[bigiain]

With the _big_ difference that Oracle are _really_ good at writing invoices and cashing big cheques...

All of the really talented Oracle people I know are enterprise sales people, and they're _really_ good. All the good tech people I know "joined" via acquisition and jumped ship as soon as financially sensible.

[ryanmarsh]

I vehemently agree with you. Their sales staff is vicious and effective... however comma ...

My stodgiest, most risk averse (Oracle using) clients are beginning to migrate to Postgres. I'm so shocked by this it still sounds like a lie as I type it. For most of my career it's been "nobody got fired for picking Oracle". Now that nobody gets fired for picking AWS the penny pinchers are looking at the RDS pricing delta between Postgres and Oracle and all of the sudden it's a no brainer. Maybe because the only sales person involved is from Amazon? IDK but Oracle will slowly die by it's own worms.

[disordinary]

I'm surprised companies still buy Oracle software, I figured that they were only in business because of Vendor lock in from governments and large corporations.

[bigiain]

Because Oracle do not sell to the sort of people who read Hackernews, they sell to people who read Financial Review and CIO Monthly or whatever. Same as SalesForce, Adobe, and a whole bunch of other "enterprise" software businesses that most dev's ignore or write off as pointless.

I worked at a place where I saw two renewals for AdobeCQ licenses paid while I worked there at ~$600k/year, all the time we were using Alfresco underneath (and I see now that site is running on Sitecore...)

[disordinary]

Probably, although I work for a government department that uses Oracle extensively but no new projects are on the platform, eventually everything will be migrated off it (mostly to the SQL Server hosted on Azure).

[bigiain]

And let me guess - the project timelines for "eventually everything will be migrated off it" run easily into seven figures of Oracle invoices? (And realistically the delays in those migration projects will mean double that gets paid to Oracle before they're completely out of your billing system?)

[disordinary]

I don't think there's any real timeline to get rid of Oracle just that new projects won't be using it as a DB and eventually it will no longer be in use.

[toyg]

Like eventually nobody will be using mainframes... except they are still there, and somebody is still cashing cheques for their support.

Ironically, it's Oracle itself who is busy self-destroying. The move to cloud-based subscription services, where switching to competitors can be so much easier, looks good in the immediate but it's pulverizing their stranglehold on partner ecosystems, and making their long-term outlook more fragile.

[ryanmarsh]

> Financial Review and CIO Monthly

Yes, bean counters. When the only sales person involved is now the AWS Architect the bean counters put Postgres and Oracle side by side and it becomes a no brainer. You're going to see lots of enterprise development moving away from Oracle as they move to AWS.

[bigiain]

I'm not so sure it's the stereotypical "beancounter" here. There seems to be absolutely no penny pinching going on (which is the impression I get from "beancounter").

I'd say it's more the "Contract Signers" who're at fault. The devs and AWS Architect are perfectly happy to use inexpensive AWS options, but somebody _else_ goes golfing and drinking with the Oracle sales team - and arrives at work hung over the next day with a shiny new half million dollar a year Oracle licence which everyone else is now required to use.

[davidgerard]

The Oracle database is very good at its job: take data in, give it back fast and reliably, optimise bad queries, etc. The interface can be hair-tearingly awful, but the software fundamentally works.

The bad part of running Oracle is absolutely everything else, especially the bit where you ever have to talk to Oracle. When we moved our stuff from Oracle to Postgres, the best bit was never ever having to think about licensing.

[Lev1a]

The DB course at my university uses Oracle software and references to DB software in my professors lectures are almost exclusively about Oracle (SQL Developer or something).

[godzillabrennus]

I've met many oracle sales people claiming they make excess of $400k a year. They are also all alcoholics.

Must be a horrible job even if they get paid well for it.

[parasubvert]

Sales people entertain clients, this doesn't imply they're alcoholics, only that eating/drinking is part of the job. That said there also are many customers that are led by functioning alcoholics and tend to select vendors they can drink with. It varies.

Enterprise software sales can be a lot of fun (I am in sales engineering, not at Oracle) as it is well paid and ultimately about enabling customer successes. But I have to look myself in the mirror at night, and can only sell something I believe in - things like open source, or cloud computing benefits, etc. Oracle database used to be worth believing in maybe 10 years ago: boring but valueable software. But these days the company is such a blight on the industry that it would be hard to work there.

[moomin]

If you can get Jon Hamm to star in this script, I guarantee there's money in it.