Oracle’s Cloud Licensing Change
One of the projects I&#x27;m working on is suffering from many of the ills that come with using Oracle on a project. At first we built the entire stack using PostgreSQL (like most sane projects should), but when it came time to deliver to the customer, they had not yet chosen to allow it as an approved software component and suggested we move to Oracle -- that was over a year ago.<p>We&#x27;ve fought every kind of licensing issue you can imagine, shitty support, broken tools. A simple migration of a few hundred rows in a very simple table turned into a month long exercise that required 200 billable hours to Oracle consultants because all of the import&#x2F;export tools that Oracle provides are broken in subtle, different and incompatible ways. At one point we <i>saved</i> time by copying and pasting data from one table into another through the management GUI rather than fight all the bullshit Oracle puts in your way.<p>The customer, now irate that we&#x27;ve been in standstill for a year, doesn&#x27;t understand and hasn&#x27;t made any progress in getting Postgres signed off on by their security idiots and now they&#x27;re out an extra million dollars or so.<p>From initial install to development to deployment it&#x27;s been a nightmare and the only conclusion anybody can reasonable come up with is that it&#x27;s because Oracle purposely breaks their software in subtle ways so that the only paths of execution require deep Oracle lore that only somebody who dedicates their job to being an Oracle DBA could possibly know.<p>Oracle can&#x27;t die fast enough as a company. They&#x27;re an enormous drag on the entire technology industry and I&#x27;m convinced a force for evil.