Oracle UK's profits have more than halved Oracle's vital statistics in the UK have moved in the wrong direction – at least from Big Red's perspective – with sales and profits slumping in the year ended 31 May 2017, accounts filed at Companies House this week reveal. According to the accounts (PDF), revenues fell by 8 per cent year-on-year to £788.1m. This was "due to …
Yeah, sounds like an ideologically compromised DBA that shouldn't be allowed to participate in recruitment and probably needs some training in basic soft skills.
I'd rather have a good DBA than a twat, even if they do have experience with Oracle. Shit, especially if they have experience with Oracle - hate the company all you like, but they do have some very nice technology.
... and charging through the nose while you're offering 1st class software with little to no competition. Sadly for Oracle those days are past. Their RDBMS is still good, but the rest of their tools are garbage and their "treat the customer as a gullible cash cow" company attitude is stuck in the 90s. Maybe they'll get a clue before they completely tank but knowing Ellisons arrogance I won't hold my breath.
I'd blame this on Hurd'n Catz, tbh. Hurd has followed his HP "cut everything now so next quarter looks great and we're fucked in 3 years" approach, and Catz appears to have no qualities that balance out Hurd's obsessive short-termism. Plus, they're pissing most of the budget into Oracle's dire cloud offering, not recognizing that they're half a decade behind the competition and no longer capable of scaling to be anything more than a bit player.
They are to databases what Blackberry were to mobiles. Sure, they worked hard to cement their position early on, and for a while seemed unassailable, but this arrogance caused them to stop innovating whilst the competition were closing in fast behind them. Now they've been overtaken, and despite a few years of comedy watching them scramble to try to keep up, know the game is over
Most java users hated Orrible before they needlessly shat all over them, so they can't even blame that for the bad sentiment towards them.
As others have pointed out, there are far better solutions around now, using any measure, and their problem, like IBM etc, is everybody damn well knows it.
IIRC, the UK govt used to spend over a billion with Oracle annually. I would have thought that the days of "We need a RDBMS for these 5000 records....let's give Oracle a ring" have been slowly and surely disappearing since the crash ~10 yrs ago.
Of course, after picking up Sun's corpse, they would have sold you a wildly expensive Sparc box to go along with their softs.
Now, Solaris is on life support and will die in a few years; shortly followed by any kind of investment in Sparc.
What are you then left with? A database and associated tools that has already been largely replaced by postgresql, mariaDB etc. along with a second-rate cloud offering.
Larry, hang on a bit before buying your next megayacht....I think your company is circling the drain.
"A database and associated tools that has already been largely replaced by postgresql, mariaDB etc"
NoSQL DBs like mariaDB and mongo will only ever be niche. Most business data is structured in a relational way and to store and process that effectively you need a relational DB. NoSQL is great for document storage and lightning fast key-value searches but in my experience using Mongo its an utter PITA to do any significantly complex relational processing on - and in some instances simply not possible and it has to be done outside the DB in the application which harks back to the pain of processing flat file DB data in the 1970s. Ironically that painful process is what gave momentum to relational DBs in the first place. Hardly a step forward into a bright future.
@boltar - Postgresql, MariaDB, and Percona as well as many others are relational databases not NoSQL. The previous comment was about replacing Leisure Suit Larry with another relational database rather than with a NoSQL database. The replacement, while not trivial, is fairly straightforward as the tables often can be replicated with minimal fuss. What will be a pain is converting the queries, views, etc from one SQL dialect to another; doable but no one's idea of a fun project.
My observation about database types is relational generally will work with most data sets at least tolerably well and they are well understood. NoSQL, however, are either the ideal solution to the problem or a real dog and often properly setting them up for optimum performance is not well understood particularly if one tries to use relational modelling on them.
@a_yank_lurker - you're bang on. A whole pile of folks jumped on to NoSQL largely because reading Ted Codd and getting to grips with database design, normalisation, indexes or even SQL etc. that is required in designing and running a relational database was just a bit too much like hard work.
So they jumped onto Mongo and all the rest of them. Of course, it's all ended in tears and a fairly brutal lesson in why you have got to know your Codd before you implement anything that resembles a database even if it's not relational.
@woodcruft - One point many fail to realize about NoSQL databases is they are not schemaless rather they have a more flexible schema. One still needs to design a proper schema suitable for the data set, project, and nature of the db. Also, relational databases are fully ACID while NoSQL dbs often are not. If ACID is critical to your project (and it often is) you must use an ACID db which will most likely be a relational db.
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