Oracle like a religion

    Everything that is written below concerns Oracle Database and Oracle Exadata.

    Preamble



    The full moon illuminated a dusty, winding road disappearing among the hills ahead. I stood in thought at the beginning of my journey, thinking about where this road could lead. Having cast doubt aside, I began my journey to the pyramid visible in the distance, the top of which was lost among the clouds. No one met me on the way, except for the monument, more like a tombstone with a picture of a man and the inscription in huge letters “In Codd we trust”. Approaching the pyramid at a fairly close distance, I managed to discern that it consists of DB_BLOCKs, mostly 8Kb in size, but more could be found. On each block was 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. Having come very close, the crowd took shape - for the most part it consisted of students, but there were business analysts, testers, programmers, you could even notice a couple of sales managers - they all rushed inside.

    Having slipped through an inconspicuous gap near the main entrance, I found myself in an amazing place. Huge space was filled with sparkling data, the walls are covered with AWR pictures and slogans. Some of them were incomprehensible to me, and some are familiar - “Exadata is 6 times faster than X”, “Oracle is 16 times faster than Y”, “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 outside. Programmers of all directions and stripes, project managers, architects, analysts, consultants, integrators - they all took refuge inside the huge pyramid. There were also evangelists who were slurred and quick to say something, raising their voice and intonation at the word Oracle. Looking more closely, I noticed several groups of people who did not have a feverish gleam in their eyes, which distorted at the word Oracle. This is a group of people in corporate blue shirts labeled Microsoft and the SQL Server label. They cried in impotent rage, muttering softly, "We also have MVCC, it’s just not turned on by default." A little further from them, there were tents with the inscription PostgreSQL - severe guys in black hoodies, incredulously looking at everything happening around and continuing to do their own thing. Sorry, the Stonebreaker left them. Looking further, I saw the flags of IBM and DB2 - a group of people in round glasses, completely closed from all the other mainframes. They were in some strange trance, it seemed that they did not understand what was happening around. In their strange Universes, parallel lines intersected, and the perpendicular had a negative value.

    Having gotten a little accustomed, I was convinced that the most interesting is in the center of the pyramid, and headed there. It was there that the priest caste called DBA carried its ministry. Caste had three levels, according to the degree of blessing from Oracle, and was arranged in the corresponding order. At the bottom of the hill, which consisted of backups, there were novices in red hoodies with large OCA letters on the back - waving manuals, they memorized cases when it was necessary to use the bitmap index, as well as how the nested loop differs from hash join-a. A little higher, at the foot, were adherents in yellow robes with the inscription OCP. They held scrolls with SQL and RMAN scripts in their hands, memorizing them, and especially complex and beautiful laid aside or exchanged them with their neighbors. In the middle of the hill sat the OCM priests in black hoodies, who had long since attained the Oracle Tao,

    A little higher, on an impromptu scene, Tom Kite skillfully explained the commandments of Oracle, throwing metalink notes in the crowd with one hand and blogging on the Internet with the other hand. At the very top of the hill was a throne on which the sun-like Larry Ellison sat. In his left hand he held a small copy of Exalytics, in his right Exadata, while he himself sat on the Big Data Appliance. Hundreds of drums pounded loudly, counting the ever-growing SCN. From time to time, Larry raised one or the other hand, indicating the mainstream of database development, while crowds of marketers and followers, screaming joyfully, supported his undertakings.

    Seeking wisdom and knowledge, I got to receive the coveted yellow hoodie and got the privilege to create my own scrolls, discuss ORA-00600 and ORA-12704, touch RMAN and Data Guard, and much more. I comprehended the tao of the relational model, absorbed the principles of ACID, learned the yin of data and yang of transactions. I rightfully took my place and knew all the offsets in the datablock header-e.

    However, over time, my surroundings began to change until it turned into a nightmare and somehow on a dark night, throwing backups and scripts, I rushed out of this temple, not looking back. On the way to the exit, I managed to notice a long-cooled corpse of a fox, and insane people jumping around him in FoxPro shirts. From their jumps, the fox flew up, and it seemed that she was still alive.

    Marketing shouts, shocking with manuals, sweet promises of HR rushed into my back - but I just accelerated my run, the veil fell from my eyes, and everything turned into a terrible nightmare. Waking up in a green meadow, I stopped, looked around and tried to evaluate my previous experience.

    Plot



    Recently, while at a conference, I had a passing acquaintance with colleagues from a similar area where I now 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 chuckle, and I realized that all the money that Oracle spent on marketing was not wasted, and Exadata turned into a brand. Well, then, I wanted to say, you can love and pray for Oracle, if he does not give a damn about one of the principles of ACID? And it may even lose commit - Link

    I constantly meet people who have a blind eye on Oracle, who think that Oracle can solve all problems, and who claim that Oracle is the best of the best. In the environment where Oracle lives, such sentiments are ubiquitous and resemble religious worship rather than professional use of the instrument. Why not figure out where Oracle is really the best and where not? What I personally have no doubt about is that Oracle is really the best at marketing. There are lots of examples of this, from the last I saw an ad banner in Sheremetyevo announcing that Oracle is several times faster than HP. Oracle used this slogan against all competitors - it's a dirty PR, what exactly Oracle declared, can be seen in the pictures below. Moreover,









    I agree that Oracle is the best solution for functionality in the OLTP sphere - it's hard to argue here, and I myself will advise everyone to use Oracle. Rich functionality - backups, standby, partitioning, RAC, ASM, Flashback, MVCC and much, much more have long made him a leader in this segment. Someone will want to mention PL / SQL - there is already a place for debate here, since the use of business logic at the database level is now a terrible bad manners and is not welcome at all.

    But for some reason, most are confident that Oracle solves absolutely all problems and is applicable to the whole spectrum of problems. In my own practice, I can say that this is not always the case - Oracle is good at something, but at some point it is a waste of money, completely different solutions based on other principles and using different mechanisms are needed here. As a good example, I can cite the DWH area, the analytical processing of large volumes of data - you can, of course, buy Oracle Exadata - but the ratio of efficiency to the amount of money spent from it will be minimal compared to solutions from other manufacturers.

    Marketing penetrates the minds of technical specialists, and it would seem that they should understand what’s what, since their job is to build investigative-causal relationships and to understand the ongoing processes. I do not want and I will not say that the Oracle solution is bad, because this is not true. But I think I need to say that Oracle’s aggressive marketing makes blind users and fans out of their users.

    Even a company like IBM is worth much more in my eyes, because they spend a lot of money on R&D. In the case of Oracle, the opposite situation can be observed - the company pursues only profit, and not a qualitative improvement in the scientific and technical level of existing solutions. Exadata is still a lot of marketing buzz paid for by ordinary users. What do you think, maybe Oracle should think about spending less on marketing and more on R&D?

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