Oracle as a religion
Everything written below refers to Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata.
The full moon lit a dusty, winding road, disappearing among the hills ahead. I stood in thought at the beginning of my path, thinking about where this road might lead. Throwing my doubts away, I began my journey to a pyramid seen far away, the summit of which was lost among the clouds. On the way, no one met me, except for the monument, more like a tombstone with the image of a man and the inscription in huge letters “In Codd we trust” . Approaching the pyramid at a fairly close distance, I managed to see that it consists of DB_BLOCK, mostly 8Kb in size, but it was possible to find more. Each block showed the logo of the company that used the block to store its data. Noticing a small crowd near the entrance to the pyramid, I became interested, and decided to find out what it is. Coming very close, the crowd acquired its outlines - for the most part it consisted of students, but business analysts, testers, programmers met, you could even notice a couple of sales managers - they all rushed inside.
Slipping through an inconspicuous gap near the main entrance, I found myself in an amazing place. The vast space was filled with sparkling data, the walls were covered with AWR images and slogans. Some of them were incomprehensible to me, and some are familiar - “Exadata is faster than X 6 times,” “Oracle is faster than Y, 16 times”, “Oracle is FASTER !!!”, “RAC is our everything!”, ”Back up or not back up? - choose your death "," No backup - no luck! "," ASM - the road to the future "," DataGuard - make life easier! ” . The audience inside was somewhat different from the one that was outside. Programmers of all directions and colors, project managers, architects, analysts, consultants, integrators — they all took refuge inside a huge pyramid. Immediately there were evangelicals, saying something indistinctly and quickly, raising their voice and intonation at the word Oracle. Looking around more carefully, I noticed several groups of people who did not have a feverish gleam in their eyes, which they juggled at the word Oracle. This is a group of people in corporate blue shirts with the words Microsoft and a SQL Server sign. They cried in impotent rage, quietly mumbling "We also have the MVCC, it just is not enabled by default." A little further away from them, there were tents with the inscription PostgreSQL - stern guys in black robes, incredulous looking at everything happening around and continuing to do their work. Sorry, Stonebraker left them. Looking further, I saw the flags IBM and DB2 - a group of people in round glasses, completely closed from all other mainframes. They were in some kind of incomprehensible trance, the impression was created that they did not understand what was happening around. In their strange universes, the parallel lines intersected, and the perpendicular had a negative value.
')
Having a little accustomed, I was convinced that the most interesting is in the center of the pyramid, and went there. It was there that the caste of priests called the DBA carried its service. The caste had three levels, according to the degree of blessing from Oracle, and was placed in the appropriate order. At the bottom of the hill, consisting of backups, were novices in red robes with large letters OCA on the back - waving manuals, they memorized cases when it is necessary to use a bitmap index, as well as how nested loop differs from hash join-a. Slightly higher, at the foot, there were adepts in yellow robes with the inscription OCP. They held in their hands scrolls with SQL and RMAN scripts, learning them by heart, and particularly complex and beautiful laid them aside or exchanged them with their neighbors. In the middle of the hill, the priests of OCM in black robes, who had long ago attained the Oracle Tao, sat, wisely nodding their heads, and making backups with the power of thought, and optimizing their performance by laying hands.
A little higher, on an improvised scene, Tom Kite skillfully explained the commandments of Oracle, throwing metalink notes into the crowd with one hand, and blogging on the Internet with the other hand. At the very top of the hill was located the throne, on which sat the sun-like Larry Ellison. In his left hand he held a small copy of Exalytics, in his right Exadata, and he himself sat on the Big Data Appliance. Hundreds of drums pounded loudly, counting out the ever-growing SCN. From time to time, Larry raised one or the other arm, pointing to the mainstream of database development, while crowds of marketers and followers, shouting happily, supported his initiatives.
Looking for wisdom and knowledge, I got to get the coveted yellow overalls and got the privilege to create my scrolls, discuss ORA-00600 and ORA-12704, touch RMAN and Data Guard and much more. I learned the dao relational model, imbibed the principles of ACID, learned the yin of data and the yang of transactions. I rightfully took my place and knew all the offsets in the datablock header-e.
However, over time, the environment around me began to change, until it turned into a nightmare and on a dark night, having abandoned backups and scripts, I rushed out of this temple, without looking back. On the way to the exit, I had time to notice the fox's long-cold corpse, and insane people jumping around it in FoxPro T-shirts. The fox flew up from their jumps, and it seemed as if she was still alive.
Marketing cries, shaking manuals, the sweet promises of HR swept through my back - but I only accelerated my run, the shroud fell from my eyes, and everything turned into a terrible nightmare. When I woke up in a green clearing, I stopped, looked around, and tried to evaluate my previous experience.
Recently, being at the conference, I had a passing acquaintance with colleagues from a similar field where I currently work. During the discussion of the platform presented at this conference, a colleague, trying to seem witty, expressed the phrase “Exadata for the poor”, referring to the platform being discussed. Half supported this statement with an approving laugh, and I realized that all the money Oracle spent on marketing was well spent, and Exadata had become a brand. Well, I wanted to say, you can love and pray at Oracle if he spat on one of the ACID principles? And may even lose commit - Link
I constantly meet with people who have a blunt look at Oracle, who think that Oracle can solve all problems and assert that Oracle is the best of the best. In the environment where Oracle lives, such sentiments are introduced everywhere and are more like religious worship than professional use of the tool. Why not figure out where Oracle is really the best, and where not? What I personally have no doubts about is that Oracle is truly the best in marketing. There are plenty of examples, from the last one I saw a banner ad in Sheremetyevo, declaring that Oracle is several times faster than HP. Oracle used this slogan against all competitors - this is dirty PR, what exactly Oracle declared can be seen in the pictures below. Moreover, before all Oracle had to apologize and pick up their words back - but the noise had already happened, the goals were achieved - everyone heard about Exadata.
I agree that Oracle is the best solution in terms of functionality in the OLTP field - it’s hard to argue, and I will even advise everyone to use Oracle. Rich functionality - backups, standby, partitioning, RAC, ASM, Flashback, MVCC, and much, much more have long made it the leader in this segment. Someone wants to mention PL / SQL - here there is already a place for a dispute, since the use of business logic at the database level in our time is terrible moveton and is not welcome at all.
But for some reason, the majority is convinced that Oracle solves absolutely all problems and is applicable to the entire spectrum of problems. According to my own practice, I can say that this is not always the case - Oracle is good at something, and in some ways it is a waste of money, we need completely different solutions based on different principles and using different mechanisms. As a graphic example, I can give the DWH domain, analytical processing of large amounts of data - you can, of course, buy Oracle Exadata - but the ratio of efficiency to the amount of money spent will be minimal compared to solutions from other manufacturers.
Marketing penetrates the minds of technical specialists, and they would seem to understand what was happening, since their job is to build causal relationships and understand the processes taking place. I do not want and I will not say that the Oracle solution is bad, as it is not true. But I think it’s necessary to say that Oracle’s aggressive marketing makes blind followers and fans of their users.
Even a company like IBM is much higher in my eyes, because they spend a lot of money on R & D. In the case of Oracle, you can observe the opposite situation - the company is only pursuing a profit, and in no way a qualitative improvement in the scientific and technical level of existing solutions. Exadata is still a big marketing noise paid for by ordinary users. Do you think Oracle should think about spending less on marketing and more on R & D?
Preamble
The full moon lit a dusty, winding road, disappearing among the hills ahead. I stood in thought at the beginning of my path, thinking about where this road might lead. Throwing my doubts away, I began my journey to a pyramid seen far away, the summit of which was lost among the clouds. On the way, no one met me, except for the monument, more like a tombstone with the image of a man and the inscription in huge letters “In Codd we trust” . Approaching the pyramid at a fairly close distance, I managed to see that it consists of DB_BLOCK, mostly 8Kb in size, but it was possible to find more. Each block showed the logo of the company that used the block to store its data. Noticing a small crowd near the entrance to the pyramid, I became interested, and decided to find out what it is. Coming very close, the crowd acquired its outlines - for the most part it consisted of students, but business analysts, testers, programmers met, you could even notice a couple of sales managers - they all rushed inside.
Slipping through an inconspicuous gap near the main entrance, I found myself in an amazing place. The vast space was filled with sparkling data, the walls were covered with AWR images and slogans. Some of them were incomprehensible to me, and some are familiar - “Exadata is faster than X 6 times,” “Oracle is faster than Y, 16 times”, “Oracle is FASTER !!!”, “RAC is our everything!”, ”Back up or not back up? - choose your death "," No backup - no luck! "," ASM - the road to the future "," DataGuard - make life easier! ” . The audience inside was somewhat different from the one that was outside. Programmers of all directions and colors, project managers, architects, analysts, consultants, integrators — they all took refuge inside a huge pyramid. Immediately there were evangelicals, saying something indistinctly and quickly, raising their voice and intonation at the word Oracle. Looking around more carefully, I noticed several groups of people who did not have a feverish gleam in their eyes, which they juggled at the word Oracle. This is a group of people in corporate blue shirts with the words Microsoft and a SQL Server sign. They cried in impotent rage, quietly mumbling "We also have the MVCC, it just is not enabled by default." A little further away from them, there were tents with the inscription PostgreSQL - stern guys in black robes, incredulous looking at everything happening around and continuing to do their work. Sorry, Stonebraker left them. Looking further, I saw the flags IBM and DB2 - a group of people in round glasses, completely closed from all other mainframes. They were in some kind of incomprehensible trance, the impression was created that they did not understand what was happening around. In their strange universes, the parallel lines intersected, and the perpendicular had a negative value.
')
Having a little accustomed, I was convinced that the most interesting is in the center of the pyramid, and went there. It was there that the caste of priests called the DBA carried its service. The caste had three levels, according to the degree of blessing from Oracle, and was placed in the appropriate order. At the bottom of the hill, consisting of backups, were novices in red robes with large letters OCA on the back - waving manuals, they memorized cases when it is necessary to use a bitmap index, as well as how nested loop differs from hash join-a. Slightly higher, at the foot, there were adepts in yellow robes with the inscription OCP. They held in their hands scrolls with SQL and RMAN scripts, learning them by heart, and particularly complex and beautiful laid them aside or exchanged them with their neighbors. In the middle of the hill, the priests of OCM in black robes, who had long ago attained the Oracle Tao, sat, wisely nodding their heads, and making backups with the power of thought, and optimizing their performance by laying hands.
A little higher, on an improvised scene, Tom Kite skillfully explained the commandments of Oracle, throwing metalink notes into the crowd with one hand, and blogging on the Internet with the other hand. At the very top of the hill was located the throne, on which sat the sun-like Larry Ellison. In his left hand he held a small copy of Exalytics, in his right Exadata, and he himself sat on the Big Data Appliance. Hundreds of drums pounded loudly, counting out the ever-growing SCN. From time to time, Larry raised one or the other arm, pointing to the mainstream of database development, while crowds of marketers and followers, shouting happily, supported his initiatives.
Looking for wisdom and knowledge, I got to get the coveted yellow overalls and got the privilege to create my scrolls, discuss ORA-00600 and ORA-12704, touch RMAN and Data Guard and much more. I learned the dao relational model, imbibed the principles of ACID, learned the yin of data and the yang of transactions. I rightfully took my place and knew all the offsets in the datablock header-e.
However, over time, the environment around me began to change, until it turned into a nightmare and on a dark night, having abandoned backups and scripts, I rushed out of this temple, without looking back. On the way to the exit, I had time to notice the fox's long-cold corpse, and insane people jumping around it in FoxPro T-shirts. The fox flew up from their jumps, and it seemed as if she was still alive.
Marketing cries, shaking manuals, the sweet promises of HR swept through my back - but I only accelerated my run, the shroud fell from my eyes, and everything turned into a terrible nightmare. When I woke up in a green clearing, I stopped, looked around, and tried to evaluate my previous experience.
Plot
Recently, being at the conference, I had a passing acquaintance with colleagues from a similar field where I currently work. During the discussion of the platform presented at this conference, a colleague, trying to seem witty, expressed the phrase “Exadata for the poor”, referring to the platform being discussed. Half supported this statement with an approving laugh, and I realized that all the money Oracle spent on marketing was well spent, and Exadata had become a brand. Well, I wanted to say, you can love and pray at Oracle if he spat on one of the ACID principles? And may even lose commit - Link
I constantly meet with people who have a blunt look at Oracle, who think that Oracle can solve all problems and assert that Oracle is the best of the best. In the environment where Oracle lives, such sentiments are introduced everywhere and are more like religious worship than professional use of the tool. Why not figure out where Oracle is really the best, and where not? What I personally have no doubts about is that Oracle is truly the best in marketing. There are plenty of examples, from the last one I saw a banner ad in Sheremetyevo, declaring that Oracle is several times faster than HP. Oracle used this slogan against all competitors - this is dirty PR, what exactly Oracle declared can be seen in the pictures below. Moreover, before all Oracle had to apologize and pick up their words back - but the noise had already happened, the goals were achieved - everyone heard about Exadata.
I agree that Oracle is the best solution in terms of functionality in the OLTP field - it’s hard to argue, and I will even advise everyone to use Oracle. Rich functionality - backups, standby, partitioning, RAC, ASM, Flashback, MVCC, and much, much more have long made it the leader in this segment. Someone wants to mention PL / SQL - here there is already a place for a dispute, since the use of business logic at the database level in our time is terrible moveton and is not welcome at all.
But for some reason, the majority is convinced that Oracle solves absolutely all problems and is applicable to the entire spectrum of problems. According to my own practice, I can say that this is not always the case - Oracle is good at something, and in some ways it is a waste of money, we need completely different solutions based on different principles and using different mechanisms. As a graphic example, I can give the DWH domain, analytical processing of large amounts of data - you can, of course, buy Oracle Exadata - but the ratio of efficiency to the amount of money spent will be minimal compared to solutions from other manufacturers.
Marketing penetrates the minds of technical specialists, and they would seem to understand what was happening, since their job is to build causal relationships and understand the processes taking place. I do not want and I will not say that the Oracle solution is bad, as it is not true. But I think it’s necessary to say that Oracle’s aggressive marketing makes blind followers and fans of their users.
Even a company like IBM is much higher in my eyes, because they spend a lot of money on R & D. In the case of Oracle, you can observe the opposite situation - the company is only pursuing a profit, and in no way a qualitative improvement in the scientific and technical level of existing solutions. Exadata is still a big marketing noise paid for by ordinary users. Do you think Oracle should think about spending less on marketing and more on R & D?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/160423/
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