As an older tech person, it's legit heartwarming watching the TikTok generation discover why we all hate Oracle.

@garius This goes the other way too: Oracle bought Dyn Inc and we immediately prioritized a migration away. Our account rep couldn't understand: "nothing changed!" "We've been a happy Dyn customer for years, but I can't risk doing business with Oracle. It's time to go."

We left on our terms, and of course then they killed the platform and laid everyone off, because Oracle's gonna Oracle.

@garius The technology changes. The Oracle experience remains timeless.

@garius it’s like 1999 all over again

@garius Everyone in the IT industry has at least one Oracle story. Mine is that Sun Microsystems won an intranet contract with us using their Portal and app-server. Right after this Oracle bought them and killed both products. The Sun rep recommended we switch to Liferay (which also supported Java portlets) but that did not scale at all… Some of the other Sun products escaped into Forgerock (OpenIDM, OpenAM and OpenDS) luckily.

@garius

I fled the country 23 years ago to escape my role as an Oracle DBA.

Never again.

@garius I was studying for my SQL exams (Oracle DBA) on 9/11. Correlation does not mean causation, but...

@garius all these clowns about to find out Larry Ellison is yet another serial sexual abuser.

@garius
we should sell tiktok to Novell instead. What's the worst that could happen?

@toriver @garius

I am so very happy I left the Java trail of tears behind many years ago.

@garius it might be time to go back and rewatch Brian Cantrill's "don't anthropomorphise Larry Ellison" talk

@garius And their flagship database is an enormous pile of Crap. Many people feed their families by knowing its quirks and difficulties, but I'd rather be productive.

To give you just one example: Oracle SQL HAS NO BOOLEAN DATA TYPE. The official recommendation is to use a 1 char field. What goes into that? Well, who knows? "Y/N" ? "y/n"? "O/N" if you're french? "1/0"?

In many shops, the result is supposedly boolean fields that contain 3, 5, even 7 different values. Yikes.

@garius the LOLest moment of the last few years on LinkedIn was explaining to an Oracle sales rep how fucking shit the company was and their historical context for being assholes and him thanking me for the details that weren't clear to him and made his last year of conversations make a lot more sense

@Dio9sys @garius Novell was bought by MicroFocus who (also had Attachmate but divested SUSE) and is now owned by of all companies, OpenText.

@garius@me.uk And I will never grow tired of Oxide and Friends live stream on Discord doing the occasional dunk on the master yachter, hisself.

Every time they dunk on Larry, an angel gets its wings.

@bcantrill @ahl

I disliked it when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. I disliked it when Oracle acquired MySQL. I disliked the dispute over Android and Java.

But, unpopular opinion here, over the years I have kind of really got used to the Oracle database, so yeah, a dilemma for me.

@garius #facts

@RogerBW @garius The great thing about unis is that, as terrible as Oracle is, guaranteed it's still not the worst part of the information architecture.

@garius

A product my employer used for a decade was bought out by oracle through another acquisition. Luckily the product was already sunset and there was only a six month overlap between EOL and the acquisition. Two years later we are still fighting bills incurred after EOL date. Sales order vs opportunities something or other. Trying to explain to CFO how Oracle is a money machine not a tech company made me sound like a crazy person. I think he is starting to get it now.

@garius
Something to talk about in the holidays

@garius See? Once in a loooong while, the laws of Kamma actually work in some discernible way.