back to article Behold, Microsoft SQL Server on Linux – and a firm screw-you to Oracle

In an aggressive move, Microsoft has told Oracle customers: migrate to SQL Server 2016 and Redmond with give you free licensing for the lifetime of the product plus technical support. Microsoft made the offer at a special Data Driven day in New York City on Thursday, and has taken out full page advertisements in the national …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    "Data is the new electricity"

    Except that without electricity, you can't get to your data?

    I can see what Nadella is trying to say (Data is ubiquitous and a requirement for successful business), but I don't like these pithy little clichés-in-the-making.

    1. cd

      Re: "Data is the new electricity"

      Blackouts are the new black.

    2. TheOtherHobbes

      Re: "Data is the new electricity"

      >I can see what Nadella is trying to say

      The NadBot was having another android (not Android) moment.

      Microsoft the Next Generation loves Data.

    3. Bob Vistakin
      Pint

      A proper Microsoft vs Oracle scrap

      This is genuinely confusing. Like, say a David Cameron vs Piers Morgan fight to the death where the only weapons are broken bottles. Clearly, you'd like them both to lose, but it to drag on as long and painfully as possible for both.

  2. hplasm
    Meh

    Super Excited...

    Why is it whenever someone at MS is 'super excited' it never really trickles down?

    1. Preston Munchensonton

      Re: Super Excited...

      Why is it whenever someone at MS is 'super excited' it never really trickles down?

      Well, I would still be in shell-shock from the various rantings and chair-throwings of the last CEO. But perhaps there's another explanation (I doubt it).

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Super Excited...

      Haha, it is true. If you look back at old Bill Gates interviews, he says "super" all the time. I think it just because part of Microsoft culture to say everything is "super."

    3. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge
      Happy

      Re: Super Excited...

      > someone at MS is 'super excited' it never really trickles down?

      I used to have a dog (yes - shocking I know!) that, when 'super excited', would let stuff trickle down..

      Mostly onto the floor. Which is why we tended to have a waterproof mat just inside the front door.

      Not a problem any cat I've ever had has had. Thus showing the ineffable superiority of the feline species[1]!

      [1] Just in case they are reading this. I sometimes wonder why my daytime internet usage figures are so high.. All those cat porn^Wvideos on t'interwebnetthingy.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Super Excited...

      "Why is it whenever someone at MS is 'super excited' it never really trickles down?"

      Tena?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Super Excited...

        As someone who's actually wearing a Tena product right now, I officially find this comment hilarious.

    5. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Super Excited...

      Excited is the new pleased or happy. It's all marketing to "big it up", like the latest washing powder washes whiter than white.

      It's quite rare to be genuinely excited about something. Happy, or pleased for most incremental changes but excited? That needs a real paradigm change. I'd be excited if they announced an easy to operate and cheap to run flying car. Or cheap nuclear fusion powered electricity. But MS-SQL on Linux? Meh!

  3. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Devil

    Conflicted.

    Less Oracle in the world, good. More Microsoft monopoly? Not so much.

    *coff* NoSQL

    1. Preston Munchensonton
      Thumb Up

      Less Oracle in the world, good. More Microsoft monopoly? Not so much.

      Technically, MS competing against Oracle for the same customers means that there isn't a monopoly.

      So long as we all have a choice, I'm fine with MS or Oracle doing whatever they want. In the end, I choose neither and I'm much happier for it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Agree, I don't think the major problem with the DB market, historically, has been too much competition or Microsoft dominating the category. Oracle basically had a free run and took full advantage of it. MS, until recently, never really made a strong play to try to upset Oracle, for no apparent reason.... This is the first legitimate threat Oracle has had since DB2 and Sybase in the 90s. It is probably going to work well for MS too. SQL is at parity with, some like Gartner would say has moved ahead of, Oracle... and it is less costly. There are a lot of people who want to move off of Oracle but can't justify rebuying licenses and the migration work, MS is taking that concern off the table. I don't think MS is going to come to just dominate the DB market. There is just too much Oracle out there, but this is going to leave a mark.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          The HANA angle

          Another side effect: SAP cannot be too pleased about this development. They are trying to get their install base to move off of primarily Oracle (and DB2, MS SQL to a lesser extent) to HANA. HANA is even more expensive than Oracle... there is just zero economic justification for SAP HANA. It is a "cause the boss (SAP) says so" decision. You are going to have some properly pissed SAP customers who are going to say "so I could move to MS SQL for zero dollars and MS will do the migration for me... but your proposition, or rather demand, is that I move to HANA for $10m in licenses and hire some consultants to do the migration and pay significantly higher on going support... all to get in memory, which 1) I don't need and 2) is also in MS SQL." MS should double down on this free license promo and tell those SAP customers that instead of moving to S/4 they can trade in their SAP licenses for Dynamics AX for no cost.... SAP HANA is an amazing, almost unprecedented, overreach on SAP's part. Even Oracle wouldn't have the stones to do something like HANA. The analogous situation would be if Oracle told customers that if they wanted to use Oracle DB, they can only run the next version on Exadata.

    2. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      Yes and No

      The SQL server itself is only half of the story. For each machine running sever you have tens, hundreds if not thousands of clients.

      The _MUCH_ bigger part is how do you access it remotely. Ugly or not Oracle can be accessed from pretty much anything under the sun - perl, python, java, various spreadsheets, analytics, etc. The same is valid for most open source databases.

      Last time I checked MS SQL, on the other hand however could be accessed from non-MS platforms only via FreeTDS (so there is no officially supported client) and the highest protocol version supported is the one that came out with SQL Server 2008. Any new features in 2013 (not sure what they shipped) as well as anything in 2016 AFAIK are not yet supported.

      1. Roq D. Kasba

        Re: Yes and No

        Interesting point, and I guess we can watch this space. I'd guess, though, that porting to Linux, creating Office for Android, embracing Eclipse does show a fundamental culture shift from MS, so I'd imagine trivial artificial barriers will also vanish.

      2. Jame_s

        Re: Yes and No

        so all the php code on linux i have accessing ms sql databases must be imaginary

        1. Danhalen

          Re: Yes and No

          Wasn't native MSSQL support was dropped from v5.3? To be fair, I've only developed one PHP application that connects to an MSSQL server, but that did indeed require FreeTDS

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Yes and No

        Microsoft support jdbc on multiple platforms and odbc on windows and linux directly. Plus community support for pretty much every language under the sun. I think we are currently using C# (native and mono), node, python, ruby, java, scala and go. I'm probably forgetting some. It's really not an issue.

        I'm excited about this, but also very cautious. SQL Server is an excellent RDBMS, probably the best bang for the buck unless you really need RAC, but some features are very tightly coupled to the windows OS. Memory and file management, security, clustering, log shipping, etc. I will be curious to see how some of those get handled under linux. I don't see myself as an early adopter.

        1. ElectricRook
          FAIL

          Re: Yes and No

          One hidden caveat is the expanded "reserved words" list. I hope a little thing like that won't bring down your server too.

      4. Richard Plinston

        Re: Yes and No

        > For each machine running sever you have tens, hundreds if not thousands of clients.

        The server may be 'free', but CALs not so much. Which is why it must be Software Assurance.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Yes and No

          "The server may be 'free', but CALs not so much"

          For enterprise, per-client licensing surely makes a lot more sense than all that per-cpu stuff. It may not float quite such exotic boats, but SQL Server might just be the bit of Microsoft's strategy that actually makes sense. At least we now know why Linux.

          1. RichardB

            Re: Yes and No

            It only rarely used to, mostly where people were installing pretty daftly specced affairs on a per project funded basis, rather than scaling appropriately.

            These days of course, you can't license enterprise by user, so the point is moot.

          2. Alain

            Re: Yes and No

            This deal will certain look sweet to the big guys in the large government institution I work for.

            The licensing terms of Oracle on VMware (there's an article about this here on El Reg) make it for insane fees. It's going to cost them millions of euros.

            However I foresee huge porting fees. Our apps use zillions of lines of stored PL/SQL code. AFAIK porting these to SQL Server is no picnic and since there are legacy apps with little or no people remaining who know the internals...

            I wouldn't dislike switching from my current clusters of HP-UX machines running Oracle instances to clustered SQL Server instances on Linux machines, though. Especially now that HP's solid ServiceGuard clustering software is available for Linux x86 boxes.

            1. werdsmith Silver badge

              Re: Yes and No

              That dirty VM licensing scam by Oracle is leaving a nasty taste, not only are they hurting clients they are also removing the value from their product by making a ROI impossible and making Oracle trained staff unpopular with cost conscious management.

              I've seen hundreds of Oracle instances that could have been done far cheaper on SQL Server Standard, and I've seen hundreds of SQL Server instances that could have been done on free databases. I guess the instances on VM will be migrated onto physical until such time that they can be banished forever and replaced with something sane.

              Oracle has some USPs that very few shops actually need nowadays, there is often a workaround.

              Kind of like buying one of the modern super-sophisticated agricultural tractors for driving to the supermarket and doing the school run.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Yes and No

                "That dirty VM licensing scam by Oracle is leaving a nasty taste"

                Definitely. That was just a stupid decision on Oracle's part from a purely financial perspective. Why would you risk upsetting thousands of highly lucrative DB customers in order to win dozens of not very lucrative VM customers?

      5. This post has been deleted by its author

      6. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Yes and No

        False.

      7. Ross 12

        Re: Yes and No

        JDBC

      8. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Yes and No

        Ugly or not Oracle can be accessed from pretty much anything under the sun

        Yes, well until Oracle bought Sun that is.

        Last project I had involving Oracle, it was upgrading a tracking system from Ubuntu 8.04 to 12.04. The project got scuppered because of the old version of Oracle being used on-site: the older libraries didn't work on Ubuntu 12.04, and the newer libraries didn't talk to their version of Oracle.

        That site is now considering a move to MS SQL Server.

    3. zentechinc

      As a data-guy I find your understanding of NoSQL as a quip against MS disconcerting.

      It's like saying: 'I hate Hickory Farms because I personally dislike their sausage and think they sell too much around the holidays, lets all eat cheese!'

      Got news for you bud: while some Hickory Farms is gross, lots of that crap is deeeeelicious. They also sell cheese too... Just like MS also has NoSQL tech (increasing all the time).

      Use whatever tech is best suited ('most delicious') for the job. Brand loyalty/prejudice is for suckers.

      1. Danny 14

        We license mssql per cpu (well per pair of cpus minimum 2 licenses). No CALs needed then. You will probably need an external connector license too depending on what you do with your sql.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "We license mssql per cpu (well per pair of cpus minimum 2 licenses). No CALs needed then. "

          Well, yes, it is horses for courses. If I'm going to connect to external, random clients, CAL licensing won't work.

          The problem is that too many things in this world are charged on a step model where a linear model would work better. People have to make sub-optimal decisions because of step changes. Examples are tax bands, per-CPU licensing, and mobile phone contracts.

          Step models arose in the days before computers because they were simple enough for people to deal with and they could be represented with paper tables. But the absurdity of, for instance, the VED bands where a test increase from 120g/km to 121 causes a tax increase of £80 should be obvious.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I have no idea what Hickory Farm is but hey, have an upvote for the Americanisation and the very valid point that being non partisan with respect to platform is a 'Good Thing'

        1. joeldillon

          It's smoked sausage. :)

    4. Long John Brass
      Headmaster

      DB2 for the win?

      Damnit, where did I put those FoxPro diskettes

      Powerbuilder maybe?

      <Icon=oldFart>

      1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

        Re: DB2 for the win?

        > Damnit, where did I put those FoxPro diskettes

        I found an old Dbase3 box at home recently (clearing out the detritus strata in the computer room) - including a number of 5 1/4" floppies..

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Beware !

    ......For the lifetime of the product.

    So does that means retirement for SQL server 2016 in 2017 then ?

    1. Franco

      Re: Beware !

      Standard MS support cycle is 5+5, I.e 5 years normal support then 5 years extended. Even products that have low uptake, like Vista, get the same lifecycle.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Beware !

      No, it does not. What good would that do MS? The deal is that they let you trade in all your Oracle licenses for MS SQL licenses and provide services to migrate the workloads plus training on MS SQL... all at no cost. MS will make money when you move from Oracle support to, still less costly, MS support.

  5. thx1138v2

    What MS isn't saying

    They'll be installing Windows 10 on the machine one dark night in an automatic update to SQL. Dual boot? BAH! HUMBUG!

  6. alain williams Silver badge

    More spyware ?

    Given that MS Windows 10 'phone home a lot and MS can upload any file that it wants from your machine; can we also expect that MS SQL server will behave likewise and give MS/NSA access to any records that it wants from your database ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: More spyware ?

      Can we stop this FUD. Yes, in preview builds of Windows 10 there was a lot of phoning home going on (for obvious reasons).

      In any recent production build, if you install it, you get the option to disable a huge number of those settings straight away before you first log in. Also, it's no longer a requirement to use a Microsoft account. And if you want to disable automatic updates, just flag your internet connection as metered, and it will wait for you to manually kick it off.

      And actually if you look at three letter agencies, Microsoft might just be a little less guilty than other big players, given that they are rigurously fighting the FBI's demand for their Ireland-based data.

      1. usbac Silver badge

        Re: More spyware ?

        By Microsoft's own admission, you can't turn off ALL of the spying. Any spying that can't be turned off completely is unacceptable in a corporate environment.

        Windows 10 will NEVER be seen on any desktop within our enterprise! Senior management here agrees that any spying is totally unacceptable. Even with the enterprise version of Windows 10, you can't completely disable all "telemetry". Not going to happen here!

        Even with all of the "telemetry" settings turned off, Windows 10 phones home over 2000 times per day. This isn't a bunch of FUD, this is reality. The world may look different from your cubicle in Redmond, but in the real world, we aren't the product!

        1. Danny 14

          Re: More spyware ?

          Our sql server isnt internet facing so it wont be phoning anyone home.

          1. Kubla Cant

            Re: More spyware ?

            @Danny 14 Our sql server isnt internet facing so it wont be phoning anyone home.

            Good point. Anyone who runs a database server that has an open internet connection fully deserves to be spied on.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: More spyware ?

          By Microsoft's own admission, you can't turn off ALL of the spying.

          Out of curiosity, have you got a source for that? (Curious about the weasel wording of their own admission.)

          1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

            Microsoft's Technet article on telemetry

            Microsoft has a rather complete article on Windows 1 0 telemetry here.

            In the second paragraph, it is stated that "You can configure telemetry at the lowest level for your edition of Windows" - note "lowest level" and not "off".

            It does say in the following paragraphs that you can turn off the services that do the phoning home, but that deprives you of the services instead of just stopping the telemetry, so I'd say that saying you can't turn off all telemetry is rather true.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: More spyware ?

          There is lots of focus on the insecurity/telemetry of OSs and that is great, but what about the hardware blobs that run all our computers and to which most us have no access to source code, even in Linux, and which is a reason why OpenBSD is available on a more limited set of hardware.

        4. MrTuK

          Re: More spyware ?

          "Windows 10 will NEVER be seen on any desktop within our enterprise! Senior management here agrees that any spying is totally unacceptable."

          WOW Senior management with Wisdom and Balls !

          I would advise being very careful what you say, NSA might send your Senior Management to Guantanamo !

          For some what surfing practise or something along those lines for being un-American or something !

          Due to the backporting of said Telemetry software/updates to Win 7 machines they now have all the dirty they need on said Senior Management including all iPhone communications via the FBI !

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: More spyware ?

        I'm not too worried about it.

    2. FuzzyWuzzys
      Happy

      Re: More spyware ?

      It already does...well sort of. When you install MSSQL it asks if you liked to supply MS with some usage stats while it's running.

  7. Deltics

    "No one does demos on anything that isn’t ironclad,"

    There is a reason for all the jokes about "the demo version", standing on the premise that the demo is not representative of the existence of anything concrete in reality. Not that this is always the case or even in this case. But to suggest that a demo is iron clad proof of something nearly being ready...

    ... if there was anyone left thinking that Gartner often are just blowing smoke rather than talking from a position of experience or knowledge, this should finally disabuse them of that notion.

    1. JoeF

      Re: "No one does demos on anything that isn’t ironclad,"

      MS in particular has a history of demo'ing things that didn't even exist, like some 20 years ago when Go Corp. was threatening to eat their lunch and they created a "demo" which was complete vaporware, but doomed Go.

      And BillG getting a BSOD on stage is somewhere on YouTube.

      1. Preston Munchensonton
        Pint

        Re: "No one does demos on anything that isn’t ironclad,"

        And BillG getting a BSOD on stage is somewhere on YouTube.

        http://youtu.be/IW7Rqwwth84

    2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: "No one does demos on anything that isn’t ironclad,"

      If there is anything that History has taught us techies, it is that no demo is ironclad.

      I'm fairly sure that every single person posting in Reg forums has been in the situation where they wanted to show a perfectly functional product, but something went wrong and the product chose that exact time to bug.

      I know it has happened to me.

      But hey, another sweeping declaration from a Gartner guy. That's what they specialize in after all.

      1. Simon Westerby 1

        Re: "No one does demos on anything that isn’t ironclad,"

        upvote for for being in the bug demo club!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh snap

    The gloves are off now. That is a pretty sweet deal.

  9. W. Anderson

    PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

    It would make significantly more sense - technically and financially - for dis-satisfied Oracle customers to migrate to latest PostgreSQL database solutions, even through established EnterpriseDB commercial vendor than to Microsoft SQLServer.

    Not only is there synergy between Oracle SQL and Postgresql PL/SQL, with very efficient tools having been developed and extensively used for such specific task, but PostgreSQL has proven to be equally or more robust, reliable and more secure than MS SQLServer, and at an lower initial and overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

    How many “successful” transitions - from Oracle - can Microsoft boast - as evaluated by credible independent sources - compared to several "real world" Fortune 500 exceptionally successful transition case studies?

    1. phil dude
      Linux

      Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

      I can confirm Postgresql is a nice replacement for *SQL.

      Source: Used for large-scale medical project (for use by physicians), that combined realtime genetic data compared with genomic, statistical, GWAS and PHEWAS analysis for use with anonymised patient records presented in clinical setting.

      When M$ starts using GPL, wake me up...

      P.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

      Maybe, but you know that MS is going to be around and supporting SQL and you know that whatever ISV your marketing department decides to buy will be supported on MS SQL and is likely not on Postgre.

      1. Roo
        Windows

        Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

        "Maybe, but you know that MS is going to be around and supporting SQL"

        That simply isn't true. There is no reason to expect MS to commit to SQLServer on Linux any more than they committed to WinRT & Silverlight. MS are in the business of making money with a big margin, if they can't do history shows they walk away.

        By contrast the PostgreSQL team have delivered a good product that has a 20 years of unblemished service history on my machines, so there is no rational reason for me to choose SQLServer over and above PostgreSQL.

        *IF* the PostgreSQL team stops supporting their code, I have the option of taking the sources and paying someone else to support it, or support it myself. With SQLServer I might be able to get the source if I grease the right palms and make the right noises, but ultimately MS can simply refuse to play ball anytime they choose - and what's worse they could decide to take you to court for running unlicensed software...

        That said it's still nice to see MS having a crack at supporting Linux, IMO it's a good thing for everyone in the long run.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

      Maybe when Postgres will implement partitioning truly... or LOBs support. And let's not speak of even more advanced features.

      Believe me, Postgres is OK if you need a a simple data dump with some SQL capabilities - which is probably what too many use a database for.

      It's nowhere near to be an Oracle or SQL Server replacement for serious database stuff, believe me.

      Oracle has a lot of idiosyncrasies, and porting any Oracle application that extensively and properly rely on Oracle features is a true bloodbath, and you're going to need to reimplement a lot of stuff from scratch.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

        "Believe me, Postgres is OK if you need a a simple data dump with some SQL capabilities - which is probably what too many use a database for."

        So...what are these "too many" doing wrong exactly? What would they use instead of a database?

        This sort of de haut en bas post tends to annoy me. By your logic "too many" people have simple databases - which is how I read your post - and PostgreSQL will do that for them. I agree that in my experience (academic) PostgreSQL enthusiasts tend to overrate it - but that's true of just about every database. The point surely is that if someone has a system that meets the limitations of PostgreSQL, they would be mad not to save the money and use it. Engineering, after all, is not about building the biggest and most complex; it's about making the smallest, simplest and cheapest thing that meets the specification.

      2. W. Anderson

        Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

        Commenters "LDS" and preceding "anonymous Coward" have shown both their infantile Microsoft bent, as well as gross ignorance in a complete lack of technical knowledge on PostgreSQL, either in it's global adoption or in an respect.

        The Database system is primary database of use for several Fortune 1000 corporations including Fujitsu, National Weather Services with advanced features in Spatial data/object management, for many of the 28 European Union countries' national Census database solution, processed exabytes of data for Yahoo that SQL Server could never handle, and proved it's superior robustness/reliability and greater security in comparison to SQLServer.

        Why else would Microsoft port its flagship database to Linux if Windows was any good. UNIX and Linux users "know" and experience the power of PostgreSQL.

        Reminder:

        EnterpriseBM commercial service and expertise for PostgreSQL has serious investment from IBM, Redhat and other vary large enterprises, and the fact the PostgreSQL has been in existence and continually improved for twenty plus years for thousands of use cases - large and small, as a Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) clearly proves it's future longevity.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

          Yeah, large technical companies with in house engineering support can use Postgre, or Cassendra or Maria or any Hadoop distro or any other open source data store. Knock themselves out. The point is that if you are running Oracle today, you have probably looked at those options and they were already unsatisfactory for one reason or another. A large one would be ISV support, e.g. you cannot run SAP or most other commercial apps on Postgre. If you're Google, you're not going to buy Oracle or MS SQL. If you're a regular shop with regular commercial applications, MS SQL is a better choice than Oracle or Postgre. Apples and oranges.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

            Postgre has been trying to take down Oracle since forever. It doesn't work because of ISV support (the largest issue), skill base, and because if anything goes wrong, the CIO doesn't want to tell the CEO that they were using this obscure DB. It sounds better to say Oracle or Microsoft. I'm not saying that Postgre has a higher probability of issues, necessarily, but what would you rather say from a CYA perspective: "we are working with Microsoft/Oracle on this issue or we are working with EnterpriseDB our PostgreSQL support provider on this issue?" The first question from the CEO in the second case is going to be "What is PostgreSQL and why would you select it?" If you say MS or Oracle, the brass is going to say "yeah, I would have made the same decision... stuff happens, not your fault." It is a play on the "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" adage. That didn't necessarily mean that IBM never had issues, but who do you want behind you if there are issues.

            1. Richard Plinston

              Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

              > Postgre has been trying to take down Oracle since forever.

              In what way? Has PostgreSQL been sending out trojans to Oracle sites?, running DOS attacks? Advertising heavily? Paying for 'grass roots' FUDsters? Firing torpedoes at catamarans?

              I thought not.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: PostgreSQL a better choice for transition from Oracle

                Take down in the business sense, replacing Oracle with less costly EnterpriseDB Postgre. Not in the Greco Roman wrestling sense... although Larry would probably prefer the latter.

  10. a_yank_lurker

    Too louses

    I have not decide who is worse Leisure Suit Larry and his minions or Slurp. This has the feel of brawl between to bottom feeders; a pox on both. The real problem for both is relational databases are a very good but mature technology that is well understood. It is excellent for many problems but lack database systems is also very dismal in other situations. Plus for both there are very good FOSS databases available such as PostgreSQL and MariaDB.

    1. DainB Bronze badge

      Re: Too louses

      There's a word to describe people who compare MariaDB to OracleDB or MSSQL.

      Morons.

      1. Joe Montana

        Re: Too louses

        A car can't carry as much load as a 40 ton truck, but for most people's journeys a car with its inferior load carrying capacity is both cheaper and more convenient.

        It all depends on what your needs are.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Too louses

        Oddly enough, that's exactly the word I use for people that will speak up on the matter without any context.

        Personally, I've saved two companies about 100k EUR/year by analyzing their database usage and recommending they go with MySQL/MariaDB instead of their blind use of Oracle for their address books.

        1. LHGFLICOD

          Re: Too louses

          Listen you, stop confusing the issue with facts and logic we want none of those new dangerous concepts around here thank you very much.

          As a somewhat angry DBA my recommendation often depends on the skill of the development team, developers who engage and speak to us pretty much get to run what they want (hence we have stuff running on postgres and MongoDB). Idiots get either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle as we end up needing the recovery tools and/or performance diagnostic tools.

          1. FuzzyWuzzys
            Facepalm

            Re: Too louses

            "Idiots get either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle as we end up needing the recovery tools and/or performance diagnostic tools."

            Sounds like a pretty flimsy reason to spend £20k/cpu just 'cos your devs are too fecking dopey to check procs and run autonomous transactions they can back out before they commit to making data changes. Why not educate them or better still sack them in favour of people who can be trusted on DBs that cost less to licence? It'll teach them to be more careful if they have to find new jobs, save money on their salaries and save money on expensive MSSQL and Oracle licenses... or where you just writing click-bait fodder?!

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Too louses

              "Why not educate them or better still sack them"

              He(?)s a DBA, not the CIO. Perhaps it's HR and the CIO who need educating, but telling them that probably isn't the best of career moves.

              We work with the other people we get, and often, much as we would like to crush their monitors, stamp on their mice and keyboards, and send them somewhere where the highest form of technology is a fire pointed stick, life is a lot easier if we smile and give them what variation on what they want will give us the least future trouble.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Too louses

      "Plus for both there are very good FOSS databases available such as PostgreSQL and MariaDB"

      MariaDB/MySQL misses so many features that SQL Server has, it's not a valid replacement (e.g. partitioned windowed functions). It is a good, simple, DB though. I've heard lots of good things about Postgres, and it has a really nice featureset too ...

  11. E 2

    Oooohhhh, a data estate!

  12. nematoad
    Happy

    Good comparison

    "It was the same kind of high wire act as Philippe Petit crossing between the old World Trade Center towers."

    A little hyperbolic don't you think?

    Either that or just plain bollocks.

    1. Captain Badmouth
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Good comparison

      A prospective entry for Private Eye's pseuds corner, I would think.

      My vote : hyperbollocks.

      Paris : Now that's what I call danger.

  13. John 209
    Unhappy

    Whether encryption

    So, corporations can have bullet-proof encryption, but we lowly smart-phone users cannot?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Whether encryption

      Corporations are people, my friend.

      However, look up Mussolini's definition of fascism and you will see the point. Apple at the moment is in trouble because they have cast slight doubt on the indissoluble union of corporations and government.

  14. naive

    A great week for Linux

    Oracle gets, after some 25 years, finally serious competition. For some reason, IBM never managed to achieve a relevant market share with their excellent DB2 on Linux/Unix environments.

    Working daily with Oracle on Unix, the arrogance of Oracle makes me sad. They ask $ 5K-10K per cpu, while being short of punching customers in the face for buying their stuff. Even paying tons of money, does not save one from having to stick a NATO alphabet under the screen for spelling out ones name to some Indian support tech.

    The support tooling for the database is a bad joke compared to myphpadmin and webmin for mysql, sqlplus is so 1985, still ignoring the "stty erase" setting of the terminal it is started on. Sqlserver is so much better, with a professional and to the point user interface for doing 95% of the dialy tasks without hassle.

    For now i am happy with this move of Microsoft, it extends the choice for Microsoft customers, the RDBMS monopoly of Oracle is broken up and this will in the long run improve everyone's lives.

    1. Bumpy Cat

      Re: A great week for Linux

      Oracle doesn't have customers, it has hostages.

    2. FuzzyWuzzys

      Re: A great week for Linux

      "sqlplus is so 1985" - So use SQL Developer, sure it's not up MSSQL SSMS, or better still buy SQL Naviagtor or TOAD.

      "ignoring the 'stty erase' "? Nope, can't say I've ever had that happen in 17 years of working with Oracle on Solaris, stty always works prior to me going into sqlplus!

      For all SQL*Plus failings at least SQL*Plus doesn't allow 17 database connections at once like SSMS does, which then allows you to accidentally start a session on the wrong instance/db combo and bugger up your day. Not just my say so, had 4-5 year MSSQL DBA veterans and devs cursing SSMS for allowing such nonsense. SQL*Plus, basic interface, limited options but one app with one session!

      I actually happen to like learning MSSQL at the moment, it's very new frontier and exiting, especially the non-autonomous, non-transactional isolation levels it offers by default. A new tag line, "SQL Server rollback? Yeah only if you deliberately set transaction mode first!".

      At the end of the day all products have good bits and bad bits and it's fun learning how to get around the bad bits by taking ideas you've learned in other products to make up for deficiencies.

  15. aj69

    Status quo

    I was raised on the belief you get what you pay for and I'm an Oracle guy. Yet, it's hard to ignore MS-SQL offer, blame it on obscure licensing models.

    I'm implementing a world-class application at the moment and have the option to use either. With bean couters driving most decisions nowdays, move from MS is an excellent way to push Oracle into more transparent licensing.

    Time will tell.

    1. Down not across

      Re: Status quo

      I was raised on the belief you get what you pay for and I'm an Oracle guy. Yet, it's hard to ignore MS-SQL offer, blame it on obscure licensing models.

      You would hope. Oracle is ridiculously expensive. And their support, well most of the time you can't call it support. Luck of the draw if you get just notes (that you've already found yourself on MOS) quoted at you or get someone with some actual clue.

      Oh, and I can't believe how buggy 12c is. Even more bizzarely lot of the bugs are to do with partitions which is kind of fundamental feature in Oracle RDBMS.

      On a lighter note it is amusing Oracle is making such fuzz about their "multi-tenant", which is pretty much doing what Sybase and SQL Server have been doing for decades (with few extra bells and whistles).

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hard to think if we were going to go to the effort of rewriting our DB from PL/SQL and oracle bits and bobs we'd go to SQL Server given an inevitable cost somewhere down the road given how expensive SQL server is now days. Pretty sure we'd find an opensource product that could do most of what we needed...

    1. Down not across

      Hard to think if we were going to go to the effort of rewriting our DB from PL/SQL and oracle bits and bobs we'd go to SQL Server...

      You probably wouldn't want to do that. I've ported between Oracle and Sybase in the past, and found it rather unpleasant.

      The logical option for abandoning Oracle, would be EnterpriseDB (or plain PostgreSQL if you don't want to pay anything).

  17. CAPS LOCK

    IF I was converting from Oracle I certainly wouldn't be inviting in Microsoft...

    .. we all know the rules about vampires, don't we?

    1. FuzzyWuzzys

      Re: IF I was converting from Oracle I certainly wouldn't be inviting in Microsoft...

      What? Hide the garlic? Put away the crosses and holy water, cover the mirrors?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Where is the Larry retort?

    I expected Larry to immediately say something like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vKOb6HAz-8

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We can already use MSSQL on Linux, it is called Sybase ASE.

    Anyhow, fairly obvious attempt to hide the fact that the world has moved off database and into big data.

  20. sfarber5300

    Microsoft is Simply Junk

    In a world with myriad DBMS products, the notion of preferring Microsoft over Oracle seems a bit like setting yourself up for failure. Personally, I wouldn't bother with either of them, simply due to cost.

    The notion that a Microsoft product, like SQL Server, could be among the least vulnerable products of its type has to be baloney, based on what we know about Microsoft. There are no more vulnerable OSes or applications than those sold by Microsoft. This is true to the point where you could make a much more robust Linux system vulnerable BECAUSE it is running SQL Server.

    Steve Ballmer & Company only want your money and could care less about anyone's project, success or reputation. We should be studiously ignoring them, not giving them the attention they want to peddle their garbage!

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