[vasilia]

I'm working in a company with 20+ years of the legacy code base. We have a custom search engine fully optimized for our purposes. Decades were spent writing this code. It supports all the newest Linux kernel technologies. The codebase is really good. But every year a new inter tries to show that open source solutions are more reliable and faster. They don't try to write code in 1 hr of course. They spend 10 days on average to show proof of concept that is really fast for benchmarking, but it fails when we try to load testing data. I don't know why people think that nobody checked other solutions before them.

[lmilcin]

The argument wasn't that ES is wrong choice, but that it will take too much effort to integrate and too long to do so.

Group of managers wanted to choose Oracle based technology for this that would further entrench their team and they argumented they can do it faster and cheaper than the development team.

They have already succeeded getting sizeable part of business logic implemented in PL/SQL supposedly to improve performance.

ES would make all their plans obsolete in a hurry.

Obviously, they were not interested in improving the product but in grabbing power, budget and control of the development process. Also they needed to score some points to show they accomplished something during calendar year.

Of course development team was also slow to deal with problems and overworked with other projects. This only fueled actions of database operations.

So my actions angered both managers of database operations as well as development teams.

[vasilia]

> Group of managers wanted to choose Oracle based technology for this that would further entrench their team and they argumented they can do it faster and cheaper than the development team.

That's true. Most Open Source solutions don't work on huge workloads. You can read about Hadoop at Facebook or MySQL. They fully rewrote MySQL engine and partially Hadoop. Oracle solutions work well on huge workloads.

This company is not a software developer. The software department is just another team inside the company. The first goal of any non-software company is to reduce costs for IT infrastructure and development. It's not Google or Facebook where software development is a key factor of company capitalization.

> Obviously, they were not interested in improving the product but in grabbing power, budget and control of the development process. Also they needed to score some points to show they accomplished something during calendar year.

Or just do their job: provides a reliable service for storing data. The main goal of the DB/SysAdmin department is to show 99.99% uptime. The software department could not guarantee this uptime. Of course, if all these software developers are good SRE that's another situation. But I'm sure no one has experience of supporting huge systems for years.

> So my actions angered both managers of database operations as well as development teams.

If you really want to change something it will be better to make a virtual team from both departments and discuss all pitfalls from both teams. Maybe you are solving non-existent problem.

[xyzzyz]

> That's true. Most Open Source solutions don't work on huge workloads. You can read about Hadoop at Facebook or MySQL. They fully rewrote MySQL engine and partially Hadoop. Oracle solutions work well on huge workloads.

Most “huge” workloads are not actually Facebook-huge.