[SPBS]

I genuinely couldn't tell if the author was being sarcastic when he said Larry Ellison was down on his luck because he dropped from 5th richest to 10th richest (and the whole thing about pulling himself out of the gutters by clawing up to 5th richest again).

[apavlo]

I was not being sarcastic. Larry is a good man.

[hodgesrm]

Larry Ellison is seriously underestimated as a database leader. I worked at Sybase. Oracle beat us fair and square. The Oracle DBMS team is outstanding.

[zaphirplane]

Didn’t Microsoft take sybase’s customers

[hodgesrm]

Not really--MS SQL Server was Windows only and took a while to grow. Oracle ran everywhere and was simply a better database by the mid-90s. (Previously Sybase was quite far ahead.) Oracle had row-level locking and MVCC at a time when Sybase was still stuck with a cumbersome page locking model. Oracle was also more reliable at least in my experience. I used to hit page corruption pretty regularly on Sybase but almost never on Oracle.

Disclaimer: I worked at Sybase. It was an outstanding company in the early days.

[fuy]

It obviously was sarcastic.

[rafaele]

Seems like he's being serious and based on the linked tweet, I think he reveres Larry Ellison.

[srini_reddy]

that's what I felt too. especially after the word "gutters". :)