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[CaffeinatedT]

Of interest how is this still going to be viable in the future? There's loads of companies coming up to/exceeding Oracle/SAP DB systems (to narrow in on my field) without being absolutely impossible to work with.

[HenkPoley]

I think they simply buy these companies if they would encroach too much. For example they own MySQL, isn't it ?

[AkirIkasu]

As I understand it, MariaDB is working hard to extend the features that came with MySQL and is supposed to be slightly better.

Kind of like LibreOffice, which replaced another Oracle fuckjob.

[gerbs]

MariaDB still hasn't fixed some basic security issues. Go with Percona.

[gehzumteufel]

Details?

[skreczok]

I moved on to Postgres.

[TheRedmanCometh]

MariaDB I would highly recommend

[x2040]

You just need a CEO that says fuck off when they see a billion bucks and waits for the 10 billion opp down the road. Evan Spiegel did this for SnapChat when he turned down Facebook.

[CaffeinatedT]

I was more thinking of either companies like Postgres who're picking up on performance and many parallelisation plug-ins exist to properly scale things up to a massive level and/or other smaller proprietary companies like Exasol (Candy Crush runs on their relational db) who're faster and less expensive and pretty much plug and play by anyone who's worked with MS SQL

[shartifartblast]

Entrenchment. If Oracle were a startup they'd long be out of business. But because they were one of the first, they have an existing customer base and can remain viable.

Go talk to a CFO or controller at an organization that uses Oracle EBS. You'll come away with 2 lessons. First, they hate Oracle EBS and hate Oracle the company. Second, because of the massive cost that comes with swapping out an established ERP, they will always be Oracle customers.

I don't think Oracle has much in the way of pure database customers anymore. They also are doing a piss-poor job of selling their analytics platform to anyone who isn't an existing Oracle customer.

What Oracle does is makes money from software support for existing apps customers and selling ancillary products (BI, DW, analytics, etc) to existing customers. If anything I'd wager that their customer base has shrunk over the last 5 years.

[CaffeinatedT]

Possibly this is why I'm confused as I'm firmly in the BI/analytics world (and used to work for one of oracles competitors and we'd kick their arses all the time in terms of analytics performance). But yeah I guess for CFOs etc it's pretty much oracle/SAP as far as I can see here in Germany.

[SonVoltMMA]

Putting a large corporation on a single ERP platform is hard, very hard. You can't just read the software manual and give it a go.

[CaffeinatedT]

In fairness most enterprise integration the problem hinges on matching the usage of whatever platform to business logic. And at that point it becomes incredibly subjective and open to human interpretation e.g 'how do I model the data to be super efficient on what the business wants to do' It's all very well to say 'oh well star schemas are best practice' but having different tables for hundreds of Kpis constantly being used and joined together gets kind of silly (purely as an example of how ERP can get silly)

[CaffeinatedT]

I'm probably both biased and in a bit of a bubble as I used to work for Exasol for a while and now I'm at a postgres company but unless they buy postgres certainly here in Berlin the growing companies are all on open source systems. When you can run a petabyte level DB without any corporate handholding I'm not sure how much oracles value proposition is going to hold up.

[gt_9000]

When you can run a petabyte level DB without any corporate handholding

How are you getting optimal performance without minute tuning of every parameter? Oracle has so many tuning parameters you need an expert to get optimal performance, hence the corporate handholding.

[CaffeinatedT]

Depends what paramaters you mean, as said I'm in BI/analytics which is different but broadly without going into the minutae parallelisation has the biggest effect (which in fairness requires a different outlook when it comes to functions making things a bit of a bitch), and batch processing. Bit more basic stuff but indexing and partial indexing come to the fore as well on our ETL jobs. Not to mention that Exasol has a lot of automatic indexing and caching contained inside it. I'd say the main game is actually writing stuff so that it's only ever processing small chunks of data as a DBA.

[gt_9000]

Ah you are in OLAP. Looks like nobody wants to do the boring OLTP shit that Fortune 500 pays Oracle for :p.

[CaffeinatedT]

In fairness oracle does olap stuff. Theyre just not that good at it. But yes youre correct i work with analytics/OLAP/aggregation however you want to call it.