On Tuesday 11. August 2015 14.27.16 David Gerard wrote:
It's apparently 404ing for at least some people. Archive copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150811052336/https://blogs.oracle.com/maryannd...
Great stuff: damage limitation in action; damage already done!
On 11 August 2015 at 10:51, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This is an ... amazing piece. This Oracle executive (read: someone who is high up enough that their words won't be edited) seriously thought this made Oracle look competent and trustworthy:
https://blogs.oracle.com/maryanndavidson/entry/those_who_can_t_do
It's one of the finest marketing posts for Postgres, and for free software in general, that I can recall this year. It really makes the point, and I suggest circulating it widely.
It certainly is one of the finest marketing posts for Free Software: the proprietary vendor keeping its customers powerless and even threatening them with lawsuits for doing things on their own computers.
It doesn't help that this comes from someone at the company who brought you scott/tiger and a variety of unsecured services well into the modern Internet age.
(My day job is in the midst of an Oracle->Postgres migration. It's going *really well*. If you're stuck somewhere that's on Oracle, show them this post, explain the serious security and competence concerns it raises, and get moving to Postgres. One of the nicest things about it: we give every app its own cluster of two PG boxes, because you have the freedom to just do that instead of running a centralised monster box with an expensive license. It turns out that just everything not having to play nice with others makes stuff stupendously easier to manage. And that's entirely before the benefits of approachable developers and viewable code.)
It saddens me that even today people talk about how many licences they have acquired and the exciting things that they intend to do with them - maybe set up a virtual machine or two! - when all that per-machine, per-CPU, per- whatever licensing are just the strings on the puppet, where the puppet is the customer who gladly dances to the vendor's tune.
(And I agree with you about PostgreSQL. I've done reasonably big data and it did the job just fine. I've used Oracle in the thankfully increasingly distant past, and all the time it was "don't hit the database" which even in read-only form could not somehow be replicated (probably because of the licence fee situation) and where the database administrator could frequently be heard cursing Oracle and smashing his keyboard against his desk. I've worked on a project where Oracle offered something but where the local representative admitted that you wouldn't want to build a product on that feature because it could easily go away (which I believe it did), and on another where the success of that project was predicated on some feature that may still exist today, but where the project struggled to make it work (perhaps because it didn't throw enough hardware at the problem, as Oracle seems to demand). Oracle should be to database systems what Sun was to hardware once the dot-com bubble burst and people realised that the equipment they needed to buy didn't have to be an expensive aspirational statement about what their enterprise was supposedly going to achieve.)
Paul