@garius @Cdespinosa Oracle have the unique ability to make their enemies seem honorable, and we've developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Oracle all their lives. My mother hates Oracle, my son hates Oracle, I hate Oracle, and this hatred has brought us together.
— With apologies to Hunter S. Thompson

@garius As no DBA (and maybe to young?) I always asked myself if there was ever a usecase for prperitary DBMS products? I saw it AS strict requirement for 3rd party Software, but for what? Thinking of PostgreSQL (and other free DBs) it offers clustering, scripting, extensions like GIS, ...
So what was the point?

@garius well… at least they are doing kinda great job as a #Java steward :)

@garius

I miss Sun Microsystems...

@garius
I wonder when they will figure out that Bill Gates is horrible, not because he met Epstein, but because he built Microsoft on his theft of other people's intellectual property.

@garius

Aside from the solarcide, I didn’t really have much ire towards Oracle. They were awful towards their customers but their products were so expensive that anyone who was an Oracle customer could have easily afforded to not be an Oracle customer. In contrast, a load of other big tech companies were abusive to people who weren’t their customers, or to people who were their customers only because they had no other choice.

@garius 35 years here. The reasons have varied over the years but it’s been well over half my life of fuck those guys

@garius This.

@garius I had my fair share of rants in my youth that I am a tad embarrassed about, but I will never be embarrassed for any poorly articulated rants I have ever had about Oracle.

@garius wait, what happened

@garius oracle is the primary reason I'm on Solaris 10 1/13 with the 2021-10 p[atch, not the 2026-01 patchset. bastards

@garius
Lawsuite Larry has many enemies.

@garius See? Once in a loooong while, the laws of Kamma actually work in some discernible way.

@garius

A product my employer used for a decade was bought out by oracle through another acquisition. Luckily the product was already sunset and there was only a six month overlap between EOL and the acquisition. Two years later we are still fighting bills incurred after EOL date. Sales order vs opportunities something or other. Trying to explain to CFO how Oracle is a money machine not a tech company made me sound like a crazy person. I think he is starting to get it now.

@garius #facts

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

I fled the country 23 years ago to escape my role as an Oracle DBA.

Never again.

@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 @piepants Oracle is old evil. None of this new evil.

(Play on old/new money.)

@garius some traditions should be kept

@garius That reason why? One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

@garius Ellison, the Midas of shit.

@garius Just got an all-staff email at the university: no new transactions (expenses, purchases, etc.) for a month while they set up some new Oracle thing. I sent them a message of condolence.

@garius the more things change the more they stay hating oracle