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

@garius Oracle, to me, are the trailblazer for so many tech companies. One good product, lots of duff ones, and a reputation for buggering up any “good” software that they bought up…

@garius That reason why? One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

@garius some traditions should be kept

@garius @piepants Oracle is old evil. None of this new evil.

(Play on old/new money.)

@garius Every once in a while, an Oracle-related salesperson emails me asking to schedule a meeting, usually to pitch me something from a subsidiary. I reply:

"I know better than to become an Oracle customer."

The older salespeople just silently remove me from their list, but I've also had younger salespeople ask me to explain. I always do. Each time I've genuinely been the first person who's explained why someone might specifically wish to _not_ have a business relationship with 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.