John Bull
As an older tech person, it's legit heartwarming watching the TikTok generation discover why we all hate Oracle.
Jan 26 at 7:13pmWeb
Show threadGreg BellJan 26
@garius the more things change the more they stay hating oracle
Show threadRoger BW 😷Jan 26
@garius Just got an all-staff email at the university: no new transactions (expenses, purchases, etc.) for a month while they set up some new Oracle thing. I sent them a message of condolence.
Show threadZeborahJan 27
@RogerBW @garius The great thing about unis is that, as terrible as Oracle is, guaranteed it's still not the worst part of the information architecture.
Show threadMacCruiskeenJan 27
@zeborah @RogerBW @garius We have sharepoint now too.
Show threadThe SecretbatcaveJan 26
@garius Ellison, the Midas of shit.
Show threadlostdocoJan 26
@secretbatcave @garius The Merdeas touch
Show threadveeteeJan 29
@lostdoco @secretbatcave @garius I refer to it as "the fecal touch"
Show threadThe SecretbatcaveJan 29
@vt52 @lostdoco @garius now this is correct
Show threadLilFluffJan 26
@garius when I delenda est lately it has usually been Harmony Gold. But, Oracle delenda est is never out of season.
Show threadPhil HaighJan 26
@garius Oracle, to me, are the trailblazer for so many tech companies. One good product, lots of duff ones, and a reputation for buggering up any “good” software that they bought up…
Show thread🔶Mark Nicoll 3.5%🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧🇪🇺🇺🇳Jan 27
@gulfie @garius
That's what happens when companies have some really good success, they expand and turn everything new around them to shit.
Show threadPhil HaighJan 27
@duckwhistle @garius On the plus side their purchase of BEA probably accelerated the move away from the full stack J2EE architecture to much lighter weight, simpler alternatives.
Show threadStumpy The MuttJan 27
@gulfie @garius Sun Microsystems for instance. R.I.P.
Show threadPhil HaighJan 27
@StumpyTheMutt @garius yep. I’m not sure the outcome would have been much better if Google had got there first, either. Different yes, better? Almost definitely not. But buying Sun wasn’t on their radar.
Show threadaspraggJan 26
@garius That reason why? One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
Show threadProgrammer 832-529 🍅Jan 26
@garius some traditions should be kept
Show thread四Jan 26

@garius @piepants Oracle is old evil. None of this new evil.

(Play on old/new money.)

Show threadWill GlynnJan 26

@garius Every once in a while, an Oracle-related salesperson emails me asking to schedule a meeting, usually to pitch me something from a subsidiary. I reply:

"I know better than to become an Oracle customer."

The older salespeople just silently remove me from their list, but I've also had younger salespeople ask me to explain. I always do. Each time I've genuinely been the first person who's explained why someone might specifically wish to _not_ have a business relationship with Oracle.

Show threadWill GlynnJan 26

@garius This goes the other way too: Oracle bought Dyn Inc and we immediately prioritized a migration away. Our account rep couldn't understand: "nothing changed!" "We've been a happy Dyn customer for years, but I can't risk doing business with Oracle. It's time to go."

We left on our terms, and of course then they killed the platform and laid everyone off, because Oracle's gonna Oracle.

Show threadEricka SimoneJan 26
@garius it’s like 1999 all over again
Show threadTor Iver WilhelmsenJan 26
@garius Everyone in the IT industry has at least one Oracle story. Mine is that Sun Microsystems won an intranet contract with us using their Portal and app-server. Right after this Oracle bought them and killed both products. The Sun rep recommended we switch to Liferay (which also supported Java portlets) but that did not scale at all… Some of the other Sun products escaped into Forgerock (OpenIDM, OpenAM and OpenDS) luckily.
Show threadHisses with Geese 🌱Jan 26
@toriver damn near cried when Oracle bought out Sun. A whole career flushed down the toilet.
Show threadDave Wilburn Jan 26

@garius

I fled the country 23 years ago to escape my role as an Oracle DBA.

Never again.

Show threadCyclesBecauseSummerIsComing😀Jan 26
@garius I was studying for my SQL exams (Oracle DBA) on 9/11. Correlation does not mean causation, but...
Show threadDio9sysJan 26
@garius
we should sell tiktok to Novell instead. What's the worst that could happen?
Show threadPauliehedron ✅  Jan 27
@Dio9sys @garius Novell was bought by MicroFocus who (also had Attachmate but divested SUSE) and is now owned by of all companies, OpenText.
Show threadJohn C-CJan 26
@garius it might be time to go back and rewatch Brian Cantrill's "don't anthropomorphise Larry Ellison" talk
Show threadjz.tuskJan 27

@johncc @garius

Came here looking for "you wouldn't hate a lawnmower, would you?". Thanks for keeping things real.

Show threadlemgandiJan 26

@garius And their flagship database is an enormous pile of Crap. Many people feed their families by knowing its quirks and difficulties, but I'd rather be productive.

To give you just one example: Oracle SQL HAS NO BOOLEAN DATA TYPE. The official recommendation is to use a 1 char field. What goes into that? Well, who knows? "Y/N" ? "y/n"? "O/N" if you're french? "1/0"?

In many shops, the result is supposedly boolean fields that contain 3, 5, even 7 different values. Yikes.

Show threadjz.tuskJan 27

@lemgandi @garius

Fuck Oracle and all, but if they don't know how to put a constraint on a column I gotta wonder if there was ever any hope.....

Show threadlemgandiJan 27

@jztusk @garius

Nope, not for a lot of places. And yeh, that's the band-aid. But still, every DBA is going to have a DIFFERENT CONSTRAINT. Y/N, y/n, 0/1, 1/-1, 1/0, O/N.

I think there's even a mid-eastern language out there where "No" begins with a Y ...

Show threadlemgandiJan 28

@jztusk @garius

And then of course Gary, who quit 5 years ago, favors +/-. But the new guy uses y/n. So now the unlucky developers get to juggle 4 different mutually incompatible values for a Boolean.

Use 'y' instead of '+'? Oops, that's a bug that takes 4 hours to find.

Show threadckJan 26
@garius the LOLest moment of the last few years on LinkedIn was explaining to an Oracle sales rep how fucking shit the company was and their historical context for being assholes and him thanking me for the details that weren't clear to him and made his last year of conversations make a lot more sense
Show threadRonald AbadiJan 27

I disliked it when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. I disliked it when Oracle acquired MySQL. I disliked the dispute over Android and Java.

But, unpopular opinion here, over the years I have kind of really got used to the Oracle database, so yeah, a dilemma for me.

Show threadJos noemt het gewoon melkJan 27
@rabadi I came here to think this and not dare saying it out loud.
Show threadEdJan 27
@garius #facts
Show threadShertsonJan 27

@garius

A product my employer used for a decade was bought out by oracle through another acquisition. Luckily the product was already sunset and there was only a six month overlap between EOL and the acquisition. Two years later we are still fighting bills incurred after EOL date. Sales order vs opportunities something or other. Trying to explain to CFO how Oracle is a money machine not a tech company made me sound like a crazy person. I think he is starting to get it now.

Show threadEndlessMasonJan 27
@garius
Something to talk about in the holidays
Show threadOwl EyesJan 27
@garius See? Once in a loooong while, the laws of Kamma actually work in some discernible way.
Show threadFaraiweJan 27
@garius 💯
Show threadRa (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩Jan 27
@garius oracle is the primary reason I'm on Solaris 10 1/13 with the 2021-10 p[atch, not the 2026-01 patchset. bastards
Show threadMaho 🦝🍻Jan 27
@garius wait, what happened
Show threadKagan MacTane (he/him)Jan 27

@mapache @garius That's what I came here trying to find out, too! From reading through, it looks like it's just that Oracle bought TikTok, I guess? (And so I guess it's really that the younger generation is*about to* discover, etc., etc., not that they're doing so yet?)

I'd be happy to get more information, if there is any.

Show threadJohn BullJan 29
@kagan @mapache yes. The TikTok purchase.
Show threadPixelcats⁷Jan 27
@garius This.
Show threadKevin ArchieJan 27
@garius 35 years here. The reasons have varied over the years but it’s been well over half my life of fuck those guys
Show threadziviJan 27
@garius oh tell me more. what’s going on in that hole??
Show threadEllyseJan 27
@garius god i remember installing oracle from scratch and asking myself why does it have to be so hard ? i just wanted a dev database. now i just use sqlite for all dev work. funny because i also used illustra which sort of became the postgres. that thing used to crash all the time .
Show threadDavid Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Jan 27

@garius

Aside from the solarcide, I didn’t really have much ire towards Oracle. They were awful towards their customers but their products were so expensive that anyone who was an Oracle customer could have easily afforded to not be an Oracle customer. In contrast, a load of other big tech companies were abusive to people who weren’t their customers, or to people who were their customers only because they had no other choice.

Show threadfuzzyfuzzyfungusJan 30
@david_chisnall @garius It's not the core of why admins hate them; they've been in adtech for at least a decade now; which is right at the eye of hurting people who aren't your customers.
Show threadShirley EugestJan 27
@garius
I wonder when they will figure out that Bill Gates is horrible, not because he met Epstein, but because he built Microsoft on his theft of other people's intellectual property.
Show threadPhil GreerJan 27

@garius

I miss Sun Microsystems...

Show threadwojtekJan 27
@garius well… at least they are doing kinda great job as a #Java steward :)
Show threadblubJan 27
@garius As no DBA (and maybe to young?) I always asked myself if there was ever a usecase for prperitary DBMS products? I saw it AS strict requirement for 3rd party Software, but for what? Thinking of PostgreSQL (and other free DBs) it offers clustering, scripting, extensions like GIS, ...
So what was the point? 
Show threadJulia ClementFeb 1

@blub @garius Many years ago there was a use case for picking DB2, Oracle, etc. There either were no free RDBMS systems or the ones that existed weren't yet advanced / stable enough. It's hard to see a good use case today.

1968 or 69, Cincom released TOTAL(*), a network database.
1979: Oracle 2.3 First commercially available SQL RDBMS
1981: IBM SQL/DS(*) released
1983: IBM DB2(*) gains SQL
1983: Oracle 3.1.3 rewritten in C & ported to UNIX
1993 MS SQL Server, a rebadged Sybase, released for NT
1994: Postgres95, first version of Postgres with SQL replacing POSTQUEL
1995 May the first version of mySQL released "For personal use" whatever that means.
1995 September PostgreSQL relicenced under a FOSS licence.
2000 SQLite 1.0 released.
2001 SQLite 2.0 had transactions

(*)=For IBM mainframes.
There were other database systems available for other mainframes.

Show threadDFX4509B (Joshua Mason)Jan 30

@garius Oracle has always been terrible even before the current controversies; see what they did to OpenSolaris for an example, bastards killed a project that was only a year old at the time.

Granted OpenSolaris is lived on by Illumos/OpenIndiana, which is both a hard fork of and a spiritual successor to OpenSolaris, but still, Oracle killed an infant project when they bought out Sun; that's horrible no matter how you slice it.

OpenSolaris didn't even get to graduate from its proverbial crawling stage ffs.

Show threadKilla KoalaJan 30
@garius @Cdespinosa Oracle have the unique ability to make their enemies seem honorable, and we've developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Oracle all their lives. My mother hates Oracle, my son hates Oracle, I hate Oracle, and this hatred has brought us together.
— With apologies to Hunter S. Thompson