I never understood why anyone picks Oracle at this point. There are so many alternative options that are vastly cheaper, much easier to maintain, and aren't owned by a company that has a habit of suing their customers.

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 41 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Twice a year I fill in as DBA when our lady graybeard Oracle DBA takes vacation. This month is one of those times. Yay me.

For my org, it's just the massive in-house developed line-of-business application that's tightly coupled to Oracle that keeps us chained to it. It's technical debt from top to bottom, and has been accumulating steadily since the early 2010s, but no one seems willing to start replacing it.

The new projects typically go with Postgres, MariaDB, or if all else fails, MSSQL. But the Oracle monster in the closet isn't likely to leave any time soon.

[–] vk6flab@lemmy.radio 21 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Around the turn of the century I built a "middleware" layer for an Oracle to MySQL bridge which enabled legacy systems to keep running while modern and open source tooling could be built.

The biggest challenge was moving from columnar to row based data .. that and compiling Solaris tools using Oracle libraries.

Oracle is like sendmail, user friendly, just very picky whom it makes friends with.

I'm getting flashbacks to debugging an Oracle connection file.

[–] SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 11 points 5 days ago

We had an application with tens of thousands of lines of PL/SQL code.

We also had the boss who demanded "database agnostic" development. So we had to write the whole thing a second time in T-SQL.

I'm so happy I switched jobs. But I guess I learned a lot in that time.

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 20 points 5 days ago

Get two juniors, unlimited Claude credits, and you'll have the problem solved in a month flat

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