So after the update you can use a (subset) of pl/sql.

Has anyone here done a migration from Oracle's offering to MariaDB? How difficult was it?

How well does Maria DB handle distributed transactions across the database cluster?

Or how does Maria DB handle object based schemas?

What about the stored procedures language features versus PL/SQL?

Don't get me wrong, it is great that Maria DB is getting lots of money so that their developers can improve it, but there are lots of database features that keep us on Oracle and SQL Server, specially when we only care about business value and not FOSS religious discussions.

It is not clear how "XA START" maps into each server.

Am I supposed to manually mess around with text ids?

Nice to see stored procedures are supported, but they seem pretty basic in language features when compared with PL/SQL or Transact SQL.

I guess MariaDB JDBC driver already has two phase commit logic, because MySql has it for decade. It is enough for distributed transactions in "heterogeneous database schemas".

What is the problem with Oracle except the price?

edit: sorry, I mean the DB, not the company.

I have been involved in a dozen or so Hadoop deployments now and almost all of them are there not because it will allow them to do amazing new things but because the licenses for Teradata or Oracle were too expensive. So they have a giant "data lake" aka "dumping ground" on HDFS and keep just the mission critical data in the EDW.

CDH provides benefits in the early days, but at this point it feels more constraining. Their release cadence is slow, so we're stuck writing long term workarounds for bugs that we're fixed two years ago in the upstream project. The stuff that they are working on is half-baked and doesn't support what would seem to be trivial use cases.

I wouldn't be surprised if their ecosystem calcifies now that they are public.

And I wouldn't say Cloudera is dominating Hadoop.

The Oracle RDBMS is absolutely terrible. You'd have to be absolutely mad to use it, even if it was free. In all my years I have never met anyone ever that chose it for it's technical merit, especially from people whom have knowledge of more than one RDBMS. Whatever it's got, another RDBMS's do it properly, and (usually) for a lot less money.

Pick a feature, any feature they advertise and will most likely be from a product they acquired, or half-arsed themselves.

I am not at all convinced any oracle engineer knows about fsync().

EDIT: PL/SQL is not a feature. It's a punishment.

Companies aren't interested in how altruistic their vendor is. They care if their product works and is supported. Also many of Oracle's customers aren't exactly strangers to aggressive tactics in the marketplace.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2147

By giving a grant to a company that is (apparently) more ethical will signal what kind of behavior you encourage, hence choosing to work with MariaDB over OracleDB.