We should really be more thankful for the existence of PostgreSQL

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

SQL Server started as a source fork of Sybase.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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,...

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

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.

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.

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...

Hey Oogali! Long time. :)

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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

> Clojure

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

> 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.

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

So you actually know a lot of Android developers.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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?

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

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.

> 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.

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...

Well, that clinches it.

you could post the citations?

[dead]

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

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

In the US there is no notice period. In every state (with the exception of Montana), employees are "At Will" only. There is no notice period, or severance pay required by law. Health insurance goes with your job, too, as do any other benefits (something called COBRA lets you pay to continue your health insurance coverage for a few months with the expectation you'll have found a new job and/or coverage)

In the US, one day you can have a job, the next none and you'd better hope you've got enough money saved up to cover rent/mortgage, food etc.

That was by far the biggest culture shock when I moved to the states, and really acted as the big "Oh shit, it really is a government by the businesses, for the businesses".

I have to be honest that I'm confused by the comment, too. Including the edit about how being out of work would be traumatic, as if losing a job was unique to the United States.

> After careful consideration of Oracle’s current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change.

That is being laid off, not being fired - big difference. Being fired means being let go for poor performance / bad behaviour. No severance or grace period is necessary there (will be written in the contract). Being made redundant, particularly a redundancy of this size is quite well protected in EU. Typically negotiations between HR and representatives of the laid off group are required, you will continue to work (officially at least) until negotiations are over, as you are not officially out yet. This usually takes a few weeks.

I can tell you this from personal experience...

No they don't? You keep working for 2-10 months until you can leave whatever your contact says

The way this email is worded this would more likely be classified as a Redundancy as opposed to a Firing. So different laws/rules would apply

Both California and federal law require 60 days notice for mass layoffs. The CA WARN Act has more protections for workers than the federal WARN Act, i.e., it also applies to part-time workers.

In California, it is illegal to require a terminated employee to sign an NDA to receive severance paid to waive the required WARN notice. A company attempting to enforce such an NDA would key face judicial sanction in court (including paying the former employee's legal fees) and likely pay fines to the CA Labor Dept as well.

The California WARN act effectively requires 2 months severance for large layoffs at large companies (or 2 months notice, but companies almost always prefer severance).

Yeah, the "just how it is" part was the part I wasn't aware of. Sibling comment has pointed out that apparently the US is the only country in the world where this is the case. And totally agree on the latter point.

250k/year. I'm not an arch. But that was the absolute high end for IC5. (Unobtainable)

Oracle is not a high payer of salaries.

I disagree that its a "signal that they overhired". Laying off people means:

1. They didn't plan well enough

2. Their business wasn't attractive enough to customers

3. Their business people aren't good enough to support the people who are developing their product.

If anything, it should be a red flag to investors that they're working with someone they can't trust to give money.

Not employees are hired though, a fair amount are added through acquisitions. Reducing staff could be just streamlining redundancies . Not the case here [1], but it not always bad planning.

Even without acquisitions, business conditions can change rapidly things like tariffs, interest rates , war or competition due to newer tools etc , as an investor you can would want leadership to move fast and course correct, rather than be held by the sunk cost fallacy.

All else being equal, the way investors would see a change like this - is now the company is no longer wasting 7.5B/yr in the future and their current cost was already priced in.

However all else is rarely the same, there could be other factors, like slowing sales growth projections which can bring down the multiples .

Oracle is still trading at 28x P/E historically they typically traded at 15x, given the growth and risk profile a more realistic number .

Since 2022 (ignoring 2020 spikes) the number has been going up are basis the expectation that their cloud business will really benefit from AI significantly.

If the market no longer has the confidence —- it has already cooled a bit since October then stock will keep dropping, layoffs will only slow it down a bit .

The timing is critical, because leverage/sale of Oracle stock is how the Warner Bros Discover acquisition is being funded .

The increasing doubts about that financial viability is why that stock risk premium is increasing on Warner .- Currently trading at 27 although acquisition price is 31 and it was trading at 29 a month back . Also senior executives like Zaslav are selling now at 27 which they less likely to if they believed deal will close at 31 soon.

TLDR; this 30k layoff is an attempt to strengthen/save the other acquisition Oracle is indirectly financing.

[1] although the Cerner acquisition added 30k employees to Oracle 3 years back. This doesn’t seem related to that. Oracle did not have a strong overlapping BU, there were/are some redundancies as in any acquisition but certainly not 30k

I did not know they got severance. In any case, I'm still not sure I'd prefer that scenario --- coming into your work to suddenly find you've been terminated and subsequently sitting on your ass for a couple months while looking for another job seems pretty emotionally damaging to me, but to each their own.

I completely agree, and apparently in California this is already the case --- I had no idea. In most contexts, though, I'd argue governments fall down on this task completely and people are, unfortunately, still very dependent on their employer. Same-day termination seems very socially risky in those cases.

The US government doesn't exactly go out of its way to support people either.

>I have no idea how they could have been so bad while employing so many people

There is a significant correlation between how many people you employ and how much nothing you accomplish. It means you've gotten big enough to survive long bouts of doing something and achieving nothing with large amounts of people.

The Oracle codebase is legendarily gnarly. Doing even small things takes forever and a mountain of work.

> What on earth were those 30k people doing?!

Could be lawyers.

Would we be sad if they were lawyers?

It's been cut in half year-to-date. It's about where it was a full year ago right now.

The graph in your Macrotrends link shows the exact same numbers as the AI source, but is harder to read and the page is half ads. It's not an authoritative source -- the data was most likely parsed out of Oracle's earning reports by some janky regexp. I don’t know why you would trust this more than AI.

I verified it before and generated the graph with gemini for c&p it into hn

Or a pickup from 2015 - 2021 which was 0% growth.

It's tricky to pick an end-of-decade year also - recessions tend to happen +/- 2 years of the end of each decade in the USA, or at least have done since records began in the 19th century. For example 2010 was recovery over 2008/2009's bust. It's not like comparing March to Ma4ch for a crude seasonal adjustment.

You did the Python right but the analysis wrong. Looking at it on a graph you can see that interpreting a single growth rate for the entire period (even if you stop pre-covid) doesn’t make sense.

You can see linear growth from 2010-2017. Then slow decline or at best a flatline from 2018-2021. Then they went crazy in 2022-2025.

Now if we just do 162k - 30k we are back to 132k, basically same ballpark as pre-COVID.

Cool to be part of history I used to go into that office Innovations campus

Saw someone had a license plate say MPAGES ha

1. They maintain and sell one of the largest relational databases.

2. They're the primary maintainer of one of the largest programming languages.

3. They do tons of HR/ERP type software.

4. They have a supply chain division (my company is a direct competitor, and we have 2000 employees--it's a drop in the bucket, but a few thousand here, a few thousand there and it starts to add up. Afaik, their supply chain org is bigger than ours).

5. Other things I probably don't know about.

Many of these things come with swarms of consultants who implement the software for companies that don't have any internal technical competency, which swells the number of workers by a lot.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not remotely a fan, I like to quote Bryan Cantrill's rant. However, they do a lot of things.

I remember reading this post years ago, and it has stuck in my brain ever since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x

Unless you have worked with Oracle or other big enterprises, you may not realize the scale of how these companies operate and the breadth of what they actually do. Just by looking at their product page[0] you can see they offer software, hardware, cloud, consulting, support, and even financing solutions. In addition to the technology and product people (of which there are many), you also need HR, sales, marketing, accounting, support, etc for the entire global organization.

Sure, 100,000 people is a lot, but Oracle also does a lot.

[0] https://www.oracle.com/products/

Oracle sells alot of software that is accompanied by hordes of consultants to set it up.

Last F50 I was at did a PeopleSoft migration. We probably had 400 Oracle employees pass through the doors over 2 years helping to get it off the ground.

Most Enterprises don't just buy software and that's it. They buy software + support to implement it for their business.

Almost certainly a large amount of support staff, so management/HR/IT etc... Then you've got your customer account managers, sales, lawyers/finance etc.... Given they do an insane amount of B2B and government sales I can see this being easy to reach tbh. Governement contract processes require an insane amount of bureacracy and negotations.

I’m guessing development is so slow that they have stacks of teams working in parallel to accomplish what 1 team could normally.