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by lisper 5523 days ago
My favorite part (with reference to eToys):

"They ditched a perfectly working MySQL application and migrated to Oracle which caused them to hire Oracle consultants $2000 per day and spend millions on Oracle big-iron."

Reminds me of when the ads manager at Google decided we needed to ditch MySQL and get a "real database" for the ads system. "Real database" in that case meant Sybase, but it was still a barely mitigated disaster. Sometimes it seems as if the "real" databases are just a colossal scam.
4 comments
dpapathanasiou 5523 days ago
Hard to say if the switch to Oracle (and the resulting expenses) was the reason for their demise, but I was surprised by this:

"In 2000 they were doing around $24 million per quarter with a gross margin of 21%."

Wow. How could you get off to a start like that and blow it all?

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bpeebles 5523 days ago
Well, it never was listed that Oracle was the reason, just that it was one of, and indicative of why it failed. If the MySQL solution was working, which the answerer on Quora implied, and there was no immediate sign of its failure, I think transitioning to Oracle at the cost of millions of dollars is a pretty big mistake.
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hga 5523 days ago
Back then it might have been an OK decision, you did get some very nice things with Oracle including scaling and MySQL was a lot less mature, only about half a decade old. It certainly doesn't sound like choosing Oracle per se was instrumental in eToys' failure. On the other hand I've never heard a good thing about Sybase.
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Devilboy 5523 days ago
Sybase is a fantastic piece of engineering. Nice code syntax, rock solid in production.

There you go, now you've heard a good thing about the father of MS SQL Server.

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jrockway 5523 days ago
Sybase has to be the worst of the "real databases", although SQL Server, DB2 and Oracle are bad too. The first time I tried to use Sybase, I wrote something like "CREATE TABLE foo (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, bar INTEGER NOT NULL)". Turns out Sybase doesn't have a type called "INTEGER". What the fuck.

Admittedly, all databases have their quirks. I use SQLite for a multi-process app suite, and get "database is locked" rather frequently. At least my app now knows how to retry transactions. Most of the apps using "real databases" fall over as soon as a transaction fails. "Internal server error, please retry later." Uh, no... transactions are supposed to fail. Even reads.

But I digress.

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rudiger 5523 days ago
paul would argue otherise
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