back to article Oracle? A strategic priority for CIOs? Nope, says Goldman Sachs

Oracle is among the legacy tech losers in a Goldman Sachs spending report that quizzed chief information officers on the procurement areas they consider to be top priorities over the next six months. The research arm of the bank's half-yearly IT Spending Survey looked at the top 10 things that CIOs said they were intending to …

  1. Gerhard Mack

    No one in their right mind starts a project with Oracle.

    This isn't about the technologies themselves it's that Oracle are a pain to deal with. They constantly hit people for as much as possible. At an old job, we had an oracle blade system that had a dead blade. They wanted 60k for a new blade, and we would have to renew our support contract first (cost plus penalties) before they would sell it to us.

    Another place I heard about, they hit a company for $800k to bring them back into compliance and then wondered why the company didn't want to buy more licenses after that for new projects.

    I had to spec out a server not long ago and our sales rep wondered why I specced the machine with fast drives, tons of ram, fast CPU but only 12 cores. "Oracle licensing" It was easier to make a fast machine and go bare metal than deal with the quirks of their licensing system re Hyper-threading (it's a considerable speedup on Oracle) than to worry that I set up the VM system the wrong way and would be out of compliance.

    Their attitude in recent years means their stuff ends up mainly being used in places where they can't easily be phased out but never for anything new.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No one in their right mind starts a project with Oracle.

      Yes, we recently had a brush with Oracle's audit deparment. They didnt find anything wrong, but wouldnt beleve it. (I work for a pretty large international business).

      And thus it was handed down from on high that no new projects are to use Oracle databases. (Not that we have been doing anyway)

      We've also got to write feasibilty reports for moving all our existing stuff off in a 2 year timeframe.

      Its nice in that we've got a couple of MariaDB and NoSQL boxes out of it.

      They managed to *really* P*ss off our CTO.

  2. a_yank_lurker

    Legacy Products

    Legacy products have a bad habit of becoming commodity or semi-commodity products. Leisure Suit's primary products are based around a relational database; a product that is semi-commodity at best. There reasons why migrating to another database engine is not trivial but there is no reason to automatically sign up with Leisure Suit if you do not have to. There are plenty of very good engines available and for some applications alternative databases to chose from. Many of those purveyors treat their customers much better than the poor sods stuck with Leisure Suit.

    1. DCFusor

      Re: Legacy Products

      What oracle has done to be less of a commodity is reminiscent of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They have so much stuff that isn't SQL standard, that once they've enticed you into using any of their features, instead of using the database for a database and constructing proper business logic and services separately - in a maintainable and sustainable way, you're hosed.

      It's like that time I fell for MS's Access for small biz, with EZ forms and (yuck) VB behind the forms. A beautiful billing system and tracking for my consultancy that made my tax accountant think I was a genius. Up and until I hit that limit on total records they set before you had to pay to upgrade - I was a new then and bought their book which suggested things like using punctuation and mixed cases in column names...and converting after that would have required a steep learning curve and a lot of writing of new sql-using software in some new language and leveraging some other report generator.

      OK, my bad in part - but everyone has to have a first time, and these easy on ramps, are, as Admiral Akbar said "are a trap".

      I've since learned how to do it right, and with any set of tools, or nearly, and would never buy into someone's lock in junk now...

      And you know what? Guys like me often command a real nice pay rate once the word gets out that we set you up and then...you can maintain it yourself if required, as it's simple and documented, and if you need my support...it's mot going to be enough for a new yacht and an island to dock it at. Sometimes expensive once is a lot cheaper than it is over and over, and as Larry found out, a drip can fill his ocean - or empty yours.

      I find it slightly rich that C# was done by MS after being sued for adding MS-only things to their Java, which is now owned by oracle...It would have been more fun had it been Larry suing them for breaking the rules - not that many times you can root for both sides...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who in their right mind would create a new solution based on Oracle these days?

    The old adage about "Oracle doesn't have customers they have hostages" is still true, but many of these hostage workloads are being replaced and not with Oracle.

  4. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Nice DB with baggage issues

    I used Oracle a long time ago and it really was a great database. Too bad customers need to pay millions of dollars for bloated sales departments, commissions, licensing tricks, support, legal, regional managers, enterprise solutions, and infinite layers of other non-producing tiers. At this point there's probably no way to get rid of them - they're part of the culture and the contracts. It's true that almost no new company will touch Oracle now. Having a team dedicated to getting by with PostgreSQL or a MySQL fork always seems to come out a lot cheaper.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nice DB with baggage issues

      30 years ago when it was the only serious game in town for medium-large size databases (Other than DB2, which has always seemed to me to be more a way of selling IBM services), they developed this attitude. I've never met anyone who has said that dealing with Oracle has ever been a fun experience.

      They are seriously behind of modern technologies, They require loads more DBA support than everything else, especially MariaDB and SQL server both of which just ... work.. , their large object support is a joke, They still havent figured out "Program files" on windows clients yet, which causes issues for locked down client machines, making deployment using most automated tools a pain in the arse, Its expensive and exposes you to random audits when they feel their short of money. Why would you?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ask which Governmemt Dept. got shafted

    To the tune of $19M in their recent trueup and was forced to take up a whole stack of oracle cloud licenses they didn’t want.

  6. MadocOwain

    Oracle forces Cloud down your throat

    In order to force analytics/BI customers to the cloud, they removed their top salespeople from the equation if you wanted your software on-premise. They also wouldn't bonus the salespeople if they sold non-cloudy licenses. So, our consultancy's network of hight-falutin' Oracle salesreps evaporated, replaced by a phone bank of anonymous sales folks in Hyderabad. Sad.

  7. ecofeco Silver badge

    About time

    What took so long?

  8. Robert B

    Oracle not enforcing licensing fees.

    A furniture company in Upstate New York was using several Oracle products and not paying for the license fees and when the head of Oracle's license enforcement was told he did nothing. They used management packs and additional CPU's for years and still do and Oracle did and does nothing to prevent the use of these products. The stock is always lower because they don't enforce the license agreements losing millions of profit.

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