Oracle DB admins urged to swap their gas guzzler for an electric car At the Postgres Vision 16 conference taking place in San Francisco this week, Ed Boyajian, president and CEO of EnterpriseDB, tried to convince attendees to abandon their Hummers for electric cars. Boyajian wasn't moonlighting for Tesla. Rather, he was peddling a metaphor in which expensive gas-guzzlers represent traditional …
'we're deploying everything on this product, but we like what you have here, so could you give it to us at a reduced cost?'"
Oracle's answer will either be "NO" or if you're a big enough customer, "Yes".
They will then charge you the most they can get away with.
I'm guessing the guy from MasterCard has never heard of vendor lock-in. I just mention it because Oracle know all about it.
That depends on your definition of "pollute," which in an Oracle context is spelled "PL/SQL."
I made a pitch a few years back for PostGres as a partial substitute for Oracle. We had the rather bad habit of making a new database for nearly every application and PostGres would have done for 90 or 95% of the databases we were running or planning, but for our other nasty habit of using PL/SQL for a lot of the application code. The savings from replacing Oracle would have been large, probably enough to recover in a couple of years the cost of translating the PL/SQL to PL/pgSQL or redoing the necessary code in another language, even taking account of the need to reanalyze some and retest it all. But it was a government agency with no tolerance for risk, where C-level management had come through a couple of years earlier and in "all-hands" meetings had informed IT personnel that IT was not a part of their core (finance and accounting) business. Rejection was almost instantaneous despite the fact that the agency was under considerable pressure to reduce operating costs.
"I thought that too. Don't these California types realise that not everybody aspires to drive a milk float? "
Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not (perhaps I need more coffee :), but FYI the Tesla P100D does 0-60 in 2.5 seconds. There are plenty of videos on youtube of Teslas leaving pretty much everything on 4 wheels (and lots on 2) for dead. Here's a good one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOuOulH02bs
Despite the best efforts of some manufacturers with their piss poor half assed electric offerings, electric cars when built properly are seriously quick vehicles.
electric cars when built properly are seriously quick vehicles.
For a while, but they can't stay the course 24/7. Put a Tesla in the Le Mans 24 hours and see where it finishes. Very nice car, but it has its limitations.
Much the same is true of the small DB vendors, OK for some light & nippy apps, but not to run a huge company.
"For a while, but they can't stay the course 24/7. Put a Tesla in the Le Mans 24 hours and see where it finishes. Very nice car, but it has its limitations."
Who cares. For road use and shorter races - eg Formula E - they're fine. The range has been sorted, now they just need to bring the charging time down to something closer to the time you spend filling up with fuel - laws of physics permitting - then there won't really be any reason not to buy one.
laws of physics permitting
1 litre of petrol contains the equivalent of 8.8kWh of energy, so a regular fill of 50litres delivers around 440kWh. Deliver that in the 5 minutes it takes to fill with 50 litres, and you get around 5MW. Say 500A at 10kV. Nasty levels for untrained people to work with.
Standard motorway service station with, say, 6-10 pumps, that's a 30-50MW grid connection, or one nuclear reactor for every 40ish filling stations. Even assuming they aren't all running every pump all the time it's still not feasible.
This article sounds unnecessarily snarky, must we assume the author has an interest in Oracle? Presumably the shindig in San Francisco pales in comparison to what he's used to when Oracle invites…
There are many situations where Oracle is the best solution and for which companies are only too happy pay even large sums of money. But the problem with Oracle, and SAP, are the licensing conditions where companies are forced to pay for stuff they neither want nor need in order for Oracle to maintain an army of sales people. Talk to any large Oracle or SAP customer and it's the contracts that annoy them the most.
Kudos to EnterpriseDB for recognising compatibility as a key motivation for companies to be able to move smaller projects. Postgres' rise in enterprises really started when Sun bought MySQL and there is now a healthy eco-system of companies providing add-ons and consulting for it and sponsoring further development. It's an open source success story and more akin to Openstack than RedHat. Many companies no longer fear open source nor do they confuse free source with "you're on your own".
Whilst the company itself might have a dubious approach to selling and supporting its products, the Oracle DB itself is a first class piece of software. As someone who's used Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, Informix & Mysql I know which one I'd pick for a production enviroment. Sadly these days I'm having to use Mongo. Jesus H, what a POS. There was a good reason relational DBs kicked the backside of key-value and flat file type DBs in the 80s and Mongo is once again proving why.
I noticed Postgres wasn't on that list. Seriously, grab a copy and have a play with it. It's very Oracle-esque and on the whole a very nice database to work with. As for Mongo and other nosql solutions, I guess it just depends on your workload (though I personally don't care for them myself either, and it is rather telling that a lot of nosql systems seem to be trying to find ways to hack in sql-like behaviour).
It doesn't matter if Postgres is better than Oracle since:
1. Oracle has the brand and marketing budget & hype
2. Postgres is a stupid name
Why are 'docker' and 'containers' and 'cloud' cool and people are buying them? It's because they sound cool, & people buy cool. Postgres is a shit name. Call it 'EpicDB' and watch it sell....
And there was me thinking that technical excellence, reliability, robustness, strong data integrity features, strong disaster-recovery features and providing a rich, standards compliant API for developers were the really important features in a database system, when all along it's a cool name that really matters! I should just save all my data to a RAM disk and call it the Batman DB.
"And there was me thinking that technical excellence, reliability, robustness, strong data integrity features, strong disaster-recovery features and..."
What makes you think the IT managers or budget holders give a shit about the technical capability of a product? It's more important that it's cool and has some Gartner support and looks good on their CV.
Like I said - branding is everything if you want to sell it to those who own the purse strings not the techies who love it's capability.
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