Comments on: Why Oracle will continue to win

Oracle has positioned itself to remain the dominant force in enterprise database and application sales. It's as simple as selling more, more of the time.

[cvaldes1831]

From a customer standpoint, here's some of the conversation that probably takes place.

"I need software that runs my company. Who is number one?" Oracle
"What machines do they qual their software on first?" Sun boxes with Solaris
"Okay, I'll take the Oracle RDBMS on a Solaris machine. When can you have this running?"

From a customer perspective, Oracle's acquisition streamlines the tech support since if there's a problem, the Sun support engineer can't point a finger and say, "That's not our problem, that's an Oracle bug" and vice versa. You have one phone number in your Rolodex (not two). You pick up the phone and say "make it work."

[daverosenberg]

Oracle makes it easy to have one throat to choke---even if the rest of the body is taking big money out of your pocket

[cvaldes1831]

Yeah, they say that Oracle's pricing model is grabbing you by the ankles and shaking you upside down; they put you back down when the money stops falling out of your pockets.

Amusingly, Dr. Eric Schmidt bragged that Google got the "world's cheapest Oracle installation." It was when the company was still a startup and he had to convince a lot of people that it was worth it to go for the big iron. While Google is relatively open-source friendly, my guess is that they are still running Oracle on Solaris.

[abcd9009]

@cvaldes1831

Google doesn't use Oracle because neither Oracle nor DB2 and certainly not SQL Server can handle the amount of query requests Google receives every millisecond. Google uses it's own proprietary Google File System (GFS) to handle the queries/user requests. In case you need more details on it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System

[cvaldes1831]

@abcd9009:

Sorry, but I think you are confused. Google uses Oracle for its back-office functions. As you mention, Google uses its own home-grown DBS for its search functions.

[DBConsultant]

Popularity doesn't make it better.
I've been doing DB work since before the relational era, and used all of the RDBMSs since.
I can easily name 3-databases RDBMSs right now that are easier to use, require significant less computer hardware and get added performance and would be a better ROI for any company.
BUT...all that said, companies will still go with "popularity" over functionality.
And, the argument that "they own all the apps" is totally ridiculous. Every system, unless it was owned by Oracle anyhow, has plugs for all popular DB systems, so I don't see how that statement can even be taken seriously.

[cvaldes1831]

IT managers are extremely conservative people. No one gets fired for picking Oracle. If Oracle on Solaris isn't running correctly, you can point the finger elsewhere.

If you pick PostgreSQL running on FreeBSD and it doesn't work, you roll up your sleeves while you enjoy the hot breath on your collar.

The world would be a better place if a few more IT managers took risks, but they're cowards -- and perhaps justifiably so. The older ones have been burned too many times to be adventurous. Or maybe they have families and don't want to be debugging RDBMSes at 2am on a Sunday. A lot of it has to do with the peace of mind.

The Google story is funny since if they decided to install Oracle today, they probably would pay ten times their original amount.

Unless things have drastically changed recently, Oracle buying cycles are pretty drawn out. Much of the revenue they're posting now are probably IT purchase decisions made 12-18 months ago. I would expect to see a dramatic drop in Oracle revenue maybe at the end of this year, reflecting last year's economic contraction.

[supoman]

As an Oracle DBA I both agree and disagree. Sure there are other RDBMS that work just as well as Oracle but I think it's the management tools that separate Oracle from the pack. When you get called at 4:00am and you have to restore
a table or an entire database. You don't want to have to go through a 40 step process. The simplicity of restore database, recover database, recover datafile, flashback table helps me sleep a little easier at night.

[DBConsultant]

There is no RDBMS that I have used that didn't have all the necessary tools to backup/recover a database. All of them are easy, if you have familiarity with them and you've done it a few times.

As for the management tools, it's totally true: oracle does supply quite a number of them. But so does a host of third party vendors and they do it because they feel that the tools oracle supplies are inferior. I know since I used to work for 2-of those vendors. If the oracle management tools were so great, then the third party vendors wouldn't need to exist.

[BradfordStephens]

I think the author may be missing something here. Oracle will continue to grow in certain spaces, probably with RDBMSs, but I think they'll keep losing overall market share. People use the RDBMS as a "Swiss Army Knife" already, treating it as a hodge-podge of key-value store, analytical package, and transactional engine.

In my latest post at http://www.roadtofailure.com , I argue that the end of the Swiss-Army RDBMS is coming -- projects like Hadoop, HBase, and BigTable are going to find a very valuable niche with people who need to scale their data, but don't need everything that SQL can provide. I encourage you to check it out :)