[kyledrake]

The bulk of the comments in here are focused on comparing Larry Ellison to a lawn mower, so I'll try a new tack and say that I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is.

Given the history of their business model being licensing of important databases that are hard to switch off of, I've actually made a point to avoid using Oracle as much as possible (even so far as to leave MySQL when they acquired it, and I've never started a fresh project in Java, which they used to drive a lawsuit they had with Google).

From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives. There are innumerable equal (better?), free alternatives, and most startups are founded by broke coders in bedrooms that choose those instead and stick with the devil they know. And they have an un-competitive cloud service? Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for, I'm genuinely curious.

[seanhunter]

Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition.

A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain features like online backups and certain replication configurations.

At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case.

Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues.

[1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.

[8ytecoder]

We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped after a couple of years.

To get to the level of scale that oracle can handle we had to build sharding and cluster replication from scratch. It still didn’t get to even 1/10th of a single oracle node. Obviously we made a lot of poor architecture decisions as well - in hindsight, of course.

[ifwinterco]

We should really be more thankful for the existence of PostgreSQL

[abalashov]

Yes, although a lot of the most advanced PostgreSQL features that would bear comparison in this discussion are relatively recent. PostgreSQL didn't have them in the 2000s, either, and where it did, the ergonomics were much worse than they are today.

[timcambrant]

I use Patroni (https://github.com/patroni/patroni) (no affiliation to me) which is a really nice and reliable PostgreSQL distribution that provides automatic failover and not just active-standby nodes with manual failover.

As I understand it, you would have to script a separate watchdog process for the basic PostgreSQL, to get high availability.

[pjmlp]

Still lacks several features, or you have to pay as well for parity.

[bigfatkitten]

Salesforce have been building an Oracle replacement based on Postgres for years, named Sayonara and as far as I know, it’s not ready yet.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/05/16/salesforce_replace_or...

[Breza]

I remember when Salesforce was a true innovator. I attended a Salesforce conference the other day. Sounds like they're all-in on their "agentic" vision. I miss when the Salesforce conferences were tailored to nerds like me and included products that the CEO would never hear about but my team would fight tooth and nail to keep in the budget.

[DrJokepu]

There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database that IBM has completely fumbled.

[chasil]

There are three different Db2 databases.

I believe the mainframe version was first.

There is a version baked into the os/400 operating system (i series).

Then unix/windows Db2 came last, if memory serves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Db2

[DrJokepu]

I only ever worked with the Linux/Windows variant. I can’t believe I am saying this about an IBM product, but I found it to be actually rather pleasant to work with.

[cyberpunk]

It’s def got 80’s hacker movie vibes, typing “Iniate log rotation sequence;” etc just screams out for a green terminal emulator.

[anthk]

As an IBM hobbyist user, picture something worse than VMS in 'hackerdom'. IBM's mainframe OSes are like NT/OS2 taken to the total extreme with objects, because by default you don't see files but objects which might have files... or not.

Imagine the antithesis of Emacs. That's an IBM environment with 3270 terminals and obtuse commands to learn.

[hxugufjfjf]

You’d never say that if you’ve been on the inside of a mainframe DB2. shudders

[nineteen999]

As somebody who administers several large DB2 clusters all linked together with multiple replication modes (HADR, SQLREP) for an emergency services communication platform, I can confirm this. It's pretty damn rock solid even on Linux these days.

[gorjusborg]

It's very amusing to me that you bring up IBM in a discussion of the value of Oracle.

I came here to say that if you want to understand Oracle's value, think IBM with less history.

[DrJokepu]

Kind of, but there are some subtle differences in my opinion. Oracle is top-to-bottom evil, whose business model basically boils down to screwing over their clients and everyone else at every possible opportunity, comparable to the likes of McKinsey or Accenture.

IBM is a bit more nuanced. My wife grew up in an IBM town and a lot of her family and her friends’ families used to work there in the 70s and 80s. People, especially the engineers, used to take pride in their work there.

[RankingMember]

I think of IBM and GE as being cut from the same cloth back then- they treated their people well and dominated their markets.

[soperj]

Didn't they famously help both the Nazis and Apartheid South Africa?

[20after4]

Yes. Leased IBM equipment was a critical infrastructure component of the holocaust.

[smoyer]

"At the time, MySQL existed ..."

You had to be careful with MySQL back then as constraints were syntactic sugar but not enforced. PostgreSQL was indeed much tougher to manage but more full-featured.

[da_chicken]

Really, you've always had to be careful with MySQL. It really was the PHP of RDBMSs.

The silent "SHOW WARNINGS" system, nonsense dates like Feb 31, implicit type conversions like converting strings to 0s, non-deterministic group by enabled by default, index corruption, etc.

[makeitrain]

Good enough for Wordpress.

[augusto-moura]

We are circling back to PHP, aren't we?

[makeitrain]

We never left

[Izkata]

Not just constraints, transactions were also a no-op. The MyISAM engine is still available in modern versions if you want to experience this, it's just not default anymore.

[jamesfinlayson]

Yep, I've had to work with a MyISAM project with no transactions - it's a reasonably simple system thank goodness but a little scary all the same (and lots of boilerplate to deal with partial failures).

[tomnipotent]

I love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had.

[bombcar]

mysql was great in 2000 if you knew all the foot guns to avoid and set it up correctly (and not just what sounded correct).

[tomnipotent]

Not to mention there was Percona, and both Google & Facebook contributed a number of patches that made monitoring MySQL top notch (such as finding slow running queries, unused indexes, locks etc.).

[sharadov]

SQL Server was pretty good until they went the Oracle way with their licensing shenanigans, but even with that they were a lot cheaper than Oracle. In fact SQL server was one of the few great products that came out of MS.

[dcrazy]

SQL Server started as a source fork of Sybase.

[pjmlp]

Having done both, with much better tooling. Sybase never had anything comparable to SSMS.

[dcrazy]

I remember MMC snap-ins.

[pimeys]

Having written a rust client for it, even their documentation is absolutely stellar. You just read how the protocol works from the PDF and implement it.

Can't say the same about Oracle.

[KellyCriterion]

For the risk of getting downvoted:

MS SQL is today stil a very good product, using it now for more than 20 years in different applications.

And: The free version with max up to 50 GB (?) of DB size is a very good option for smaller environments/apps

[augusto-moura]

50GB sounds like nothing, but I believe you in the quality. Most big bucks paid databases need to be high quality though, otherwise they would fail as products

[sharadov]

I was a SQL server DBA early in my career, I've not used it in the last decade, glad to hear that it's still a great product.

[partyficial]

My first job was a SQL DBA. 15 years and 5 companies later, this startup I'm at (which got acquired recently), still uses SQL Server. It has stood the test of time.

[KellyCriterion]

Actually one of the very few really good MS products at all?

Visual Studio is also great and widely adopted.

But what else do they have? I had some good experiences with Exchange years ago, but this is just my personal experience, since most people seem to hate it.

What else do they have that is considered a good/solid product that you would recommend to someone?

[prepend]

I disagree as I was running clustered sql server 6.5 and 7 in 1998 for hundreds of concurrent users doing millions of reads per hour on NT basically commodity boxes. Replaced it with Oracle for 100x cost and lost performance.

I think even back then you were usually better off with distributed databases running mysql or postgres over Oracle. Although people liked to think a giant Oracle db was better.

[whatisthiseven]

For others like me who might be skeptical to hear throughput in any metric other than seconds (and is used to large numbers in hours/days being used to inflate), I think millions per hour is actually quite high for 1998.

Assume that means 5_000_000/hour. 5M/hr => 83k/min => 1400/s. That is impressive for late 90s. I was generous on what "millions per hour" meant, but even if its 2.5M/hr that would be 700/s, which is still quite good.

[Rapzid]

Those are big numbers especially for non-enterprise DBs in the 90s.

MySQL's big breakthrough(not specifically talking about perf) was innodb in 2010.

Just 15+ years ago Postgres had major issues with concurrency as we think about it today.

And just 10+ years ago a LOT of DB drivers weren't thread safe and had their own issues dealing with concurrency.

So nearly 30 years ago? Fuhgeddaboudit.

[mike_hearn]

What do you mean a distributed database running mysql or postgres? Even today you can't have a distribute db running (real) Postgres, it doesn't do multi-master clustering.

[killerstorm]

What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction processing workloads...

[seanhunter]

DB2 was crazy good for certain use cases but very weird. For one, the pattern for DB2 efficiency was pretty much the exact opposite of every other database. Every other database would say "Normalize your tables, use BCNF, blah blah, small reference tables, special indices etc".

DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely fast for the time and could handle very large datasets.

[rowls66]

I have not had much experience with DB2, but given that the relational data model and normalization was invented at IBM (Codd) and IBM's implemenation of those concepts was DB2, DB2 performing poorly with a normalized data model seems strange.

My recollection was that DB2 did not support multi version concurrency control like Oracle and Postgres did. The result was a lot of lock contention with DB2 if you were not careful. MVCC was eventually added to DB2, but by then it was too late.

[silisili]

That sounds oddly similar to how people recommend using Dynamo. It's super hard to do coming from SQL because everything just feels wrong.

[pjmlp]

Still around, and present form for many big corps.

[twoodfin]

DB2 had/has excellent data compression capabilities, achieving ratios for OLTP that would only be equaled by later OLAP columnar systems.

For raw performance needs, many financial services schema were going to be denormalized anyway. Compression was a great way to claw some of the resulting inefficient storage back.

[ErroneousBosh]

> DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely fast for the time and could handle very large datasets.

Nobody got fired for buying IBM^W NoSQL

[randomNumber7]

So it was an early version of mongoDB?

[wilsonnb3]

Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.

[zerkten]

SQL Server 2000 was well received in the segments that mattered as a challenger. Oracle was in first place running on Unix. However, it was viewed as expensive and the procurement experience was regarded as unpleasant. People wanted competition even if they didn't think SQL Server, or another alternative, could unseat Oracle for the most important stuff.

Windows was really picking up steam and there was a move to web development in the Windows-based developer space. Visual Basic and Delphi were popular but desktop development had peaked. ASP was for building your apps and SQL Server was the natural backend. SQL Server fed off this wave. It wasn't dislodging Oracle, but rather than every app being built on Oracle, more apps started to use SQL Server as the backend.

Then ASP.NET appeared on the scene and demand grew even more. It was a well-integrated combo that appealed to a lot of shops. I started my career in a global pharma and there was a split between tech budget. IT was a Windows shop for many reasons and ran as much on SQL Server as possible. R&D was Unix/Linux with Oracle. There was a real battle going on in the .NET vs Java (how about some EJB 1) and the databases followed the growth curves of both rather than competing against each other.

The SQL Slammer worm brought a lot of attention to the product. There were instances running everywhere and IT didn't expect so much adoption. Back then you had a lot more servers running inside offices than you do today. My office was much like my homelab today. This validated the need so the patches got applies, IT got involved in the upkeep, and adoption continued to grow.

Oracle's sales folk and lawyers were horrible to deal with. I had some experience of this directly as they tried pushing Java-related products and my boss dragged me into the evals. One of my in-laws was outside counsel in the IT space doing work with enterprise-sized companies. He claims they are the worst company he's ever had to deal with and wouldn't delegate any decision-making locally which endlessly dragged out deals. They had a good product but felt they could get away with anything. Over time he saw customers run lots of taskforces to chip away Oracle usage. This accelerated with SaaS because you could eliminate the app AND Oracle in one swoop.

[seanhunter]

I remember talking to one tech leader at the time who described it as "surprisingly good, for a microsoft product" which sort of summed it up. But it had similar characteristics to sybase except more so because you had to run it on an NT server (iirc) and so there was an even harder cap on the scale of hardware you could run it on, whereas you could run oracle on really top-end sparc hardware that was way more powerful than anything that ran windows.

[wil421]

Depends if the director or VP liked Microsoft or not. I’ve worked at places that loved SQL Server and Microsoft server products in general. Others did not use them anywhere in their datacenter and wouldn’t have considered them. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft were very dependent on if the people in charged liked them. Not so much technical merits.

[billywhizz]

SQL Server was very good and used in a lot of enterprises. ime the decision between Oracle and SQL Server tended to be down to whether the IT department or company was a "Microsoft Shop" or not. There were a lot of things that came free with SQL Server licenses and it had really nice integrations with other Microsoft enterprise systems software and desktop software.

Oracle was definitely seen as the more mature and resilient (and expensive!) RDBMS in all the years I worked in that space. It also ran on Unix/Linux whereas SQL Server was windows only. Many enterprises didn't like running Microsoft servers, for lots of (usually good) reasons.

[fauigerzigerk]

MS SQL Server was forked from Sybase in 1993. Not sure how much the code had diverged by 2000. Informix was also a contender back then.

[trueno]

we still have an informix db for an old early 2000s application we have to support. shit runs on centos5 lmao. it's actually not too bad, around v12 there's cdc capabilities (requires you to build your own agent service to consume the data) that made the exercise of real time replicating the app db in our edw a cakewalk. which ironically has greatly extended the lifespan of the application since no one has to query informix anymore directly.

ibms docs and help sites suck butt tho.

[minkeymaniac]

7 was a rewrite, from c to c++, also went from 2k pages to 8k pages

[fipar]

My experience at the time was that it was perceived as not serious enough and lacking important features. If my memory isn't very bad, I believe as late as 2000 SQL Server still only supported AFTER triggers.

In my experience in the late 90s and early 00s, besides Oracle and Sybase, DB/2 and Informix were also regarded as good. Oracle was considered the best though.

[minkeymaniac]

2000 for sure had instead of triggers.. I used them :-)

[fipar]

Thanks for the clarification, I guess my memory is very bad after all! :)

Do you remember if that was a recent addition?

Full disclosure: I was quite the newbie back then and most of what I "new" about SQL Server was what the more experienced coworkers told me. This was a very IBM-biased place so I'm not surprised they would have stuck to some old shortcoming, like people who still talk about bad MySQL defaults that have been changed for at least 10 years.

Up until that job (which was my second Actual Formal Job), all my DB experience had been with either dBase (I think III plus or IV) and access, so this was a whole new world with me.

It was through MS SQL Server that a colleague taught me about backups and recovery, after I ran an update in prod but forgot to include the where clause ... :)

[chasil]

This is a very short comment on SQL Server's code improvements (post-Sybase).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18464429

The top comment in the post is a long complaint about the code quality of the Oracle database (worth a read).

[CaptainZapp]

SQL Server was Sybase until (I think) version 4.9, just rebranded as Microsoft SQL Server.

Then the two versions split and I don't think that any of the Sybase source code remains in what is SQL Server today.

That said, a lot of the concepts (like a significant number of system stored procedures) and also TSQL remain almost the same, with small differences (except for system functions, which SQL Server has a lot more functionality).

When you come from the Sybase world getting a start on SQL Server is quite straight forward when it comes to handling the database.

Internals and other low level nuts and bolts differ nowadays, of course.

[pjmlp]

I wrote a connector for Sybase back in 2000, based on our existing one for MS SQL Server 7, and some things had already changed on the protocol level.

I don't remember exactly what and why, just that for some specific DML commands another kind of connection was required.

[CaptainZapp]

The split must have happened in the mid nineties (I think) with SQL Server 6 and Sybase 10. The next version after 4.9.

It's notable that 10 was the worst Sybase version, ever.

Source: I worked for Sybase Professional Services from 95 - 99.

[password4321]

SQL Server's claim to fame was GUI admin tools making life easier for many who bore DBA responsibilities only in anger.

It remains one of the most reliable Microsoft products, but few would claim that is a high bar.

[prepend]

TOAD was fantastic for Oracle, though. I liked it better than SQL’s stuff.

[password4321]

I can't really speak to 3rd party utilities, I think Management Studio was sufficient to keep most competition from ever starting.

[gregw2]

MS SQL Server was a cheaper, friendlier plugin replacement for Sybase in the early 2000s.

I built apps in an active-active bidirectional replication telecom Sybase environment and was deeply involved in migrating it to MS SQL server in the early 2000s. I remember a fair amount of paranoia and effort around the transition as our entire business and customers' phone calls depended on it (for "reasons") but in hindsight it went quite smoothly and there were no regrets afterwards.

The Microsoft went and added a nice BI stack to the whole thing which added a new dimension of value creation at a new low price point.

[pjmlp]

Open arms, especially given its graphical tooling.

Starting with version 7.5 it was quite alright, however being Microsoft, it has been mostly used in Microsoft shops, alongside VB, MFC two tier applications, ASP, .NET, Sharepoint, Dynamics,...

[pjmlp]

I keep landing into projects with Oracle, SQL Server, DB 2.

Naturally our customers aren't companies that care about HN audience.

[sehugg]

IIRC they also had the first native (100% Java) JDBC driver, so you could run from any platform and without weird JNI locking issues when using threads.

[ErroneousBosh]

> A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability

... and both of them were Postgres.

I used it in the late 90s for the backend for websites written in PHP3, but everyone said this was ridiculous and silly and don't you know that everyone's using the MySQL thing.

So I used this MySQL thing, but by about 2005 I'd gone back to powering my lawnmower with a 500bhp Scania V8 because I just preferred having that level of ridiculous overkill in an engine.

Nowadays? Key/Value store in RAM is probably fine for testing -> Sqlite is often Good Enough -> Ah sod it, fire Postgres into a docker container and warn the neighbours, we're going down the Scanny V8 route yet again.

[spixy]

Java and VirtualBox. But both are free.

[kstrauser]

Sort of. The VirtualBox Extension Pack is free for personal or educational use. It is explicitly not free for work use[0]. You can download it for free, but accepting the license to do so obligates you to pay them for it.

[0]https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

[reactordev]

I was around back then and I call Bullshit on everything you claim. There were more database options in 2000 than there were in 1996. Even before that there was FoxPro… c’mon man. Oracle’s only value was they built a NO EXIT clause into their contracts…

[hn_acc1]

Oracle was the ONLY game in town if you were serious. It was like buying IBM in the 80s. Source: programmed PL/SQL and embedded SQL at the Toronto Stock Exchange in the early 90s, on SCO Unix and Oracle.

[bdangubic]

it was soooooo the only game in town that they were like NVDA now, yea you got alternatives but you really don't and hence you charge insane prices and everyone is paying up with a grin on their faces. oracle was the only game in town 100% if you were serious!

[bombcar]

Nobody was building WoW on FoxPro, c'mon.

You'd have to assume businesses were insane/stupid to go with Oracle to the tune of billions and billions of dollars if you believe that they had zero value to sell.

[amiga386]

> Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle

Oracle buys smaller enterprise companies with rich customers that were already using Oracle DB, or makes them rely on it, then cashes in on licensing.

So for example, they bought Micros (most EFTPOS terminals in the world are powered by them, I think), they bought Cerner (big supplier of IT to healthcare companies), they bought PeopleSoft. If your big company isn't using SAP, it's probably using that. Mundane but essential things for large businesses: CRM, ERP, payroll/HR.

So that's what you'd use Oracle for. Or perhaps you wouldn't use Oracle, then Oracle would buy your IT supplier and either you have to change your IT supplier (costing you millions) or congrats you're an Oracle customer now.

[nocommandline]

Oracle used to have EBS which competed primarily in SCM/Procurement (or ERP) domain.

They acquired the leaders in HCM (PeopleSoft) and CRM (Siebel) domains and combined them all (SCM, HCM, CRM) into a single (new) product called Fusion.

Their pitch also was - PeopleSoft and Siebel required people with different skill sets (PeopleCode for PeopleSoft, Siebel eScript for Siebel); but with Fusion, customization would not require any programming language knowledge and in the rare cases that it did, you just needed Java. This meant it was cheaper for enterprises. This was a big selling point for a lot of enterprises and helped them reduce their IT cost.

[amiga386]

I presume what that actually means is that the Java programmer needs to learn the now-Java APIs of what PeopleCode did, and the now-Java APIs of what eScript did, and they're all probably JavaBeans...

But I suppose that does help a company get staff in the door if the job advert just says "Java programmer", they won't be immediately scared off.

[oogali]

Your phone calls and SMS messages that touch the phone network, likely touch Oracle. Yes, nearly all of them.

For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].

Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly.

EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release:

> Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries.

Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.

Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013.

1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-te...

2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07...

3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-market...

4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-win...

5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view

[amiga386]

Isn't SS7 going away?

It's not used in 4G/5G; Diameter is used instead. Most cellular telcos are ending or planning to end their 2G/3G networks (3G moreso than 2G). In the US, the FCC continues to push for IP-only networks, and AT&T is turning off their landline services (though they keep pushing out the date, it's currently at 2029). Obviously, the US is not the only country, but this seems to be the global direction.

Nonetheless, I can imagine that Oracle will still worm its way into telco recordkeeping and billing systems even if the protocol changes...

[abalashov]

Hey Oogali! Long time. :)

"When you read an unusually high-expertise HN comment and realise you know the author..."

[bequanna]

It sounds like you don't use Oracle, Oracle uses you.

[jvanderbot]

Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies.

The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

[mooreds]

My employer is actively hiring java engineers and we don't "take pictures of things from far away".

There are vibrant java user's groups all around the world. There are many java community conferences. The most recent redmonk language rankings[0] show java at #3.

The world is big :) .

0: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2025/06/18/language-rankings-1-2...

[jvanderbot]

You're right of course, but we only just met! You're the first of probably many counter examples.

[rbanffy]

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

We all have different circles. I work for a bank and the bulk of the LOB code here is Java (or something that runs under a JVM). There are no Oracle databases as far as I know, but my visibility is limited.

Also, Oracle Applications for things like HR.

[InsideOutSanta]

Yeah, lots of corporate backend code is Java, and Java is a great choice for backend/server code. I've never seen Oracle anywhere, though, not in banks and not in governments. I've mostly seen Postgres and MSSQL and some MongoDB.

[JackFr]

I've been working in Wall St. banks for the past 30 years, and I've never used an Oracle database. The investment banks were all Sybase shops in the 90's, and a bunch of them still are. In my experience those that do move are most likely to go to SQL Server, since its Sybase roots make the transition a little easier.

When something has been there for 20+ years switching costs are big.

[cyberpunk]

I work for a pretty big one and we’ve got an exacc or twelve.

Regulatory thing for us, some workloads need production support for the data tier for various boring legal and compliance reasons, so our choices are kida limited to oracle and, these days, mongo, who have made massive inroads to enterprise in the last couple years.

Personally, I prefer Mongo.

[pjc50]

We use Java.

We have Oracle blocked at the router (!) to prevent anyone downloading the Oracle JDK and incurring the wrath of Oracle licensing.

[tombert]

Apple used Java in a ton of backend stuff. At least the entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java and very very small amount of Clojure.

[steve1977]

There was a time (around the beginnings of Mac OS X) when Java was considered a first class citizen in Mac OS X, next to Objective-C.

Some NeXT products like WebObjects got ported to Java (and ran not only the iTunes backend but also things like the original Dell online store) and there was something called the Java bridge which allowed you to program Cocoa applications with Java.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Oh, and with Yellow Box for Windows, this was also possible on Windows.

If you look at the screenshots here, it's mostly Windows 2000: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Le...

[giobox]

It wasn't just Apple, in the late 90s/early 2000s there was a not insignificant number of folks in business/academia who thought Java would take over the world. Windows XP also shipped with an embedded JVM for running Java apps out of the box at one stage too, just before Microsoft doubled down on c#/.NET.

Along with MacOS X, Apple's Xcode IDE even had native java project support briefly in this era as well.

[steve1977]

There was even a Microsoft Visual J++ (and later J#).

It was definitely the thing for a while. Although I remember my very first steps with Java and Swing and my primary impression was "this is so slow".

[jug]

Yup, this brings back my academia years in 1998, sitting with KDE 1.0 and Java 1.1. It was mostly Java, then Perl as this fabulous scripting/glue language, teeny bit of C and MIPS Assembler for the low level courses.

We didn't touch a fairly esoteric language called Python much. Because we saw the future. Java and IPv6 was about to change everything.

[bombcar]

Java really could have taken over the world, and it can be performant, too.

One of the versions of the most popular game in the world is written in Java, and it's quite capable of being very fast.

[steve1977]

Well this must have been around Java 1.2 or 1.4 IIRC, I'm not even sure if Hotspot was a a thing back then.

I just remember that GUI programming with Swing felt like molasses compared to native GUIs at that time (i.e. Win32/MFC, Cocoa, Motif).

But of course the cross-platform aspect was cool and since I did quite a bit with Solaris back then, Java got of course pushed a lot by Sun.

[CyberDildonics]

Are you talking about minecraft? Minecraft was known for working only because it is so simple graphically compared to other games. It was said to allocate and deallocate hundreds of megabyte of memory every frame.

[jen20]

One only need look at the job postings for Apple to see quite how common Java backend is there.

[butterlesstoast]

Checks out https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=java&sort=relevan...

[shrikant]

Yeah I can see that, even when a recruiter contacted me a few years back for a data engineering position, they were looking strictly for experience in JVM-based languages.

[rbanffy]

> Clojure

Apple should do more of that - they make cool computers, and should use cool languages.

[tombert]

Yeah, I wish they did more Clojure as well. As far as I could tell, it was kind of snuck in about ~12 years ago, and it kind of grew from there.

To be fair, I know people hate on it, but I honestly do kind of think Objective C is kind of a cool language. I think it's ugly but I think the message-passing style semantics are kind of neat.

[jimbokun]

Adding Smalltalk message passing as an extension to C was very clever and allowed writing very efficient code and dynamic high level UI code in a single language. The semantics were kept clear by the distinctive syntax of message passing. And allowed access to any existing C libraries.

[duskwuff]

Objective C is neat inasmuch as it managed to add a simple but practical object system to C without all the added baggage of C++. It wasn't without its downsides - in particular, the overhead of a method call was significantly higher than in C++ - but I still appreciate it for its minimalism.

[Wowfunhappy]

Back in the day, Objective-C was considered a cool hip language, wasn't it?

[adolph]

> entire backend for iTunes (Jingle) was written in Java

Wasn't that because iTunes started out as a NextStep WebObjects application? WebObjects started on Objective C, transitioned to a framework for Java in early 2000's, came to Apple with the Next acquisition.

[somewhereoutth]

iCloud is mostly Java (or was, about 10 years ago when I was there)

[glitchc]

The financial market infrastructure heavily relies on Java. Transactions at commercial banks across North America are mostly executed on Java codebases.

[iamjake648]

Interesting, the _majority_ of developers I know write in JVM languages - mostly Kotlin for new stuff at this point.

Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.

[geodel]

It could mean you know very few developers.

> Typically I see folks using the Amazon Corretto java distribution.

It means nothing. ~90% of core development of JDK and JVM is done by Oracle employees and it is shared by all distributions by various vendors.

[pjmlp]

So you actually know a lot of Android developers.

[amiga386]

There are probably millions of corporate projects written in Java. One of the reasons Oracle bought Sun Microsystems (who invented Java) was because Oracle itself had written so much middleware crap in Java.

Both Java and C#/.NET are super-popular in Enterprise land, with the choice between them mainly being if the enterprise is a Microsoft shop or not.

Everything SAP touches is written in Java too, and it's boring old payroll stuff. There's the entire Android user interface with millions of Java-only app developers.

Oracle may well be in bed with the spooks, but it's not a Java-specific thing.

[bobthepanda]

Java is not uncommon. Off the top of my head, a certain rainforest company and a lot of banks and EMR providers use it.

[wredcoll]

Amazon, among others, write a lot of java, but they want absolutely nothing to do with oracle licenses for java

[tombert]

I worked for a drug discovery company doing Java [1] since we were using Kafka Streams very liberally, but everything was done with the OpenJDK Temurin distribution. It was drilled into our heads on the first day do not install anything from Oracle. I think they were afraid of some weird lawsuit unless they bought an expensive license.

I totally get it, but it made me a bit sad because they were even weary of something like GraalVM for some projects where startup time was becoming an issue; I think the Community Edition for GraalVM would have been fine but I think they had this "we don't touch anything with an the Oracle name directly attached with a ten foot pole". Which is totally fair.

[1] It's not hard to find which one but I politely ask that you do not post it here in relation to this thread.

[mort96]

I'm sure GraalVM is nice enough technology but I don't understand why anyone would actively choose to use a JVM from Oracle if they can avoid it.

[tombert]

The Ahead of Time compilation is pretty nice for some stuff. Generally startup time is significantly improved, so if you're writing command line tools in particular it can be cool.

[pjmlp]

OpenJDK is from Oracle as well.

[vips7L]

HotSpot also has lots of things to speed up start time. Project Leyden has made a lot of advancements. AOTCache and crac etc.

[bobthepanda]

Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

[burnte]

> Right, I just feel like this is a bit over the top

Well, the writer said the only Java devs THEY KN OW, not all Java devs.

[coredog64]

They have their own OpenJDK distribution (Amazon Corretto)

[pjmlp]

They surely like the work Oracle employees provide to OpenJDK.

[nsxwolf]

There are literally millions of us that write Java and don't work for the CIA. It's like still in the top 3 of all languages.

[bombcar]

I was surprised at first to learn Minecraft was a CIA plot and then I thought about it and it all fit together :)

[ghurtado]

> The only developers I know who write Java

It sounds like your personal anecdote is particularly uninformative then.

[prepend]

Useful for letting us know that GP has a limited network and situational awareness.

I always find these “relative to me” claims not very informative on the internet. But it fun when every once in a while you notice the claimer is Bill Joy or Linus Torvalds or someone where the relativeness holds weight.

[layer8]

Look at who is making OpenJDK distributions besides Oracle: Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM, Eclipse, SAP, … It’s being used everywhere.

[p2detar]

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

This can’t be a serious comment. I’d say probably half the world‘s B2B and enterprise runs on Java. Especially in Europe.

[malfist]

Amazon is predominantly a java shop as is a lot of big enterprise

[grishka]

> The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

Huh??? Google, the search engine part, is written in Java as far as I know. Yandex uses Java extensively. Odnoklassniki, once second most popular Russian social network, is written in Java. Banks like Java. Android apps are written in Java (and Kotlin, which I consider an abstraction over Java).

And that's only what I can remember right away. A sizable chunk of the world runs on Java.

[lenerdenator]

The question then becomes, does Java warrant the valuation Oracle has when the language itself is mostly FLOSS?

[layer8]

Oracle effectively still largely controls the evolution of the language and of OpenJDK, and Java is still a registered Oracle trademark. While it could be forked and renamed if necessary (as happened in the javax –> jakarta transition), that would likely end up being quite disruptive and costly.

That being said, Oracle’s valuation is based on their huge integrated ecosystem. That they also control Java, while not insignificant, probably only plays a minor role there.

[pjmlp]

Who do you think pays most of the salaries of people working on OpenJDK?

[sleepybrett]

I think that overstates, there is a lot of java in the enterprise still, it's lose share to golang and typescript and in certain cases rust, but it's still around and doing just fine (to my annoyance).

[losvedir]

What? What kind of ridiculous bubble are you in? Isn't Java one of the main languages at Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc?

[bjord]

it's not purely gov work—lots of legacy software (especially outside of the US) is java-based

and if you hire an offshore outsourcing company, odds are that they will insist on something java (spring) based, as that's where their experience is

[vips7L]

Lots of green field apps are Java based too. I just started a new codebase in Java 25.

[northern-lights]

as a counterpoint - Amazon is a Java shop and most of the companies that model themselves after Amazon are also Java shops.

[raverbashing]

And you know that they will be using Java 6 just because...

[victorbjorklund]

That is a silly take. The absolute majority of Java devs in the world does not work in spy agencies (sounds like it’s more about your personal network being close to that world)

[imglorp]

This feels correct. Their business model is squeezing anyone who can't migrate off their properties and suing the rest.

Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?

[toomuchtodo]

> Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?

Short term shareholder equity gains during an over exuberant hype cycle you do not know when might repeat.

"As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." -- Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince (symbolizing Wall Street's reckless persistence in risky lending despite signs of a market downturn)

The Overvaluation Trap - https://hbr.org/2015/12/the-overvaluation-trap - December 2015

> The trap is an almost inevitable consequence of what many managers might regard as a blessing, because it occurs when the capital markets overvalue a company’s equity—and especially when stock overvaluation is common in a particular sector. In the following pages, we’ll describe the trap, show how it has played out in various industries, and suggest where it may be playing out once again.

"If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Paul Newman

Edit: tsunamifury wrote a prescient comment a decade ago, referencing the same hrb piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851527

[jollymonATX]

They have not pulled the pin on the ZFS grenade yet, but I expect at some point it happens.

[riffraff]

but what would be the blast radius for ZFS?

Most enterprises don't seem to be running ZFS with Linux, and the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.

Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.

[toast0]

> the only large target using FreeBSD I can think of is Netflix, but AFAIR they don't use ZFS either.

I can't quite remember, but I think they might have mentioned using ZFS rather than UFS for the OS, but I'm pretty sure they're not using it for the CDN data partitions. I love ZFS, but for CDN nodes, I think it would be more harmful than helpful; especially how ARC is separate from the FreeBSD 'Unified Buffer Cache', and how much work Netflix has done to reduce the number of times data hits RAM on the way from disk to the user.

> Oracle sues when there's $$$ to make, but I don't think ZFS would warrant them much.

(Agreeing with you), if they are using ZFS for the OS and Oracle makes ZFS toxic, it shouldn't take long to ditch it.

[kstrauser]

It’s why I run btrfs on my lab machines. I’ve used ZFS for, looks at calendar oh, wow, literally decades now. It’s fantastic. But the miasma of Oracle’s infection keeps me from recommending it for anything commercial.

ZFS, in a vacuum is fantastic. But it’s not in a vacuum.

[uberduper]

There's no zfs grenade. It's CDDL, feel free to use it wherever you want. Oracle can't come after you for violating the gpl even if somehow using zfs on linux violates the gpl.

[jollymonATX]

Everything I have read is that the cddl is not compatible with binary deployments of zfs on linux so actually wouldnt that mean yes they could press that if you bundled it with gpl? Actual lawyers have said yes it could which is what I am refering to, however I think the actual answer is that Oracle has created a latch by inaction on this subject for so long now.

[uberduper]

CDDL is more permissive than gpl. It's not a violation of cddl to intermingle with code under a different license. GPL is the issue and it's the individual contributors to linux that _could_ sue.

[mort96]

I'm not a lawyer. I don't k is what Oracle's lawyers can and can't do. Even if I'm legally in the right, Oracle's lawyers could break me if they wanted. I can't know if there is a ZFS grenade, and neither can you. But we can choose to not deal with Oracle.

[bombcar]

At that point, if they wanted to, they could sue mort96 for saying something bad about Oracle. It's unlikely they'll do that and perhaps a bit less unlikely they'll sue over ZFS.

Most of their legal shenanigans appear to be restricted to companies that already license some software from them.

[mort96]

We have pretty good laws and systems protecting our right to say something bad about companies. I trust that to protect me.

We have less good laws and systems protecting our right to use software in ways which Oracle considers breach of license.

[imglorp]

They can sue for a variety of reasons from trade secret to trademark.

It doesn't mean they'll win anything in court but they'll ruin you long before they notice the spend.

[nubinetwork]

I'm not sure Larry would be interested in suing Matt Ahrens (one of the original designers), or a handful of LLNL employees (ie the US government).

[scentoni]

The present US government would delight in finding a new way to funnel more yachtloads of cash to Larry Ellison, legally or otherwise, as long as someone in the regime gets something out of it.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Because you can get the government to buy it via corruption?

[sellmethepen]

There's more to it than just pure databases. They have a pretty large vertical of SaaS apps, specifically ERP. Oracle Saas (their ERP platform) is used by thousands of customers - these are systems implemented with SI's and run super critical functions like payroll, manufacturing, etc really hard to rip out once they're put in place. This has been fueling their growth for some time, and seems like OCI is picking up now from a pure infra POV. But yeah I don't think I'd ever use any Oracle components voluntarily or at the very least find ways to have exit paths

[x0x0]

Yeah, many of these comments are extremely misinformed. Oracle has been an application software vendor for a long time.

For example, Oracle sell Opera. Opera manages hotels, both individual and chains. And integrates with their amusement park management software.

People complain about them, but software like that is much closer to an sdk than a finished product. It is generally customized for each buyer for their needs. And the quality of the customization is more on the buyer than on Oracle.

Oracle have a giant suite of these products for POS, guest experiences, amusement parks, hospitality, marketing (b2b and b2c), etc. And companies buy from Oracle because they're not good at making software and because you do leverage some economies of scale.

[bombcar]

Enterprise software as an SDK with a demo is a perfect way of explaining it - I'll have to remember that.

Jira, installed fresh, is nice. Jira after it implements your enterprise disfunction, is a new level of hell Dante couldn't've dreamed of.

[balderdash]

on this point the netsuite ecosystem is huge and there are not that many options for SME's that are too big/complex for inacct or quicken (even campfire/rillet etc) but don't want to get anywhere near SAP, Infor, IFS, oracle (not netsuite).

[drillsteps5]

Oracle has also owned JD Edwards since early 2000s which is in many large legacy companies (I think a lot of them are still in mainframes).

[lateforwork]

Oracle database has unparalleled scalability. Ask someone who works at Microsoft SQL Server division what their bug database looks like. They will tell you that a single SQL Server instance cannot scale to the entire SQL Server division. Oracle on the other hand has a single database for the entire company. No other database is this scalable.

But Oracle is not just a database company. Oracle started as a database company, but today they are more an applications company than a database company. They have ERP back-office applications (finance, operations, HR), and CRM front-office applications (sales, marketing, service). Oracle bought a large number of applications software companies such as Seibel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, NetSuite and Cerner to become this big.

Of course Oracle is also a major cloud services provider and provide AI superclusters, and GPU instances from NVIDIA and AMD (context for today's layoffs).

[kpil]

I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers.

Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.

[topspin]

The original question does discount the capability of Oracle's database too much, as only something "golf executives" buy. When you have a large problem that is best solved with a relational model, Oracle delivers and can indeed be worth all the money and license hell involved.

[cool_dude85]

I think the big use case for Oracle products are for businesses that are not in the IT space. A lot of reasons for this, a big one is the breadth of Oracle's products is very solid and, similar to Microsoft, you can be sold on Oracle solving all your database needs across your business: HR, asset management, customer relationship stuff, your actual business, all with a single vendor. Non-IT management will be told that it all integrates seamlessly, you don't need to hire IT staff dealing with software from 10 different vendors, just the one.

For instance, I work in the utility industry. They offer specialized utility-specific software for managing data from our meters, our customer and billing system, asset management, HR, accounting, reporting from all these systems. Even more specialized stuff exists that we don'tbuy. No doubt if you had a different use case, Oracle would sell us on their ability to handle it. I think this is the model they follow. They are not trying to sell to startups, tech platforms, software companies, etc. They are trying to sell to your bank.

[vector_spaces]

The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful.

But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in North America. Their database product is very far from their only LOB.

[torben-friis]

>Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for

You would use it to keep your job when your company goes with it against all technical recommendation due to the push of a higher up that wouldn't let the idea go for stupid or suspicious reasons.

[rwmj]

I actually sat through an Oracle sales presentation around 1999 (I was the product engineer, along with company executives) and honestly it sounded pretty good. At the time we were using Lotus Notes for a database so even pencil and paper would have been better. Oracle absolutely was the market leader and there was no doubt about its technical chops. Oracle Parallel Server could run active-active across two sites separated by many miles of fibre, which was a remarkable thing to do back then.

Oracle came back with a quote that was so far outside what our company could afford that we went with Informix (not a cheap database). Pretty lucky escape.

A year or two later I ported the whole stack to PostgreSQL and it worked absolutely fine since we didn't have that much scale. Unfortunately when I left the guy who took over was a huge Informix fan so he deleted all the PG code and went back.

[bombcar]

Oracle was (and I assume is) able to provide "hardware" level support for their software, if you paid enough and your database was shitting itself at 2 AM, they'd have engineers on the phone and maybe on the plane to get you back up and running.

For smaller companies and businesses? Not needed. For big multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap.

[ralphc]

I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."

[post-it]

Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind.

My hunch is that big consulting firms like CGI might use it, and therefore the customers of those firms use it? But I haven't worked at any of those.

[rbanffy]

> Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind.

Lucky you. Sadly, not all companies are new enough to be able to do that. Some embarked on Java when it was Sun, and Oracle when the only alternative would have been SQL Server (or DB2 on AIX, AS/400, or MVS).

[TheGRS]

A past company I worked for made SaaS and On-prem and we supported Oracle with the on-prem. The simple act of supporting and testing that option was enormous for our company, but the customers we had that needed it were highly lucrative.

[pydry]

I worked for one company that used it. Everybody on the ground hated it but the costs of migrating away were enormous because every system they relied upon was tightly coupled to every other system. It would have been a multiyear project to get off it.

Their software wasn't just more expensive than using open source equivalents it was worse, too. It's just very, very sticky.

At the same time the sales team wine and dine key decision makers and try to strike the fear of god in to them so they don't rock the boat.

[InsideOutSanta]

We heard you're planning to migrate away from Oracle. We understand, but unfortunately, that means we have to get rid of the 75% discount we gave you, so we'll make a decade of revenue in the two years it'll take you to get rid of us. Still planning to migrate away?

[lazide]

It’s a common ‘large enterprise’ dependency often due to some internal CRN/Accounting/Compliance software, so I suspect you are right.

[rbanffy]

People also marry the database when a significant amount of logic is in stored procedures.

[lazide]

Hard to do if it’s not present to use already?

[mft_]

They sell to cash-rich organisations who are a bit clueless about technology and so can't or wouldn't want to either roll their own, or go with a better but smaller provider?

e.g. I was unsurprised when I spotted that Novartis (no connection, btw) was deep in with Oracle. Big pharma, lots of money, typically-clueless-big-org-IT-leadership, etc.

(LOL, Novartis also uses SAP.)

[whynotmaybe]

And, their product have worked correctly for decades.

So if you have a lot of money and don't want to take any risk you go the oracle route. It's not the best product today, but you won't have any surprise, except cost, that you can justify because it's oracle.

Which is the same as using a tank to go grocery shopping because you're afraid of an accident on the way. You need everything in house to support a thank, special garage, specifically trained crew, specific fuel...

And it's way harder to drive than a civic.

[vachina]

Precisely this. They prey on outsource-happy big orgs that have 1 million different SaaS all tied together by scotch tape (because their IT dept. is also outsourced)

[elzbardico]

Non-tech companies have bigger fish to fry in cost optimization than IT infrastructure.

For example, nobody buying, insuring and operating supertankers will care that much about Oracle licensing or even renewing a mainframe contract.

[torginus]

The whole medical industries business model is that they create so much compliance regulation that you need every compliance product under the sun to comply with them, thereby you can keep out competition.

[phendrenad2]

I have a theory that being cash-rich creates an atmosphere of technological cluelessness, or more specifically weaponized incompetence. A cash-rich company attracts sociopathic executives, who are focused on the prestige of working at a top company. These executives display a unified front outwardly, but internally they are all stabbing each other in the back constantly. And any executive who champions in-house software is just giving other executives ammunition whenever said software has the smallest bug.

[trelane]

Java is used a lot, but not Oracle's version.

One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.

[vips7L]

They’re all Oracle’s version. OpenJdk is Oracle’s implementation of the JLS. They’re just not using Oracle’s build of OpenJdk.

[pjmlp]

Almost all.

Embedded folks with real time offerings like PTC, Aicas, microEJ,.... have their own implementations, with real time support, bare metal deployments.

Folks like IBM and Azul nowadays take parts of OpenJDK, mostly standard library, and add their own runtimes instead.

[rockinghigh]

Their revenue was $57.4 billion last year. Just in Q4; cloud revenue $6.7 billion, cloud infrastructure $3.0 billion, cloud application $3.7 billion, Fusion Cloud ERP $1.0 billion, NetSuite cloud ERP $1.0 billion.

[ab_testing]

I think saying that Oracle is a provider of database software is something that you hear from old technical folks who have not used Oracle since the 90s. In fact Oracle's revenue from database software is very tiny. Much of their revenue comes from enterprise and cloud software.

If you are a publicly traded company who needs to report audited financial results every quarter to shareholders, there are less than 10 ERP software in world for that and Oracle owns 5 of those - Fusion, PeopleSoft, Netsuite, JDE and EBS.

Also, in the last decade a big chunk of their revenue comes from cloud services where these enterprises move away from their physical hardware and onto the cloud. Here also, Oracle provides one of the most generous free limits compared to GCP, AWS and Azure. Also they provide some unique options that I have not seen in any other clouds like Bring Your Own License where you can keep running your old enterprise databases in the cloud with just paying for the compute .

Few years back they also bought out Cerner which was the largest EHR company at that time and it pushed their head count by 28000.

They grew their headcount massively during covid like any other software company and simultaneously took on too much debt to build datacenters.

But with rising cost of these capex builds, they are in consolidation mode and reducing headcounts just like other companies.

[drillsteps5]

Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for 20+ years.

Oracle the company specializes in acquiring software, integrating it in their ecosystem, selling the installations, and living off the recurring licensing fees (NetSuite is one example).

[cloudfudge]

The focus not being the DB for 20 years is mostly true, with the exception that all of their applications are well-served by having a very scalable and very bulletproof database in-house.

[russellbeattie]

If you're a massive organization and have need for a mission critical database that cannot fail for any reason, with massive scale and scalability, security, reliability, high availability, high throughput, etc., and you want instant expertise available to solve any DB problems, then you're not using Postgres, a cloud database or rolling your own noSQL solution.

I'm talking about huge, billion dollar institutions like banks, financial services, governments, logistics, manufacturing, software, etc. These are the companies run by the "golf executives" who want guaranteed database dependability and are willing to pay for it.

In this case, you'll use Oracle or IBM DB2.

For example, if you're TikTok dealing with billions of interactions, or Boeing, maintaining critical databases of millions of parts, you'll be totally willing to spend huge amounts of money to make sure your data is rock solid, even if it's overpriced (Apparently, Microsoft is one of Oracle's biggest customers of all companies!)

[arethuza]

They acquired a lot of applications - ERP, CRM, finance - I suspect actual database licensing revenues are only a small part of their revenues these days.

Years ago I had some fun integrating with Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) - which is actually a pretty impressive beast if you need consolidated financial reporting!

[bilekas]

It's exactly as you said. The dependency on old school legacy implementations that can't be turned off. To be fair to Microslop even they had the foresight to open source .net core and even try to bring some things to the open source community. Oracle actively turned into a patent troll.

[Hizonner]

They make a lot of money off of the cloud services and their layered "enterprise" applications. Selling "just the database" isn't what Oracle's been about for a very long time.

[BoredPositron]

It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System runs all oracle in the backend.

[rbanffy]

Indeed. Oracle runs on z/OS as well.

[vasco]

Government contracts. You get good at bidding, there's money to be made there. And those bidding processes are way more than just the tech. That's their main value prop I think. Having the bureaucratic machine to bid and win contracts.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

If you want to build a system of monolith services and be locked into a 30 year old waterfall development model, then Oracle is for you.

I’ve had this argument with several DBAs. They always claim “Oracle is the most performant,” while quite possibly true technically, they also tend to run a single massive instance that inevitably leads to a complete failure of the site under heavy load. Oracle is often designed to be the single point of failure. I believe that is by design. The same problems can be solved with modern event driven architectures, better caching, horizontal dynamic scaling, etc.

[exidy]

I had to explain this to some slightly younger colleagues recently. It's hard to believe now, but in ye olde days hardware was not as cheap and abundant as it is now. So you invested heavily in your database servers and to justify the hardware and software cost, ran as many workloads as possible on it to spread the pain.

This is also the same incentives that resulted in many classic architectures from 80s and 90s relying heavily on stored procedures. It was the only place where certain data could be crunched in a performant way. Middleware servers lacked the CPU and memory to crunch large datasets, and the network was more of a performance bottleneck.

[nocommandline]

> and be locked into a 30 year old waterfall development model,

Oracle switched from Waterfall development model to sprint years ago. They also switched from yearly to quarterly releases (for their Apps) which means they deliver a lot of features in a year.

[kstrauser]

> They also switched from yearly to quarterly releases (for their Apps) which means they deliver a lot of features in a year.

Without commenting on whether this is true of Oracle, that conclusion doesn't inherently follow from the given. If I'm driving 60 miles per hour, then recalculate it in miles per minute, that doesn't actually mean I'm going faster. Oracle could easily be delivering 1/8 a year's worth of features in 1/4 a year due to release process overhead for all I'd know.

[TheGRS]

Totally agreed looking at them from a development and cutting-edge viewpoint. They own what was once very competitive platforms and languages, which they still support. They have largely transitioned into rent seekers.

From the investment standpoint they still have a lot of value to siphon from, but its all rent seeking behavior, its not producing new ecosystems like them or Sun did in the past. Long-term blue chip play.

Though all the Paramount stuff is loosely coupled to them now, so tough to say if its a good long-term play anymore.

[temporallobe]

Oracle is used for mission-critical legacy applications, which is common in the federal government IT space. Replacing with OSS is a nontrivial undertaking, but it is happening. For the most part, replacing Oracle’s Java with OpenJDK is relatively painless, but some agencies preferred the licensed version because it includes support. Replacing a database, however, is a much scarier task, even when you have experienced and competent DBAs.

[sellmesoap]

The technology is irrelevant, at one point in my career I worked for a ~200 person co. that was aquried by another massive (20,000+ seat) company who was even less useful than Oracle; trying to figure out the rough mechanics of why such a useless tower of people is built and maintained, I realized the magic: big juicy government contracts!

[stego-tech]

It's stickiness.

Their biggest asset is ERP. That's how they get orgs locked in, because migrating ERP systems after deployment can take decades of work and cost multitudes more than just eating Oracle's renewal increases. Could orgs jettison them into the sun? Totally. Is it fiscally sensible? Yeah, absolutely. Can you sell that to the board? Nope.

The best way to kill Oracle - because such a toxic organization absolutely deserves to fail - is to avoid building anything atop their infrastructure ever again going forward. Don't use their Java tooling, don't use their software suites, don't use their cloud services.

Just don't use Oracle for anything new, and work to get the fuck off of it for anything that remains.

The only reason Oracle survives is because rich dumb fucks keep giving them money.

[balderdash]

A while ago we were looking at migrating ERP - netsuite was a not a good price proposition and candidly feels a bit dated - but when you mapped features it was pretty impressive and for a lot of business that have some complexity (multi-entity, multi-currency, multi site mfg or inventory), there is not a whole lot of good alternatives because you can't use quicken but you definitely don't want SAP

[stego-tech]

The irony is that the ERP space is ripe for innovation and disruption, but nobody wants to get into ERP because it's a goddamn nightmare.

Every business runs slightly differently than everyone else, and ERP tries to be this all-encompassing monolith. I wonder if the solution to ERP isn't just targeted microservices exposing data via APIs...

[balderdash]

yeah but i think that is the problem - everyone wants to customize / thinks their business is super unique, but honestly the customization is what makes ERP so painful. industry customization is important (motels are different than a small manufacturer) but for SMEs a standard solution that fits their industry is the can be implemented in a manner that's not akin to open heart surgery would be far more valuable to these firms.

[bsder]

> I'm genuinely confused at what the value prop of Oracle is.

Legal blame transfer.

Oracle has every single compliance checkbox you need for any certification you can name.

So, if your end customer (generally BigCorp or BigGovt) wants "NitWit Certification v4007", you call up the Oracle sales rep, get a quote, and pass the cost along with a significant markup.

[elorant]

Support, that's what you'd use them for. Something breaks and your team can't figure it out? You make a phone call and someone will be there in a jiffy to work things out. And if he can't either they'll fly a whole team from a different city or even a different country until they solve it.

[xtracto]

I just read a tech "policy" document of one of the largest packaged food makers in Mexico. They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support.

There are A Lot of businesses thar are happy to burn cash for a false sense of security. They don't know better.

[kstrauser]

> They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support.

Hahahahaha. Yes, by all means, call IBM or Oracle and ask them to compensate you for downtime. Support, sure, of a sort. If you throw enough money at them, you'll get an answer from them in an arbitrarily short time frame.

[ventana]

I assume you would use Oracle Cloud if, for whatever reason possibly related to legal or competition, you cannot use AWS, or GCP, or Azure. It's hard for me to imagine a startup that needs cloud and would onboard to Oracle Cloud and not to any of the top 3 providers instead.

[roncesvalles]

Also, their inability to make a NewSQL DB rivaling Spanner or Cockroach (they basically just had to clone one of these or acquire Cockroach) puts them out of any serious competition for the future of databases. Their "Oracle Autonomous DB" ain't it.

[jeffbee]

Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.

[cloudfudge]

Oracle Cloud isn't actually "terrible cloud", but it definitely isn't geared toward smaller users like startups and individuals. It's downright hostile to casual use. But for fortune 500 companies who don't mind being in bed with Oracle, the price can be right.

[silisili]

I use it only for the free(for now) tier. I always thought AWS console was about the worst UI/UX could get.

Not to be outdone, Oracle came along and said 'hold my beer.'

[newsoftheday]

I posted a response from Gemini where I asked Gemini, "Do you have citations proving or disproving whether Oracle Cloud is still attracting cloud customers away from Azure, AWS and GCP?" and it seems it disagrees with your "nobody wants their terrible cloud" view.

[kstrauser]

Well, that clinches it.

[nemomarx]

you could post the citations?

[yxhuvud]

You are missing the business model - buy has-been platforms and frameworks and charge big bucks for maintenance. Customers eventually manage to migrate off you, but it is fine cause you buy some other has-been stack and then overcharge for that.

[daneel_w]

From small-scale use over the course of several years, I've found their "cloud" (OCI) to be a solid and well-planned product. Additionally, I've experienced not one single outage or hiccup so far (Stockholm region).

[paulddraper]

NetSuite

There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.

[glenstein]

Truth. I don't know of a better plug and play option than Netsuite for middle to big companies.

[outside2344]

They do own some vertically integrated products like PeopleSoft that use these lower level foundational pieces. But I agree, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would use Oracle outside of golf and sailing bribes.

[benced]

If you are buying GPUs today, they really are massively cheaper than other clouds.

[kstrauser]

Until you become addicted, and then plan for the price to spike.

[progbits]

If you are not yet in Oracle's clutches you have to be extremely naive or shortsighted to be using Oracle cloud. Obviously the low prices are because they have a shit product and shit reputation, and the moment they think they captured large enough audience they are going to hike them

[kstrauser]

Yup. They're not offering those prices out of generosity. They're offering them because that's the most they can charge big players who understand what it means to buy from Oracle.

[elif]

They aren't a database company. They are a full spectrum B2B SaaS contract company. They make far more by up selling services than they do from databases total. Half of their stack will run on whatever db you want.

[mr_mitm]

Aren't their databases behemoths that satisfy requirements (especially of regulatory nature) of large banks and such? I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup.

[chasd00]

> I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup.

that's right, Oracle's databases are for things like Visa and Mastercard transactions and maybe the US IRS and Social Security systems of record.

[pjmlp]

Cool stuff like distributed transactions, the database as OS with raw disks, the database as application platform with APEX.

Then again, I guess I am one of those folks that enjoys cool toys, that only big corporations pay for.

[MattGaiser]

Many organizations are extremely low capacity. I am aware of a company that has merely a few hundred gigabytes of data and is stuck on Oracle.

[jjav]

In a world of continuous change, at least we can always rely on oracle being consistently evil.

[saidnooneever]

oracle is deeply embedded in enterprise and a lot of other enterprise solutions also use it. they have no value proposition for startups. likely just on existing clients and ppl who end up using stuff that requires their products.

[DetroitThrow]

Well, if you're an elected official, and you're in charge of government organizations that could be used to enrich billionaire donors by using a donor's services - Oracle fits that niche very well!

[willio58]

> From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives.

This is basically it. You wouldn’t want to use oracle for anything, and they know that. What they also know, very very well, is that they can get their fingers into high-dollar orgs and shmooze people that have little knowledge on the matter to lock themselves into basically never ending contracts for garbage products.

Oracle is a perfect distillation of capitalism in that way.

[mbloom1915]

yeah... their "value prop" is keeping monoliths trapped and embedded in their systems with customizations out the wazoo. slow, painful death

[mghackerlady]

maybeeee SPARC based Solaris? Probably not a major usecase nowadays (Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun) but it seems to be limping along

[andyjohnson0]

> Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun

My recollection is that they also qanted Sun's storage hardware products, to sell alongside their existing DB software.

[mghackerlady]

that was also a reason, but you can't convince me Oracle wasn't primarily in it for Java

[diogomqbm]

i know they're also one of the AI data center providers of this era. Making partnerships with NVIDIA and helping GPUs get to market.

[tchalla]

The answer to your question lies in Oracle 10K.

[s_dev]

Oracle run a huge % of the worlds POS devices.

[ModernMech]

I have a cousin who owns a business that decided to contract with Oracle, and as he described this my first thought was “why tf would you ever sign an agreement with Oracle, don’t you know about them?”

But as he described the whole dealings (for some SEO product, I’m not sure of the specifics) it became clear to me they bamboozled him, gave him a bait and switch, and left him on the hook for a huge bill he never thought he’d have to pay.

So to answer your question I don’t think there is a value prop, I think it’s actually a giant grift.

[gytisgreitai]

Clearly you are in USA. It’s not how their business works and Startups are not their target. Lobbying governments across the world with questionable practices are

[bdangubic]

moat

[EliRivers]

Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Mar...

For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.

One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend.

When the analysis was being conducted, the team grew concerned with the costs — both in terms of budget and disk I/O. Oracle licenses are incredibly expensive, and there would be a huge volume of CDR data written to and read from the database. Finally, it dawned on someone that the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in. In fact, a single, low-end Sun server with a few hundred megs of RAM could easily handle the CDR generation and application backend.

Excited about their good news, they called up a meeting with the product managers. "We've discovered that we can deliver the product at a fraction of what our original estimates were." The managers left the room, some looking happy, others just looking incredulous.

Later that day, Jason got a call from the VP of Engineering. "Jason, while I understand what you're proposing is technically valid, you have upset the marketing team."

"I'm sorry... did I say something?"

"It's just that they've promised the customer that our product would use Oracle 8i, and now they're going to be made liars. Can you just humor me and add Oracle 8i to the design somewhere?"

"Uh..."

"I have enough trouble politically as it is. I really appreciate this favor!" click

After delivering the news to his team, they argued a bit on what to use Oracle for. Ultimately they delivered the final product with an Oracle database that had a single table which was used to store a handful of configuration parameters.

It was the most expensive individual table Jason had ever created in his entire career.

[faangguyindia]

Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your services in Golang.