty, old or no documentation at all.
PostgreSQL is not in this set.
Re: (Score:2)
For me that's the killer of closed source. For open source rare problems are often unfixed but well documented in blog posts that contain long strings of profanity typically ending in "I can't believe that X works like this". Closed source tends to have shaky uncertain explanations on how people think things function. Since only a hand full of people in the whole world have the access to reverse engineer the problem correctly no one really knows what is going on.
I'm