Opinions on Oracle (have you ever had to deal with them)?

RetroComputingCollector

RetroComputingCollector

I'm lucky enough to never had dealt with One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, but has anyone on these forums ever had to deal with Oracle? What is your opinion of them and are they really that bad?
 

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They are a commercial company - all commercial companies needs / wants to make money. Which is fine.
For a long while, their main product was the Oracle database (some argues that it still is). Before they had serious competition they priced their database as high as the customers could take.
When they got some serious competition, they learned from them (the competitors) new ways to license their database - and increased their prices.
Now that sensible customers have switched to solutions that gives more value for the money (than Oracle), Oracle still cling to their high prices - and likely will until they have to close the barn door.

Does that make them any worse than other commercial companies?

I don't know.
 
My last job was in a CentOS shop, years ago now, probably around the time of CentOS 5x. Anyway, we got some new Oracle database and their salespeople convinced my boss they needed Oracle Linux. So, we got one. We had one or two problems, and I found their support terrible. We'd ask a question, and by the time they got back to us, a few days later, we had given up and tried rebooting which fixed things. The system itself was horrible, it was just like the CentOS we'd been using. As for Ellison as a person, well, the reports aren't great. I think it's just his son sucking up to Trump, but either way POSIX.1 mentioned, there's lots of controversies.

TLDR; is when I dealt with Oracle, which admittedly was years ago, my experience with their support was that it was not very good, and didn't help us solve anything. I don't know what the DB admins' experience was though.

EDIT: Above I said the system itself was horrible, and that should have been the system itself wasn't horrible, (it was standard RedHat type RHEl5 or 6 whichever it was back then.
 
I personally know a dev-ops specialist working at Oracle. Due to NDA's he can't specifically talk about much of what he does internally but often recommends OCI and its different services.
 
RetroComputingCollector said:
I'm lucky enough to never had dealt with One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, but has anyone on these forums ever had to deal with Oracle? What is your opinion of them and are they really that bad?
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Define bad? There are certainly other companies I would be happier dealing with. There are also other companies I would hate to have to deal with more.
 
RetroComputingCollector said:
Bad as in "you don't want to deal with them". What companies would you not want to deal with more than Oracle?
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Never had anything with Oracle (not counting tech they acquired from Sun), but my good friend Dave (unfortunately, he passed young) worked in their Johannesburg branch and he hated working there, despite his uncle who got him this job was in higher management, so he had his protection.

My only personal experience with big Evil Corp. was doing repro work for JP Morgan in Johannesburg. It was profitable for me, because shop where I worked charged them extra and again charged extra offset printer guy who was printing their weekly reports on stock market (or something like that) and I had fair cut of that, because I came up with very fast system that from receiving their MS Word docs (RGB), I was able to output imposed separations on film in 2-3 spot colors in 30-45 mins. max.
Once, there were some "misunderstandings" about who is to blame for the errors in the printed docs, so I went to their HQ. It looked like spaceship to me with all those enormous displays in the circle showing stocks and prices, but I was shocked by their tech stuff level of incompetence and a level of nepotism. Luckily for me, person there in charge of printing was older lady, and she was very competent, so she understood what I was talking about and suggesting about their writing workflow, she even complained (in private) to me that she is surrounded by idiots 🤣 They even had someone who was employed as PostScript expert, but didn't know first thing about it 🤦‍♂️
My general impression was that it was run as typical socialist/communist enterprise (I grow up in the country that was run like that, so I could recognize what I saw for what it is), and I remember thinking: "If those guys are running the world, all will go to $hit in next 25-30 years max." And here we are, 25 years later 😖
 
tingo said:
For a long while, their main product was the Oracle database (some argues that it still is). Before they had serious competition they priced their database as high as the customers could take.
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Oracle always had competition, unless you define their market in a myopic way.

They shipped what is probably the first relational database available to commercial customers in 1979. It was a small upstart, competing with hierarchical and network databases. The 400 pound gorilla in that market was IBM's IMS. So they were not the king of the hill initially, they were a small and scrappy competitor, using a more easy-to-use technology (relational) against the big entrenched companies.

It turns out that relational databases were a really good idea. So good that IBM was sort of forced into selling one to its customers. The fascinating thing is that the relational database is an IBM invention (see Edgar Codd), and the first prototype / non-commercial implementation was IBM's System R. But after building that research prototype (and even alpha-testing it at a few customer sites) in the mid 70s, IBM decided to not productize it and sell it to customers. It only shipped its own relational database (the thing that is today called DB2) in 1983, four years after Oracle. In the meantime, Ingres had become another successful relational product, and the open-source version of it inspired Tandem's NonStop SQL product. Digital also had RDB shipping by then.

So in some sense Oracle had little competition in the market for RELATIONAL databases for a few years (79 to about 83), until IBM and many others caught up. But even during that time, they were competing with other forms of databases. And since ~83, it has been in a highly competitive market for relational databases.

Disclaimer: The folks who developed System R, the first relational database, were my colleagues and friends when I worked at IBM. I still see a few of them regularly, at lunch and dinner, or at concerts.

Anyway, to answer the original question: I've never been an Oracle customer, nor collaborated with them in any meaningful way. I hear second-hand that they are awful to deal with, and obnoxious. But that hearsay might be highly biased, since I come from the other big company in the database market.
 
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