Larry Ellison today said really nice things about rival Amazon's cloud

Re: Could get interesting

Agreed! People think of Oracle as one of these crusty software giants like CA, Symantec, BMC, etc. that are just extracting license fees year after year from companies that are hopelessly locked into their 20 year old products. I think Oracle is definitely one of those, but they have the money to burn on developing new things also.

I guarantee the main goal of bulking up the Oracle cloud is not so companies can run x86 IaaS stuff, but to host all of Oracle's software remotely. Adobe did this with Creative Cloud to guarantee permanent lock in and subscription revenue because they know there's no alternatives in the industry. Microsoft is doing this with Office 365 - they're making it an incredibly bad deal to buy perpetual Office licenses now. I think Oracle's plan is to make it so expensive and cumbersome to buy, license and run Oracle software on premises that companies have no choice but to buy into the cloud.

Re: Could get interesting

"Oracle might do some damage in the cloud"

Doubtful. Oracle don't understand cloud. At all. AWS is winning not because they have a better database, but because they have a better platform. People can rewrite applications and services using the full breadth of AWS services and the same goes for Azure and soon Google as well. Oracle will need to create a "serverless" compute platform, PaaS services, and the various types of database PaaS if they are to compete.

Oh, and he forgot to mention Amazon also offer Oracle PaaS on a true pay as you go model in their cloud for people who are locked in to that technology already. The other AWS database services are actually compatible with other databases anyway so there's very little lock-in there. But he'd know that, as a "database expert".

Re: Could get interesting

"you are locked in, baby"

Pot, meet Kettle...

Yeah, the dude can be a d bag and he probably knows that. There is at least one good point though and that is the incumbents have built their infrastructure on old shit and in order to improve the infrastructure, they have to upgrade it, while, like, running. This is more than hard at scale. So, those that are jumping in now can do so with platforms that are one or more iterations of Moore's Law later. Faster, smaller, lower wattage and overall better economics. The SPARC M7 chip can scale up to 512 cores, 4,096 threads and 8 terabytes (TB) of memory. How many Xeons does it take to get 4,096 threads? I would never buy a SPARC box, but I'd let my cloud provider run them to their hearts content. I just want good price/performance with security and I'm probably not the only one that looks at cloud that way. If Oracle can really deliver that, more power to them. Or, more SPARC to them....

Ellison stating that people shopping at a competitor need to get their chequebook out ... Good one, Larry!

Better still... Ellison slamming vendor lock-in... ?!!

Don't repeat Ellison's bullshit, even if you change a word or three ... the fact is, if you go cloud and use open source frameworks and db's (e.g. NOT .NET, not Oracle nor SQL SERVER), you are good to go, no lock-in.

Then again, if you are using open source, why would you want to go cloud in the first place ? If you have to, go open source ... shit, whatever you do, if time to migrate comes, go open source.

Re: Oracle Database

Oracle own MySQL don't they?

Re: If you needed proof...

You're on an IT site, I doubt many of us were employed from casting photos.

In fact many of my users say I should get more into telephone support, or "at least knock".

Re: If you needed proof...

Looks perfectly okay to me. Were you expecting Brad Pitt or something?

Most people here think Ellison's a bell end, but that's nothing to do with his appearance.

FWIW, remember when Johnny Depp and his soon-to-be-estranged wife got in a spat with that Australian politician Barnaby Joyce? At one point, Depp- already starting to come across as an entitled, spoilt film star and less sympathetic than he had been in the past- accused Joyce of looking "inbred with a tomato".

Well, so what? Coming from pretty-boy Depp, who is- or was- better looking than most people, this ironically comes across as a lot cheaper than it would from some random, average-looking nobody.

I think Joyce missed the opportunity to turn Depp's own words against him and hit him where it hurts- his desire to be seen as a Serious Actor. His response should simply have been, "Yes, it's true, I'm an ugly bastard. I think it's quite clear to everyone that I didn't get where I am today on the basis of my looks, unlike Mr Depp."

I have only worked for a year with an oracle db and generally are not a db guy (more image processing, physics simulation, hardware control etc), but what i gathered back then was oracle can be a beast in db performance. Features ... errr, dunno but in my eyes they are all about being fast at relational queries.

A) how do you brag about that other than comparing to how others do on that very same field

B) i can see them actually doing extremely well in /that/ field also in the cloud, but hypy things like big data seems to be about unstructured data.

dunno why; the things i would guess the most valuable for business intelligence, where probably the money lies, /should/ be structured to have value. IOW, if oracle manages to offer relevant help at BI also with "AI" (tho i still shudder at the thought of "pretrained" AI models to use in BI) they should be set up good to help others make money (in contrast to sink money into hype).

Disclaimer of course i'm no expert on any of this, just seeing +/- from the sidelines what some few companies in one very specific field (medtech) are interested in/struggle with, apart from the -inherent to that field- "how do we remain or even get compliant to the gazillon and ever changing regulations".

So they are based in Stockholm?