It's not because of poor Oracle reputation, it's because of technologies. Oracle is losing database-related markets.

15-20 years ago Oracle was №1 in database-related technologies and everyone knew it. For that time they had almost perfect solutions for most database-related problems on market. But market is changing. Today they stuck with their good solutions for outdated problems and their solutions doesn't solve modern problems well.

So here is my short list of modern database-related problems, for which I think Oracle is not best at:

- files/data storage (today there are better non-database solutions for that, 15-20 years ago it was a good practice to store files in database),

- full-text search (10-15 years ago substring search was enough, today we want complex search criterions),

- consistency across data centers,

- key-value cache (today we want almost instantaneous cache answers),

- OLAP (there are faster solutions on market).

15-20 years ago Oracle was one and only one solution for almost all database-related business problems. Today for many modern problems there are better solutions than Oracle.

Twenty years ago most of the databases we've come to trust were still quirky and strange (Postgres before SQL) or toy-like in capability (MySQL on MyISAM). A lot has changed since then.

Competitors like DB2 and Sybase seem to have utterly faded away, so it's surpising that Oracle's still a factor at all.

Is there anything that Oracle still does that nobody else can match?

Well, it's undeniable that as an OLTP RDBMS, Oracle is very good, at least if you ignore the complexities of managing it. Almost nobody can beat it on features.

For example, consider partitioning. Oracle has had seamless predicate-based table partitioning for about 20 years now. Postgres is getting there, but is still lagging behind. With Oracle you just tell it to partition by some expression(s) and off you go.

Then there are things like multi-master replication, bitmap indexing and other nice features. Oracle is also extremely fast. The underlying table storage is very pragmatic, with a hybrid MVCC system that has both an undo and a redo log. Tables are written in-place, and transaction contention is handled by linked lists of records to the undo log, so getting an older copy of a row is still almost as cheap as Postgres.

Of course, it's beaten in some areas. It's not great a full text search, I believe. Compared to Oracle, Postgres' transactional DDL is positively magical. With Oracle and nearly every other database out there, things like "drop table" can't run inside a transaction.

I would never want to work with Oracle, but I can't deny that it's got some great features.

Sales. What I hear from friends in big co's is that the decision to use Oracle is made on the golf course and not in engineering. Engineering is actively moving to the other technologies, and eventually the companies will stop paying for Oracle because it is no longer in use.

Thanks for pointing me to "Postgres before SQL" - the history page at postgresql.org has links to the initial documents - QUEL is like a hint of an alternative universe. I think it is time to pick up a book by Michael Stonebraker.

And thank you in turn for the reference. It does indeed sound very interesting [1]. I had never heard of QUEL either [2].

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/history.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages

SQL Server is a fork of Sybase’s code, so the child product became much more popular than the parent.

My understanding is that it's a complete rewrite, perhaps more than once at this point.

Probably, but it started as a fork. Last I looked a T-SQL programmer can adapt pretty quickly still.

If you are doing financial services like insurance or banking, you might be stuck on Oracle because you need active active worldwide database replication and none of the 1st-gen NoSQLs offer global ACID transactions. As someone who's been working in databases for over a decade I've seen customers develop database evaluation strategies, but still be unable to migrate away from Oracle. That is changing with the distributed ACID transactions offered by databases like my employer FaunaDB.

Doesn't Spanner support ACID transactions?

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

Yes it does.

> Is there anything that Oracle still does that nobody else can match?

Selling to enterprise.

which is so odd to me, I use DB2, in that our AIX/Oracle teams have many people working as "DBA" but on our DB2 iSeries there are two of us and our data sets are as large. The difference is there are so many things that the iSeries does automatically that it makes being a DBA a breeze.

I really need to get an understanding of the issues the Orcale team faces one day but they tend to look down on us and the pc groups

When oracle corrupts data, you have to google magic incantations and type them in console. I did that many times. But what I never understood is why do I have to do so in the first place, why Oracle does not self-heal itself.

Consultant income driven development.

Sales, and sailing.

It's true. Postgres doesn't have a very competitive America's Cup team.

Active-Active clustering also know as Oracle RAC.

Suing people.

Oracle isn't great in the cloud or with autoscaling either. With the move to microservices it is less important to have one giant centralized database, and "less good" alternatives have become good enough. Oracle is pretty much the opposite of agile when it comes to facing these challenges.

A lot of Oracle customers got oracle products 15 or 20 or more years ago. A lot of those developers, sysadmins and data base admins that have worked on oracle themselves are now into senior Management and executive positions. I wonder how much this has to do with transitions. That they know it sucks, so they are more willing to fight beyond standard "it's expensive" arguments.

A bit of a shower thought, I have no evidence for this.

Speaking from my probably limited experience compared to others here, these early Oracle adopters turned senior/management you mentioned actually are the ones I saw fighting hardest to keep Oracle around. That is all they know and all they ever have known. In some cases even lying about other technology assessments and flat out sabotage to make sure things aint change. The most vocal pushback against Oracle I saw was from people who were not early adapters and had experienced other systems.

There are a few companies who could all have the same slogan, but I’ll use Oracle in this example...

Oracle: we make the stuff that other people make you use.

Other candidates include (but not limited to)

- Atlasian - Microsoft - Adobe

Microsoft’s development ecosystem (e.g. SQL Server, .NET) is top notch, even if you hate Windows and Office.

As a Microsoft Development Technologies MVP, I can tell you MS gets it and has made huge progress in usefulness and usability of the DotNet ecosystem. Keep in mind there are on the order of 1M C# developers worldwide. Most in enterprise environments and most belonging to the dark matter developers. They don't hang out on HN, Twitter, go to conferences, write blogs, or even read them. This will keep MS dev ecosystem development focused on C# and object oriented for the rest of my life. But I can tell you all the MS techies in .NET development are interested in and respect F# and functional programming and want to see it succeed. There has been pain getting to cross-platform .NET, which is what NetStandard/NetCore is all about. It is pretty stable and useful today, and there is a lot of wood behind the development arrow going forward.

I love C#, and have been using it since the 1.0 days back around 2002. What has really annoyed me as of late is the confusing branding. Standard vs Core vs what the hell is Framework 4.7 called?

Along with the branding confusion, the formally very approachable and discoverable MSDN documentation for the class library has become a near useless clusterfuck. They've deprecated made.microsoft.com/library/ (at least for .Net) but don't mention it on the site!

> What has really annoyed me as of late is the confusing branding. Standard vs Core vs what the hell is Framework 4.7 called?

I agree that it's confusing at first, but when you step back and look at why Microsoft went down this path, it starts to make a lot of sense.

When .NET was launched in 2002, it was a closed-source, Windows only development framework.

Microsoft was a very different company back then, and Windows was its gravy train. If you were a developer inside the Windows ecosystem, you were showered with (closed-source) love. If you were outside? Well, fuck you, Microsoft will crush you. Everything was oriented towards getting retail/enterprise consumers to buy Windows (and Office etc).

The 180 degree flip to embrace open source is a very recent development. Microsoft realized that desktop OS's were less and less relevant commercially, and that the future was in cloud services.

I haven't looked at the figures, but I assume it's a lot more lucrative to lock in tens of thousands of dollars per month in cloud subscription/support fees than selling Windows direct to consumers.

So with this reorientation, Microsoft needs a strategy to capture the cloud services market (and keep in mind that this is 5-10 years after AWS has been running the shop).

The solution? Open source .NET to accelerate its adoption and entice developers towards Azure.

First, Microsoft won't care if you use their implementation of .NET or Mono - as long as you're using it on Azure, you're fine. Hence .NET Standard - literally, an open-source standard that anyone can code against, and know that their stuff will just run, no matter which implementation is used under the hood.

Second, Microsoft then release their own implementation of this standard - .NET Core.

Third, we come to .NET Framework. For most entrants to the ecosystem, you can consider this to be legacy. This is the evolution of the original (2002) closed-source approach to .NET, and is only sticking around due to Microsoft's long-term commitment to its software releases.

Again, I agree that none of this is clear when you're new to .NET. It makes a lot more sense when you realize the naming evolved from Microsoft shoehorning a legacy platform into a fundamentally new, open-source/SaaS subscription strategy.

I'm an F# coder in a company of C# "dark matter developers". (Thanks for that term!) There's no ecosystem I'd prefer to be working in than .NET.

Could you elaborate on what are missing parts in other ecosystems than .net/c#

I don't have a lot of recent experience with other ecosystems, so take what I say with a grain of salt. With that disclaimer in mind:

* Visual Studio is the best IDE, bar none. It's a pleasure to use and Microsoft keeps it up to date so it's usually bug free for normal use. I don't even know what its serious competitors are. Eclipse? VIM? Forgive me for not knowing. :)

* C# is the best OO programming language (if you don't need the raw speed of C++ or, I guess, Rust). Java is a disappointing mess controlled by, yes, Oracle. Python and other dynamically typed languages are fine for scripting, but not for developing complex professional software.

* F# is the best functional programming language for getting stuff done. In fact, it's the best language for getting stuff done, period. Haskell is amazing for its mathematical purity, and I've learned so much about FP and category theory from the Haskell community, but F# gives you immediate access to the zillions of packages created for the .NET ecosystem and is totally compatible with C#. You can also use F# for imperative OO programming when you need to (which is almost never).

* SQL Server is the best RDBMS. Oracle is painful. The open source databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) have come a long way, but still don't have SQL Server's combination of power and ease of use. NoSQL databases are interesting, but seriously lacking in important features. I've yet to come across a use case where I would actually want to use one. (Special demerit to MongoDB for using JSON as a query language. Good lord.)

* Windows is fine. It's not Unix/Linux, but it lacks for nothing.

If I had the time to investigate other ecosystems, I'd like to pick up Rust and Haskell. I'm afraid that Python and JavaScript will eat the entire world, before then, though. :)

All of the above is massively IMHO, obviously.

Having switched from the Windows ecosystem to Linux a while back, I have a few comments:

I don’t know how bug-free VS is now, but VS 2005 and 2008 were buggy in problematic ways. Support was friendly, but the bugs didn’t get fixed quickly. IntelliType (for C++) was nifty bug extremely buggy. Switching to emacs was a major step back in usability, but it was enormously faster and it tended to just work.

C# has a top notch compiler. Sadly, MS’s C++ compiler was, and mostly still is, pretty bad.

Getting off of Windows was a big win. Managing a Linux machine is much nicer, and, when something doesn’t work, you have a better chance of figuring out why.

I have no experience with SQL Server. MySQL and PostgreSQL both sucked back then.

Honestly, C# has replaced C++ for the large majority of Windows application developers. Developing C# apps in Visual Studio is basically frictionless in a way that C++ will never be. C++ as a language (regardless of IDE) is a major pain in the butt.

My big Windows program wasn’t a Windows “application”. It was high performance software that happened to run on Windows. C# was not even close to being in the running.

If we were starting from scratch, Rust would be a credible contender.

I think Haskell is a very nice general purpose language. I think of it as a better Java. There's no need to think of it as a scary academic thing, unless one focuses on the wrong kind of blog posts. https://patrickmn.com/software/the-haskell-pyramid/

I don't mean to knock Haskell at all. It's a fine language with a great community around it.

That said, the number of commercial applications developed in Haskell is very small, because, I think, it doesn't integrate as well into the larger ecosystems around it. It seems like it's a beautiful island all by itself.

The number of commercial applications developed in functional programming languages as a whole is pretty small compared to mainstream languages. I am a dotnet dev and also like F# a lot, but I cannot think of very many commercial applications written in F# either.

That's true, but for someone like me in a C# shop, I can slip F# code into our apps seamlessly. No one would say the apps are written in F#, but several key components are.

Hopefully, FP will take over the world soon and Haskell and F# will both be at the top of the charts! :)

yeah, very cool you were able to find a way to write some F# at work, I wish I could too.

Given trends, I don't expect to see any exponential growth though.

I've found VS 2017 a step down from VS 2015 with way worse performance on iddentical workload and PC.

Does C# have multiple dispatch ala CLOS?

No, it has single dispatch virtual methods, a la C++.

That is not my experience. I've been shipping code for >20 years across a ton of platforms. MS tech has always been a snowflake headache.

Eh... i’d disagree. But what do you mean by “Top Notch”?

See my reply elsewhere in this thread.

I left the MS ecosystem years ago and still miss MSSQL. The full toolset was (is?) very powerful and developer friendly.

I know there are some free tools, but for me nothing out there compares to Adobe Lightroom.

IMO, none of those companies are in the same ballpark as Oracle.

Take a look at the "Most Loved" and the "Most Dreaded" databases here:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-d...

It's pretty clear that MSSQL is seen rather differently from DB2 and Oracle (which are #1 and #2 on the "most dreaded" list, respectively).

Yeah but... at the risk of sounding like a dick... is stack overflow the best place to guage opinion on such things? I mean we’re essentially asking the people who post questions like “why is my HTML table not look right?” To posit an opinion on what they consider best of class in a whole bunch of categories that they’re probably novices at.

I think it’s pretty clear that the people with the best opinions on SO are vastly outnumbered by people with unqualified opinions. Surely something like Simpson’s law can be applied here. Like - of the people with n amount of accepted answers for any given tag - what is their opinion on something related to that tag?

The people who ask why HTML table is not looking right are unlikely to express a strong opinion on Oracle etc either way.

Are you sure? I suspect that they’re the people most likely to participate in those polls.

I personally can’t be bothered with these kinds of questions, but I remember that back in my early days, I was something of a zealot when it came to things I knew vs things I didn’t. I cut my teeth on PHP, MySQL and Flash/Actionscript. Had you asked me back then how I rated those things, I’d have given them 10/10, despite having nothing to compare them to.

Look at the description of the that the poll asked:

"% of developers who are developing with the language or technology but have not expressed interest in continuing to do so"

I think DB2 depends entirely on what platform you use it on.

sure sql studio that has the same problems like the last time i used it 10 yeaars ago, lol microsoft you cannot refresh the side view after i make changes, so i have to hit refresh constantly.

None of those companies have non-executive customers who exclusively hate them. Oracle is unique in this regard.

Salesforce's Dreamforce conferences are similar. There were 120k attendees the year I went.

No developer (or not a lot) would knowingly choose Salesforce as a tool, yet all these folks are at the conference because the employer paid them to go.

I don't think that comparison is really valid. I know tons of companies that run virtually all of their CRM on Salesforce, and this isn't going anywhere soon, nor do these companies have anything that they are planning on transitioning to.

With Oracle, though, I think it really is a lack of technical positioning rather than any "devs hate them" sentiment that is a real existential risk to them long term. Lots of senior execs realize that Oracle's cloud technology is a joke, and more importantly their crazy licensing model makes it a major PITA to run Oracle DBs in any other cloud, and perhaps even more importantly that a lot of changes in dev architecture are making the huge, powerful, monolithic database less critical than it once was. Sure, there are lots of legacy mission critical apps that live and will live on Oracle for a long time, but executive leadership at many companies is now starting to see this (appropriately IMO) as a competitive disadvantage, and they will make choices to try to extricate themselves from Oracle as much as possible.

Don't forget PEGA. Management love PEGA and Salesforce.

I think it’s pretty insane that it’s taking companies this long to transition away from Oracle.

Many of the Oracle system I worked on were huge. Hundreds or thousands of stored procedures that would have to be completely rewritten. Migrating the data...that is easy. Staring down a 10,000 line stored procedure is daunting.

There's an interview with Ellison "Oracle is destined to beat Amazon at cloud database" oct 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ

where he's chatting about some of his customers hating Oracle and wanting to get off, specifically Amazon and SAP. But he says they don't because the Oracle database is better and the other systems don't work properly.

It’s funny, I first bought Oracle in 1999. Every Oracle user I talked with that year said the same thing. They all hate Oracle, they were all switching.

It always amazed me that a primarily database company was worth that much money, since PostgreSQL is free and insanely well documented.

It’s like a Fortune 500 company being based on selling the bash shell and tools for using bash.

Open source for infrastructure level software has historically been wildly successful.

Isn’t that exactly what Red Hat does? And Warren Buffet even just bought a stake in them.

I sold my ORCL a couple years ago (had held it for 20 years) for just that reason. A company whose customers use their product because they have to rather than because they want to is doomed. The same for Novell stock back in the day.

The last straw for me was when I read they were suing their customers.

So Google is doomed? (I think it is.)

Google's primary service is selling search ads that consumers view, primarily via search. Consumers have almost no lock in, and consistently choose Google search over Bing, etc. Google is not at all like Oracle in this case.

Google's business is selling ads to companies and agencies (which hate Google) and selling ad display tech to websites and publishers (which hate Google). They buy companies (Urchin, Doubleclick), make them free, destroy competition, introduce pricing. Pretty identical to the bad guys in tech history.

Even if that's true, it doesn't matter. Consumers are using Google, so there is not really a free market for search ads from thee marketers' perspective.

I don’t like google but I use a lot of their products and of course am involuntarily tracked by them all over. I can hate them all I want, but I’m not their customer. So they have that going for them...