As an older tech person, it's legit heartwarming watching the TikTok generation discover why we all hate Oracle.
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I disliked it when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. I disliked it when Oracle acquired MySQL. I disliked the dispute over Android and Java.
But, unpopular opinion here, over the years I have kind of really got used to the Oracle database, so yeah, a dilemma for me.
@garius And I will never grow tired of Oxide and Friends live stream on Discord doing the occasional dunk on the master yachter, hisself. Every time they dunk on Larry, an angel gets its wings.
@garius the LOLest moment of the last few years on LinkedIn was explaining to an Oracle sales rep how fucking shit the company was and their historical context for being assholes and him thanking me for the details that weren't clear to him and made his last year of conversations make a lot more sense
@garius And their flagship database is an enormous pile of Crap. Many people feed their families by knowing its quirks and difficulties, but I'd rather be productive.
To give you just one example: Oracle SQL HAS NO BOOLEAN DATA TYPE. The official recommendation is to use a 1 char field. What goes into that? Well, who knows? "Y/N" ? "y/n"? "O/N" if you're french? "1/0"?
In many shops, the result is supposedly boolean fields that contain 3, 5, even 7 different values. Yikes.
@garius it might be time to go back and rewatch Brian Cantrill's "don't anthropomorphise Larry Ellison" talk
@garius I was studying for my SQL exams (Oranje DBA) on 9/11. Correlation does not mean causation, but...
@garius Everyone in the IT industry has at least one Oracle story. Mine is that Sun Microsystems won an intranet contract with us using their Portal and app-server. Right after this Oracle bought them and killed both products. The Sun rep recommended we switch to Liferay (which also supported Java portlets) but that did not scale at all… Some of the other Sun products escaped into Forgerock (OpenIDM, OpenAM and OpenDS) luckily.
@garius it’s like 1999 all over again
@garius I have been involved in supporting oracle systems since 7, and wow. They really are the blueprint for awful nepo-systems.
* Started out of a CIA/Govt project
* Nurtured on endless Govt funds
* Insanely overcomplicated
* Never got better
* Fabulously wealthy and insanely nuts mgmt
I mean, Oracle walked so that stuff like X could run, I guess.
@garius The technology changes. The Oracle experience remains timeless.
@garius Every once in a while, an Oracle-related salesperson emails me asking to schedule a meeting, usually to pitch me something from a subsidiary. I reply:
"I know better than to become an Oracle customer."
The older salespeople just silently remove me from their list, but I've also had younger salespeople ask me to explain. I always do. Each time I've genuinely been the first person who's explained why someone might specifically wish to _not_ have a business relationship with Oracle.
@garius some traditions should be kept
