Re: off to the farm to start new career ...
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:19:54 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <4716e523-2d05-4d49-b431-10c8103358e7_at_q40g2000prg.googlegroups.com>
On Sep 10, 3:28 am, Tuomas <ho..._at_lut.fi> wrote:
> (This is mostly about corporate politics, i.e.. off topic, please bear with me.)
>
> On 09/09/10 18:32, Mladen Gogala wrote:
> ....
>
> > As a matter of fact, I tried pushing for DB2 because I am still
> > suspicious of open source databases, especially after the MySQL story.
>
> On the other hand licensing is such that you may use your existing DBs
> forever and most of the support is community driven anyway (applies, in
> reality, to MS or Oracle, too), so the impact of the owner changes aren't so
> major as in the case of a commercial product. If MySQL were a commercial
> product (actually: closed source), I'd be really worried and new projects
> would search alternatives.
What do you do when the community goes away?
>
> Also, if the product is good, there will be maintainers/upgraders as long as
> there are users. Of course, the quality of maintainers is unknown until they
> produce something.
The product may be good, but the developers and support staff who put out products based on it may not be.
I was at a social event recently, and a dentist asked me if I could help him back up his application data (his office was next door). Pretty cool app, image processing of dental x-rays. I poked around, and eventually found a user screen for backups, which included some simple examples like c:\mysql\data (or whatever). The dentist was convinced there should be some image files around somewhere, but I ventured a guess that they must be in the db somewhere, since the only image files seemed to be from his previous app, which is also running on this laptop. Yes, two image processing apps concurrent on this laptop. Anyways, not remembering what little I've seen about mysql, I eventually figured out where on the network the database was, and showed him how to use the app to back it up, and helped him make some redundancy there - hadn't been backed up since April. Now, I'm sure the support people he talked to before this were competent enough, and the backup seemed helpful enough as programmed, but only if you have a certain techie viewpoint - I'm guessing the idea of a network involved didn't make it to the support person. A couple years down the road? I have severe doubts.
>
> I've nothing against DB2 and current IBM as a company seems at least
> palatable compared to the old one (they also seem to like open source quite
> a lot). DB2 is a solid product and I think I'd also choose it rather than
> Postgress for a new big project. Maybe it's just me.
>
> On the other hand, as a DBA I'm slightly suspicious of _all_ DB-products:
> Shoddy mock-ups put together before deadline as release dates are always
> defined by marketing, i.e.. people who have no idea of quality nor how to
> make it. ;)
I have the idea that for this size product, there is just a continuous effort, and since the deadline is arbitrary, stuff either makes it or doesn't. The shoddiness comes in by giving cross-platform testing short shrift, and perhaps an inbuilt issue of the least experienced developers given the most pedestrian work.
>
> Oracle as a company is (IMHO) on the slippery path, there are many signs of
> marketing-driven company (loud mouthed CEO is one of those) and that's
> always bad for the programming quality and eventually the users.
True enough.
>
> Also old programming rule: "Every program grows until it exceeds the
> abilities of the people developing it". So far there haven't been many
> exceptions from this rule.
This cuts in all directions, of course.
>
> > MySQL was turned into a Cinderella of the database world, bought out by
> > the evil stepmother. Unless a beautiful prince comes by, MySQL is f**ed.
>
> MySQL as a product seems to be doomed, yes. I couldn't imagine anything else
> than slaughtering at the moment. Especially when Ellison decided to kill
> many other open source projects going on also.
The big question for me is, why wasn't this obvious from the beginning? I know I've expressed doubts across century boundaries over the longevity of any open source project.
>
> > So far, there are new forks of MySQL, which can be translated into
> > kissing frogs, without much to show for.
>
> Many (almost all of the key persons) of the original developers (before Sun
> bought them) left Sun/Oracle as soon as Oracle bought Sun, so they are free
> to develop new forks.
And be loudmouths too.
>
> These guys made MySQL because they didn't like Oracle at all (as a company),
> so I'm quite sure that there will be new product fairly soon, of course
> called something else.
In a land of forks, the man with the knife is king.
>
> Also Ellison seems to lose contact with reality, his latest comments on
> Hurd/HP-hassle were quite weird (even if Hurd is his personal friend) and
> even weirder was the decision to hire Hurd, a person who didn't get anything
> done in HP, except that all the qualified personnel left, very bad thing for
> a technology company. Not something that you or me would put in our CVs.
A CEO's idea of a bad thing, a shareholder's idea of a bad thing, and a techies idea of a bad thing... make a Venn diagram, the first two will overlap quite a bit.
>
> Is Ellison going down the same path as Ballmer?:
> "When there is criticism inside the company, kick the critics out, hire only
> yes-men instead and do not change anything, because you know that you are
> always right!"
This is true, can't help but wonder if it is unavoidable for companies of that size. If you don't have a strong leader, you lurch around and fall down.
>
> I do know that Ellison is a greedy man, licensing prices for small
> installations is absurd and even more absurd for development tools and that
> means that there are very small amount of new Oracle users (or none) at any
> given time. No new users -> no future in the long term (10-30 years).
True enough for SMB, but look at the shareholder docs, and share prices - yes, that is short term, but there is plenty of growth for the forseeable future, and even with the current economy, Oracle has chugged along. Exadata? $300K to start, riiiiight. But, what if 18 months along the price falls by an order of magnitude? What db2 could compete with a sparxadata?
>
> Is Ellison in the "steal everything you can and run"-phase in Oracle? Long
> term policy seems to be non-existent.
Here, I think you are waaaaaaay underestimating Larry. All along, if he's made mistakes (aside from the purely greedy and pee-pee ones), they've been for being too far ahead of the curve.
>
> Well, we live interesting times.
Yes, we do.
>
> > Unfortunately, some people that have more sway than me are avid magazine
> > readers and believe that open source is the way of the future.
>
> I'd see it as a sliding scale of solutions for some problems and some
> situations. The company I work for, uses open source whenever we can and we
> have been mostly happy of this decision. Immediate major impact on license
> administration: We haven't one. Or license fees.
>
> On the other hand, the amount of experience and knowledge needed to operate
> is somewhat higher than commercial products, many products do the job but
> aren't very user friendly or fine-tuned. That's a major cost sometimes,
> fortunately not too often. Most of this is internal, our clients have no
> idea what tools we are using and we are not advertising those either, unless
> someone asks.
Maybe my view is too skewed, but I see an order of magnitude greater costs.
>
> We use often Apache, PHP, Tomcat and some DB, often MySQL as databases
> mostly are very small, combination that's easy to apply on whatever platform
> you like to use.
>
> But I do agree on that that most PHBs read too many magazines without any
> source criticism. Especially if those are glossy high profile magazines for
> "top management".
Nothing new, ancient when Scott Adams started to make fun of it.
>
> > What I like about commercial databases is that there is someone to call
> and yell
>
> > at when something bad happens.
>
> Unfortunately, more often than not, that's the only thing that happens. ;)
Yeah, glad I don't have one of those yellee jobs. Bad enough being in earshot of a yeller.
>
> It helps anyway, I have to admit that.
>
> --
> Tuomas - VWs: '63 typ14, '65 typ34 & '61 typ2
That's impressive. Any ghia pix online? At one point I had '68 and '78 transporters, and my neighbor had a crew-cab, made for entertaining parking in front of my house.
jg
-- _at_home.com is bogus. "You're killing us Larry!" - Screaming bedbugs in mattress comercial.Received on Fri Sep 10 2010 - 12:19:54 CDT