it's not that simple [LWN.net]

it's not that simple

Posted Apr 7, 2008 17:23 UTC (Mon) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458)
In reply to: it's not that simple by nix
Parent article: Sun Microsystems' Next Linux Move (Seeking Alpha)

Wow. I knew about the clob limitations, but the rest... Had no clue. I think it's awesome that
Oracle is the 9:th largest contributor to Linux. I'm sure they'll make Linux enterprise ready
in no time.

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it's not that simple

Posted Apr 7, 2008 18:14 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

i.e. bugger it up completely? Yep, that's possible, but I hope not!

I've been doing Oracle stuff for ten years now and much of it consists of 
spending great effort to find ways to *avoid* using Oracle, because using 
it is so unpleasant. Using Unix stuff instead is generally vastly more 
enjoyable.

I suspect a lot of the ugliness in the Oracle stuff is because their 
competition is largely other hugely expensive databases like SQL Server, 
which are *also* incredibly wart-filled, because they're all based on 
really really old code and have been maintained for decades by people who 
care more about getting the next version out and getting a new marketing 
buzzword implemented than they do about internal consistency.

(e.g. Oracle's 'object oriented' features introduced in Oracle 8. There 
are *still* bugs in there whereby unprivileged users can crash entire 
database instances. They *still* don't implement inheritance as far as I 
can tell. It's *still* nearly useless for any practical purpose... because 
it was never intended to be *used*: it was just a marketing buzzword, 
when 'object oriented' was the latest big thing.)