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Re:Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Cus... by pjmlp on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @02:10PM (#17128101)
- PL/SQL

- Graphical development environment for stored procedures, data modelling, database management

- Distributed transactions and cluster management tooling

- Their Java, .NET, C++ drivers (yes actual C++, not plain C) quality, including IDE tooling

- Integration with other enterprise stacks that speak Oracle

Re:Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Cus... by hyperman1 on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @03:26PM (#17128694)
Actually, none of these matter:

- PL/SQL is a horrible programming language. It consistently scores bad on e.g. stack overflow. I know about 4 non-oracle-DBA people who say something positive about it, and just about anybody else hates it with a passion. PL/SQL is a reason for lock-in when you have a few million lines of it, but that's about it.

- Graphical thing - nobody cares. An SQL database needs reasonable textual tools for the pros to do SQL editing. I would love an IPython for Oracle. But what you describe is tooling in the hand-holding, for dummies world. And I don't mean that negatively, we all started there and most people don't want to be IT-er just to solve their problem. But dummies is also a market segment where oracle is easily worst in class. I don't know why, but every oracle GUI seems inspired by that GoT Iron throne which cuts whoever tries to touch it.

- I worked with their Java and their C/C++ OCI driver. Both had crippling bugs, and caused serious migration issues or data corruption when upgrading oracle or even patching windows. The guys admitted some of them should have been documented in their migration guide, even if Oracle was internally aware of them. Yeah, thanks a lot.

- Integration with other stacks: Integration in the Microsoft world with mssql is a lot better if you want a good integrated stack. Integration within the oracle stack, there you might be right. And that stack is huge. But it is also very low-quality and hated by most of its users (oracle financials is an example where I never heard an end user tell anything remotely positive)

There are good reasons for using oracle. mulmen's post here above lists a few technical ones. It is very hard to make oracle lose data after successfull commit. There is also the management fallacy that oracle=enterprise class and open source=toy, and you can use that very well to sell your program by making it require oracle. So yeah, oracle has good sides. But please not these.

Re:Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Cus... by pjmlp on Tuesday May 22, 2018 @04:17PM (#17129054)
You might not care, millions of Oracle customers, me included do.

The only database that tops Oracle in this regard is Microsoft SQL Server.

PL/SQL is so bad that the beloved PostgreSQL copied it.

Many of us prefer living in the Xerox PARC world, not AT&T.

If I miss playing around with awk, sed, perl, sqlplus, troff, tex, graphviz, ... I know where to find them.

All software has bugs, I just found out more in PostgreSQL than Oracle or SQL Server together, specially in EF bindings.

Re:Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Cus... by perl4ever on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @02:03AM (#17131738)
The thing I don't like about PL/SQL is mainly the lack of orthogonality to its features. It feels like it was assembled by different groups of people, in different silos, at different times - without an overall vision or even someone who understands it in its entirety.
Re:Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Cus... by Annatar on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @08:49AM (#17133674)
PL/SQL is a horrible programming language.

PL/SQL is a wonderful programming language, regardless of how it is rated by clueless developers on some arbitrary web site on the internet. What kind of an argument is that anyway?!?