Oracle's letter to Russian IT companies
Oracle is beginning to find they are in trouble. Here&#x27;s a small example: I&#x27;m hearing from a fairly reliable source that quite a few large Australian banks are replacing Oracle (my source didn&#x27;t say with what). They are citing the enormous cost of the licenses, along with difficulty getting adequate support without paying a fortune. My contact himself is in upper management of a large corporation and Oracle screwed him on licensing, forcing him to pay a huge amount of money from his budget that he badly needed to spend on other projects. This delayed these projects by about 3 months, and put a bit of pressure on the area of the business he oversaw. He&#x27;s also investigating the best way of quietly getting rid of Oracle as fast as possible. That will take some time, but he&#x27;s at the point of rejecting any new solutions that require Oracle products.<p>I&#x27;m not at all surprised. Medium sized businesses used to use Oracle due to perceived reliability and features, however there have been a number of things that are making them reconsider:<p>* A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don&#x27;t need.<p>* difficulty in getting support - Oracle are notorious for not responding in a timely fashion to tickets, and a willingness by the CSO to completely ignore serious security flaws.<p>I experienced this myself four years ago when my boss put me in charge of a clear Unicode bug in their OLEDB driver - the bug had been open for 2 years and by the time I left a year later Oracle had almost wilfully ignored everything we wrote, even ignoring a program we built in .NET that showed the problem. Throughout the ticket we dealt with something like 4 support people, each of whom didn&#x27;t understand Unicode and who needed a basic backgrounder on how UTF8 works.<p>* license costs are ridiculous, and frankly not worth it.<p>* it can often be hard to find people who can troubleshoot performance issues. Even highly skilled people face a black box when they work on improving query performance as the CBO is largely a black box that can change from version to version. Without a clear explanation of how the CBO actually makes decisions it&#x27;s often a bit of a crapshoot when tuning queries.<p>* Oracle DBAs are very expensive, compared to how much you can pay an equivalent skilled DBA who knows Postgres or even SQL Server.<p>* there are few features most medium sized businesses need that can&#x27;t be done in Postgres.