this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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What does Oracle even do?
https://youtu.be/KW80Yjib7RA
Create a db that sucks so bad you have to hire them to maintain it.
Sues their customers
Makes Larry Edison rich
They sell software that sits so deep in people's stack that replacing it takes tons of effort. Companies calculate that it's cheaper to keep paying Oracle than to rewrite crucial services.
It took three years but we've almost rooted it all out.
There's still one ancient product that will (theoretically) decommission in mid 2028. It makes enough money to cover the Oracle licensing but isn't worth reworking to migrate.
Knowing how decom goes, I'm sure it'll still be running in 2035 with that one last client who "can't move to the newer, better, easier project because... Reasons (I don't wanna)"
Some people say Oracle doesn’t have clients. They have hostages.
Specifically, they have had a popular expensive DBMS for last 30ish years.
Which even they saw as a diminishing opportunity, so they bought Sun so they also have Solaris and Java and a bunch of other miscellaneous crap.
They get non trivial amounts of money by punishing anyone with a business relationship with them with audits and superfluous invoices.
Story time, a product at my company used to provide a Java webstart application from a web GUI. We did not use any oracle software including any of their Java editions so we paid it no mind (though I hated the applet demanding Java, but at least it wasn't active x).
Anyway several of our customers said we needed to purge it, because oracle detected JSPs served by our software, and their audit said that if JSPs were served but no Java runtimes detected, obviously the company must be "hiding" the JREs and invoiced the company for every employee to have their paid Java runtimes. Happened to multiple of our clients.
So that's what drive us to finally purge Java and embrace modern html capabilities, and a way that Oracle makes money and also any no one who knows anything wants to willingly end up with an Oracle business relationship.
Charge people who accidentally used their Java SDK.
Boy you're in for a ride.
Palantir runs on Oracle Cloud.
Oracle finances Paramount buying out Warner Bros.
Other shady shit Oracle does: https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/the-merger-that-needed-a-war
Basically think Oracle is a competent League of Evil that can hide from the media spotlight.
They hide from the media spotlight by increasingly being the media spotlight.
Something can’t hit you without showing itself before. Oracle takes it to the next level and tells you they’re coming before they destroy you. Vampires need to be invited.
Years ago, they were the go to solution for databases. No CIO would ever be fired for picking Oracle over competitors regardless the pain that would follow, same as having Windows as the OS on all employees computers.
If there's an issue with the world's most popular solutxon: "Shits happens, we all know", if there's an issue with that alternative solution: "You see what bappens with your toy-thing? Let's be professional and use a professional solution!".
Years have passed, the alternative slowly made a name for themselves, but OracleDB didn't evolve much because of inertia and the high maintenance that locks existing customers.
So now they're going all-in on data centres for AI, that means to me the end is near.
They used to sell a pretty good (if complex) database system. However it hasn't been popular for many years. I assume they still have big customers who are locked in.
These days they're just another amorphous "cloud service provider", and not a good one either.
In IT the golden rule is regardless of technical merit, you do not want a business relationship with Oracle under any circumstances.
They will use that foot in the door to make your life hell with audits and invoicing crap you never bought.
I work with a client using an Oracle DB. You have to do multiple request to even do something basic as pagination 😂.
They improved it over the years, but given the choice, I'd advice for anything else than Oracle. I'd even prefer MS Sql, which, given I'm pretty anti-MS, is a miracle.
They are doing something wrong. Say what you want about their commercial strategy, the product itself is pretty good. It can definitely do pagination, and I hope they are not doing skip and limit.
Yeah, you can do pagination, but you need two request : one to select everything, the second to only return the results between id x and id y. Needless to say, the performances are far from ideal.
But in recent version you do skip and take x, which is far easier to write. But my codebase date back to the 2000's, and it uses the old ways.
As an example, an SQL request to filter on an handful of parameters, and paginate, easily amount to 40-50 lines of SQL. And that's the easy ones, because some request uses multiple view, in which case I wouldn't be surprised to find a request doing more than 100 lines of SQL, maybe without even factoring the view in.
That's some funky code, pagination is much easier than that, unless there's something else going on.
Probably, but I won't touch that shit unless I have no way doing otherwise.
It hasn't been popular? I guess you mean "cool" or "trendy" but well more than half of enterprise applications work on oracle, closer to 75% in fact.
Yes, plenty of companies are exiting oracle but it will still dominate for at least a decade. Sometimes there's just no good equivalent, and no, Postgres cannot compare even tho it's a great DB for many use cases.
Destroy popular and useful companies.
I've been a software engineer for over 20 years now and tbh I couldn't tell you even if my life depended on it. I know it's a shit tier hosting service that people use because they offer 5$ worth virtual server for free with a valid credit card but that's about it.
It's one of those ancient paper shuffling IT companies that is 95% sale/middle mamager leeches, 5% wizard engineers carrying everything on their shoulders.
Sounds a lot like IBM.
At least IBM used to be cool and gave us things like SQL, DRAM and Thinkpads. Other than Java kits I couldn't name a single useful initiative from Oracle. They just take existing inventions and shuffle enterprise papers.
IBM gave us the PC standard! That's by far their biggest contribution to the IT world, we're still harvesting the belefits today.
Look at the ARM ecosystem of "every-PCB-is-its-own-kind".
Oracle didn't even create Java, Sun Microsystems did and Oracle gobbled them up. The only thing Oracle has actually created is a shitty old database system and legions of lawyers.
I don't know much about Sun, but they seemed like a cool company - Java, Solaris, Sparc. A lot of people sounded pretty upset when they got acquired.
Used to be cool.....you might want to look a little bit further into IBMs past, specifically what they were doing during WW2...
The tech is still cool. Doesn't mean IBM didn't deserve to be dissolved and it's entire staff shoved into a wood chipper post war for aiding and abetting genocide. Kinda like the V1s and V2s, fun fact my great grandfather worked on those and Stukas, shame the Navy posted him in fucking Florida.
All is justified if it gave us Thinkpad 🙂↕️
Yes and like IBM they are in the business of getting out of business, and business is good!
Both IBM and Oracle I haven't really worked with because they're heavily used by massive companies. We had an Oracle database when I was in banking that was because we were self hosting a loan accounting system. IBM does backend data processing stuff for massive companies like American Express and Bank of America. All of the smaller shops I've worked in have built things on Microsoft's stack.
Is this hyperbole? I really doubt someone can be a SWE for even 2 years and not know what oracle does...
Nope, I'm not an american and oracle is really not that well known outside of american corporate tech.
Mysql and Java were very big in Europe but as developer you don't really interact with Oracle at all and even then everyone's using openjdk since early 2010s so really if you're not working in american enterprise you never even going to encounter Oracle's name let alone interact with them.
My only interaction was calling their support trying to explain what a debit card is because Oracle is so brokenly american that they don't understand the difference between debit and credit.
"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
DATACENTERs apparently, especially for AI.
They sponsor some really neat sailboats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Team_USA