Short answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition.

A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain features like online backups and certain replication configurations.

At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case.

Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues.

[1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.

> Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle

Oracle buys smaller enterprise companies with rich customers that were already using Oracle DB, or makes them rely on it, then cashes in on licensing.

So for example, they bought Micros (most EFTPOS terminals in the world are powered by them, I think), they bought Cerner (big supplier of IT to healthcare companies), they bought PeopleSoft. If your big company isn't using SAP, it's probably using that. Mundane but essential things for large businesses: CRM, ERP, payroll/HR.

So that's what you'd use Oracle for. Or perhaps you wouldn't use Oracle, then Oracle would buy your IT supplier and either you have to change your IT supplier (costing you millions) or congrats you're an Oracle customer now.

Oracle and Java are deeply embedded in US gov work. How deep? Let's just say a large number of classified developer jobs hire for Java. Ellison has been a huge proponent of a surveillance state, and that likely ingratiates him with certain three letter agencies.

The only developers I know who write Java full time work in systems that take pictures of things from far away.

This feels correct. Their business model is squeezing anyone who can't migrate off their properties and suing the rest.

Why would go $58B in debt to support a new feature that no one will want after alienating everyone above?

The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful.

But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in North America. Their database product is very far from their only LOB.

There's more to it than just pure databases. They have a pretty large vertical of SaaS apps, specifically ERP. Oracle Saas (their ERP platform) is used by thousands of customers - these are systems implemented with SI's and run super critical functions like payroll, manufacturing, etc really hard to rip out once they're put in place. This has been fueling their growth for some time, and seems like OCI is picking up now from a pure infra POV. But yeah I don't think I'd ever use any Oracle components voluntarily or at the very least find ways to have exit paths

I actually sat through an Oracle sales presentation around 1999 (I was the product engineer, along with company executives) and honestly it sounded pretty good. At the time we were using Lotus Notes for a database so even pencil and paper would have been better. Oracle absolutely was the market leader and there was no doubt about its technical chops. Oracle Parallel Server could run active-active across two sites separated by many miles of fibre, which was a remarkable thing to do back then.

Oracle came back with a quote that was so far outside what our company could afford that we went with Informix (not a cheap database). Pretty lucky escape.

A year or two later I ported the whole stack to PostgreSQL and it worked absolutely fine since we didn't have that much scale. Unfortunately when I left the guy who took over was a huge Informix fan so he deleted all the PG code and went back.

>Enlighten me on what I would use Oracle for

You would use it to keep your job when your company goes with it against all technical recommendation due to the push of a higher up that wouldn't let the idea go for stupid or suspicious reasons.

I think the big use case for Oracle products are for businesses that are not in the IT space. A lot of reasons for this, a big one is the breadth of Oracle's products is very solid and, similar to Microsoft, you can be sold on Oracle solving all your database needs across your business: HR, asset management, customer relationship stuff, your actual business, all with a single vendor. Non-IT management will be told that it all integrates seamlessly, you don't need to hire IT staff dealing with software from 10 different vendors, just the one.

For instance, I work in the utility industry. They offer specialized utility-specific software for managing data from our meters, our customer and billing system, asset management, HR, accounting, reporting from all these systems. Even more specialized stuff exists that we don'tbuy. No doubt if you had a different use case, Oracle would sell us on their ability to handle it. I think this is the model they follow. They are not trying to sell to startups, tech platforms, software companies, etc. They are trying to sell to your bank.

I didn't save the tweet I saw it in but I saved the joke - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."

Every company I've worked for has avoided Oracle software of any kind.

My hunch is that big consulting firms like CGI might use it, and therefore the customers of those firms use it? But I haven't worked at any of those.

They sell to cash-rich organisations who are a bit clueless about technology and so can't or wouldn't want to either roll their own, or go with a better but smaller provider?

e.g. I was unsurprised when I spotted that Novartis (no connection, btw) was deep in with Oracle. Big pharma, lots of money, typically-clueless-big-org-IT-leadership, etc.

(LOL, Novartis also uses SAP.)

Java is used a lot, but not Oracle's version.

One of the best things Sun ever did was open sourcing Java.

Their revenue was $57.4 billion last year. Just in Q4; cloud revenue $6.7 billion, cloud infrastructure $3.0 billion, cloud application $3.7 billion, Fusion Cloud ERP $1.0 billion, NetSuite cloud ERP $1.0 billion.

Oracle database has unparalleled scalability. Ask someone who works at Microsoft SQL Server division what their bug database looks like. They will tell you that a single SQL Server instance cannot scale to the entire SQL Server division. Oracle on the other hand has a single database for the entire company. No other database is this scalable.

But Oracle is not just a database company. Oracle started as a database company, but today they are more an applications company than a database company. They have ERP back-office applications (finance, operations, HR), and CRM front-office applications (sales, marketing, service). Oracle bought a large number of applications software companies such as Seibel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, NetSuite and Cerner to become this big.

Of course Oracle is also a major cloud services provider and provide AI superclusters, and GPU instances from NVIDIA and AMD (context for today's layoffs).

They acquired a lot of applications - ERP, CRM, finance - I suspect actual database licensing revenues are only a small part of their revenues these days.

Years ago I had some fun integrating with Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) - which is actually a pretty impressive beast if you need consolidated financial reporting!

Oracle the company has not been about Oracle the DB server for 20+ years.

Oracle the company specializes in acquiring software, integrating it in their ecosystem, selling the installations, and living off the recurring licensing fees (NetSuite is one example).

It's exactly as you said. The dependency on old school legacy implementations that can't be turned off. To be fair to Microslop even they had the foresight to open source .net core and even try to bring some things to the open source community. Oracle actively turned into a patent troll.

Oracle is used for mission-critical legacy applications, which is common in the federal government IT space. Replacing with OSS is a nontrivial undertaking, but it is happening. For the most part, replacing Oracle’s Java with OpenJDK is relatively painless, but some agencies preferred the licensed version because it includes support. Replacing a database, however, is a much scarier task, even when you have experienced and competent DBAs.

They make a lot of money off of the cloud services and their layered "enterprise" applications. Selling "just the database" isn't what Oracle's been about for a very long time.

I just read a tech "policy" document of one of the largest packaged food makers in Mexico. They explicitly say they ONLY use paid services/software to ensure there is liability and support.

There are A Lot of businesses thar are happy to burn cash for a false sense of security. They don't know better.

Oracle run a huge % of the worlds POS devices.

Cool stuff like distributed transactions, the database as OS with raw disks, the database as application platform with APEX.

Then again, I guess I am one of those folks that enjoys cool toys, that only big corporations pay for.

Support, that's what you'd use them for. Something breaks and your team can't figure it out? You make a phone call and someone will be there in a jiffy to work things out. And if he can't either they'll fly a whole team from a different city or even a different country until they solve it.

Totally agreed looking at them from a development and cutting-edge viewpoint. They own what was once very competitive platforms and languages, which they still support. They have largely transitioned into rent seekers.

From the investment standpoint they still have a lot of value to siphon from, but its all rent seeking behavior, its not producing new ecosystems like them or Sun did in the past. Long-term blue chip play.

Though all the Paramount stuff is loosely coupled to them now, so tough to say if its a good long-term play anymore.

They do own some vertically integrated products like PeopleSoft that use these lower level foundational pieces. But I agree, I don't know why anyone in their right mind would use Oracle outside of golf and sailing bribes.

Also, their inability to make a NewSQL DB rivaling Spanner or Cockroach (they basically just had to clone one of these or acquire Cockroach) puts them out of any serious competition for the future of databases. Their "Oracle Autonomous DB" ain't it.

You are missing the business model - buy has-been platforms and frameworks and charge big bucks for maintenance. Customers eventually manage to migrate off you, but it is fine cause you buy some other has-been stack and then overcharge for that.

They aren't a database company. They are a full spectrum B2B SaaS contract company. They make far more by up selling services than they do from databases total. Half of their stack will run on whatever db you want.

It's stickiness.

Their biggest asset is ERP. That's how they get orgs locked in, because migrating ERP systems after deployment can take decades of work and cost multitudes more than just eating Oracle's renewal increases. Could orgs jettison them into the sun? Totally. Is it fiscally sensible? Yeah, absolutely. Can you sell that to the board? Nope.

The best way to kill Oracle - because such a toxic organization absolutely deserves to fail - is to avoid building anything atop their infrastructure ever again going forward. Don't use their Java tooling, don't use their software suites, don't use their cloud services.

Just don't use Oracle for anything new, and work to get the fuck off of it for anything that remains.

The only reason Oracle survives is because rich dumb fucks keep giving them money.

I assume you would use Oracle Cloud if, for whatever reason possibly related to legal or competition, you cannot use AWS, or GCP, or Azure. It's hard for me to imagine a startup that needs cloud and would onboard to Oracle Cloud and not to any of the top 3 providers instead.

If you're a massive organization and have need for a mission critical database that cannot fail for any reason, with massive scale and scalability, security, reliability, high availability, high throughput, etc., and you want instant expertise available to solve any DB problems, then you're not using Postgres, a cloud database or rolling your own noSQL solution.

I'm talking about huge, billion dollar institutions like banks, financial services, governments, logistics, manufacturing, software, etc. These are the companies run by the "golf executives" who want guaranteed database dependability and are willing to pay for it.

In this case, you'll use Oracle or IBM DB2.

For example, if you're TikTok dealing with billions of interactions, or Boeing, maintaining critical databases of millions of parts, you'll be totally willing to spend huge amounts of money to make sure your data is rock solid, even if it's overpriced (Apparently, Microsoft is one of Oracle's biggest customers of all companies!)

From small-scale use over the course of several years, I've found their "cloud" (OCI) to be a solid and well-planned product. Additionally, I've experienced not one single outage or hiccup so far (Stockholm region).

If you are buying GPUs today, they really are massively cheaper than other clouds.

Aren't their databases behemoths that satisfy requirements (especially of regulatory nature) of large banks and such? I don't think they have much in common with the needs of your run-of-the-mill startup.

In a world of continuous change, at least we can always rely on oracle being consistently evil.

> From my chair, they make an expensive database they try to sell to golf executives.

This is basically it. You wouldn’t want to use oracle for anything, and they know that. What they also know, very very well, is that they can get their fingers into high-dollar orgs and shmooze people that have little knowledge on the matter to lock themselves into basically never ending contracts for garbage products.

Oracle is a perfect distillation of capitalism in that way.

oracle is deeply embedded in enterprise and a lot of other enterprise solutions also use it. they have no value proposition for startups. likely just on existing clients and ppl who end up using stuff that requires their products.

maybeeee SPARC based Solaris? Probably not a major usecase nowadays (Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for Sun) but it seems to be limping along

yeah... their "value prop" is keeping monoliths trapped and embedded in their systems with customizations out the wazoo. slow, painful death

The answer to your question lies in Oracle 10K.

It's like IBM for legacy business the German Banking System runs all oracle in the backend.

Oracle has made a large bet on being a cloud, but nobody wants their terrible cloud, which is reflected in their dollar-store prices. They staffed up and built facilities that they can't sell so I am not surprised they are now swinging the axe.

i know they're also one of the AI data center providers of this era. Making partnerships with NVIDIA and helping GPUs get to market.

Clearly you are in USA. It’s not how their business works and Startups are not their target. Lobbying governments across the world with questionable practices are

Government contracts. You get good at bidding, there's money to be made there. And those bidding processes are way more than just the tech. That's their main value prop I think. Having the bureaucratic machine to bid and win contracts.

NetSuite

There are alternatives, but NetSuite is the gold standard unless you want to fork over for SAP.

Many organizations are extremely low capacity. I am aware of a company that has merely a few hundred gigabytes of data and is stuck on Oracle.

moat

Well, if you're an elected official, and you're in charge of government organizations that could be used to enrich billionaire donors by using a donor's services - Oracle fits that niche very well!

I have a cousin who owns a business that decided to contract with Oracle, and as he described this my first thought was “why tf would you ever sign an agreement with Oracle, don’t you know about them?”

But as he described the whole dealings (for some SEO product, I’m not sure of the specifics) it became clear to me they bamboozled him, gave him a bait and switch, and left him on the hook for a huge bill he never thought he’d have to pay.

So to answer your question I don’t think there is a value prop, I think it’s actually a giant grift.

Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Mar...

For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirements that his team would have to meticulously follow. In this case, some bigtime POTS operators demanded that all servers must come from Sun, and any databases must be built on Oracle 8i.

One of the applications they were building had to interface with the clients' call data records (or CDRs). The most important use of CDRs is for phone bill calculation, so naturally they were stored in properly designed and indexed tables. The CDRs were stored alongside all billing records, and were frequently accessed by mission-critical internal applications, and they weren't prepared to expose all of that to a third party. So instead, Jason's company would have to construct CDRs on their own from the signaling message flow. Because the CDRs would be processed right away, they wouldn't even need to store them. The tentative architecture called for an Oracle database for CDR pipelining from the front end to the application backend.

When the analysis was being conducted, the team grew concerned with the costs — both in terms of budget and disk I/O. Oracle licenses are incredibly expensive, and there would be a huge volume of CDR data written to and read from the database. Finally, it dawned on someone that the database was completely superfluous since records were processed as they came in. In fact, a single, low-end Sun server with a few hundred megs of RAM could easily handle the CDR generation and application backend.

Excited about their good news, they called up a meeting with the product managers. "We've discovered that we can deliver the product at a fraction of what our original estimates were." The managers left the room, some looking happy, others just looking incredulous.

Later that day, Jason got a call from the VP of Engineering. "Jason, while I understand what you're proposing is technically valid, you have upset the marketing team."

"I'm sorry... did I say something?"

"It's just that they've promised the customer that our product would use Oracle 8i, and now they're going to be made liars. Can you just humor me and add Oracle 8i to the design somewhere?"

"Uh..."

"I have enough trouble politically as it is. I really appreciate this favor!" click

After delivering the news to his team, they argued a bit on what to use Oracle for. Ultimately they delivered the final product with an Oracle database that had a single table which was used to store a handful of configuration parameters.

It was the most expensive individual table Jason had ever created in his entire career.

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Java sucks, it will consume lots of ram. Just write your services in Golang.