Oracle has bigger problems than OpenAI. They've been selling large enterprise contracts for the past 10 years and they're coming up for renewal. A lot of those enterprises don't feel they got a good value. If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years, then that could have a severe impact to Oracle. Their other issue is a lot of those enterprises are looking at migrating to PostgreSQL so they can migrate off of Oracle's RDBMS. Many have already deployed PostgreSQL for their department-level applications, so they can get the experience they need before tackling their enterprise-level applications.
In my organization we've worked hard for several years to insulate ourselves from Oracle.
We've implemented aggressive desktop monitoring and blocked downloads from Oracle to avoid the Java subscription. Where it's needed, an OpenJDK distribution is used.
Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle. I get it, a big RAC customer will have a harder time, but they'll also likely have alternatives (e.g. SAP implementation to HANA).
I know of at least one vendor (Hyland) who's dropping Oracle support and providing a migration path to MS SQL. Shame not a FOSS database, but still a trend away from Oracle.
I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP.
The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.
Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.
So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.
Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.
Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.
Aren’t contract expiration dates distributed over time? Why would now be a particularly vulnerable time? Granted, we’re coming up on the end of the calendar year, but 2025 doesn’t feel particularly special.
I also have to wonder how many customers actually signed a 10 year contract (which is extremely long for software of all things), unless I'm misunderstanding the comment.
Can confirm. There is zero good will towards Oracle in my organization, and AWS have positioned themselves in a way to push the enterprise team to using PostgreSQL on RDS, and helping development teams make the move with training and proservices. Oracle's greed is finally coming back to haunt them.
Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.
> If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years
Think about how hard it would be for you to switch from iPhone to Android. Now multiply that by 10000. That's how hard it is to switch enterprise software.
Once technologies mature enough, they converge to roughly the same set of features. Case in point: I was an avid Windows user, but then decided to switch to Linux. While it was problematic, it was much less so than I had anticipated.
Imagine switching between Firefox and Chrome. Between Ford and Toyota. Between Seagate and Western Digital. Between USB-C and Lightning.
Oracle's growth and value is in SaaS apps (NetSuite) and their cloud offering, not DB licensing. The economic impact of enterprises moving off Oracle DB is massively overstated here.
Probably nobody here is an Oracle fan but the miss on sentiment like this is you could have written the same comment minus OpenAI 10 and maybe even 20 years ago.
Definitely true, but a lot of Oracle sites are that way because of decisions made decades ago. Opportunities to re-architect are rare. But when those opportunities do come along, nobody is choosing Oracle RDBMS for their future state.
What I do see is orgs choosing other Oracle apps like ERP which sneak the Oracle RDBMS in as part of the bundle.
Anyone using Oracle purely as a database is going to migrate to PostgreSQL eventually, but there are a lot of orgs where the database is just one part of a wider Oracle ecosystem with world-class vendor lock-in features.
Oracle has been selling large enterprise contracts for many decades and those enterprises were looking to migrate off Oracle since then too (I've been working on a project like that almost 20 years ago, at my first real job).
There are enough examples which one might mention here: Nokia, MySpace, Yahoo, Kodac, AOL, Blockbuster, toys‘r‘us … all ones big. Yes, oracle might not vanish, but it definitely needs some change.
Java is one thing they did right. Most enterprises are looking to move away from Oracle. I think there will be niche cases where rewrites don’t make sense. But for one of the big telecom providers I work for - the decision was made in 2020 to move off of Oracle. It’s not a flash cut but we’ve significantly reduced reliance. There are some critical apps that are still on it, but those are capped in maintenance mode until their replacements are ready.
Java is in the best shape it's ever been in. Jdk development and performance are through the roof and the developer experiences gets better with every release.
Java's in great shape now, but the period between when Oracle bought Sun (~2010) and about 2017 wasn't great, and there was a lot of concern about Java's future. I think most people who moved away from Java then haven't looked back.
Pretty common attitude from folks who have never worked in one of the BigTech companies where Java rules (Amazon being a prime example). Since they never encounter Java in the "SF-style Startup" world, they assume that it must be dead. Meanwhile hundreds-of-thousands of Engineers deal with hundreds-of-millions (billions?) of lines of Java every day
My assumption is the poster wants to imply Oracle destroyed the good will and interest for people to start new Java projects after the licensing changes and subsequent shakedown. Java clearly still runs all over the place and will for a while (although plenty of people trying to keep java but get away from oracle).
Java's not gone anywhere, but it's been years since I've interviewed anyone who has made it their language of choice. Developer sentiment for it isn't exactly great.
A decade ago, a good ~80% of applicants chose to use it or C#.
I personally don't have any issues with working with it, but nobody's learning it outside of work.
On the other hand, it is quite easy to learn, so there's that going for it.
If I'm reading the chart correctly, the current stock price of ORCL is 15% below the price before they announced the OpenAI deal in September. 40% down from the peak is one thing, but I see the net v.s. before the craziness as a better indicator of what's going on.
Oracle’s massive bet on OpenAI might be financially risky, but its investments in AI farms could accelerate Java’s evolution for AI. While Python dominates training, inference is where the money is. Projects like OpenJDK Babylon hint at a future where the JVM becomes a serious player in AI inference.
It is legacy decisions going back decades. Thirty years ago, you did not have a wealth of database alternatives. You picked Oracle and built the business around it. More and more business processes accumulate around the data store, all using some proprietary Oracle extensions. Eventually, the thought of disentangling the dependency is so daunting you are locked in forever until an existential risk materializes.
In 1998 I worked for a small nasdaq company that had a successful software as a service product that was growing quickly.
We used Clarion and MSSQL7 on windows because it was cheap. Since we started making real money, some figured we could finally afford Oracle and Sun (back when they were different).
I was a junior so my job was to evaluate the migration of one of our sql servers to oracle to test it out. I talks with the Oracle team who helps people plan purchases. They took my transaction level (~100M/year) and size (1-2GB/year) and came back with $1M for the system. This replaced a functioning $10k server. And we had maybe a dozen that would have to eventually move.
When I told them the current server was $10k, they revised their estimate to $100k. I recommended we not move.
I left the company a little while later and I think they ended up buying lots of Oracle.
Companies have money and don’t mind spending on useless stuff.
A few years ago I had the head of a devops team at a large company say that the project I was working on should switch from postgres to a "real" enterprise database like oracle. This happened while we were having zero issues with postgres, it was a perfect fit for our case, and it wasn't even relevant to the conversation. He just saw that's what we were using and reflexively thought that of course we should use Oracle.
It blew my mind at the time. Oracle is so widely hated among developers, entirely justifiably, that this guy's take really shocked me. I've literally never heard another glowing recommendation for that company before or since.
In my experience, it is from technical management in medium/big companies you'll listen some good things about Oracle as a database product (regardless of its actual merits), like stability, scalability, compliance checks, and other "enterprisy" features (like database encryption). Also, it is offered as a default database option for many enterprise applications from their vendors.
While many people points to Postgresql as "the alternative", in many places outside USA its commercial support is not available, or too limited.
Other commercial alternatives (like MSSQL) have the (more or less) the same bad reputation regarding licensing costs.
My old boss literally said they don't trust other databases. I tried to push for postgres. But they insisted only oracle is professional. Our software only worked with an oracle backend. I no longer work there.
Isn't the whole "thing" about JPA (and all other ORMs ever) that you're supposed to "use it" instead of directly doing well optimized native queries on your database so that you can jump ship if the database provider turns out to be shit?
On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, on my region, "Oracle Database - Base Database Service" (single node database) costs the same as a much more powerful cluster of managed "Database with PostgreSQL", or a managed cluster of "MySQL HeatWave".
Under most circumstances, you should still pick non-oracle-DB on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Single-sign on, in-person support, certificated software, offering training courses to onboard people, undeletable logs, help with upgrading major versions..
All from a single vendor so you can pick up the phone, yell "fix it" and go on with your day.
Oracle bet the farm on AI, and that’s starting to look like a really bad idea. Commentary about delaying new data center buildouts for AI is freaking out the markets today that the bubble burst is starting. Credit default swap values are also now heavily leaning towards a bunch of AI investments going bust.
Well, lets be fair here. Oracle is a predatory company that extorts its customers for the highest price. Adopters of AI in the enterprise are going to be building such shitty and shoddy products using AI that they'll need huge support contracts just to keep these poorly made AI products alive.
Adding AI to the oracle infrastructure cancer will certainly a boon to it's business model. Sure it might kill 10-20% of it's customers, but if it can become a pure AI parasitic play and spread it's seed, it's going to grow.
People dont realize that capitalism is size agnostic: As long as you can sell 1 boner pill for $1 million, you only need one customer rather than say 1 million pills for 1$. And, isn't it easier to keep one customer happier if they pay your bills?
Will be interesting. Also the Paramount Skydance takeover bid is still pending. Paramount is ~15 billion market cap and the deal for Warner is ~77 billion.
Readit News
We've implemented aggressive desktop monitoring and blocked downloads from Oracle to avoid the Java subscription. Where it's needed, an OpenJDK distribution is used.
Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle. I get it, a big RAC customer will have a harder time, but they'll also likely have alternatives (e.g. SAP implementation to HANA).
I know of at least one vendor (Hyland) who's dropping Oracle support and providing a migration path to MS SQL. Shame not a FOSS database, but still a trend away from Oracle.
The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.
Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.
So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.
Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.
Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300
Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.
Think about how hard it would be for you to switch from iPhone to Android. Now multiply that by 10000. That's how hard it is to switch enterprise software.
Imagine switching between Firefox and Chrome. Between Ford and Toyota. Between Seagate and Western Digital. Between USB-C and Lightning.
What I do see is orgs choosing other Oracle apps like ERP which sneak the Oracle RDBMS in as part of the bundle.
Anyone using Oracle purely as a database is going to migrate to PostgreSQL eventually, but there are a lot of orgs where the database is just one part of a wider Oracle ecosystem with world-class vendor lock-in features.
>Market cap of half a trillion.
>Somehow they're "in trouble".
Mega LMAO.
A decade ago, a good ~80% of applicants chose to use it or C#.
I personally don't have any issues with working with it, but nobody's learning it outside of work.
On the other hand, it is quite easy to learn, so there's that going for it.
Deleted Comment
https://openjdk.org/projects/babylon/articles/auto-diff
We used Clarion and MSSQL7 on windows because it was cheap. Since we started making real money, some figured we could finally afford Oracle and Sun (back when they were different).
I was a junior so my job was to evaluate the migration of one of our sql servers to oracle to test it out. I talks with the Oracle team who helps people plan purchases. They took my transaction level (~100M/year) and size (1-2GB/year) and came back with $1M for the system. This replaced a functioning $10k server. And we had maybe a dozen that would have to eventually move.
When I told them the current server was $10k, they revised their estimate to $100k. I recommended we not move.
I left the company a little while later and I think they ended up buying lots of Oracle.
Companies have money and don’t mind spending on useless stuff.
It blew my mind at the time. Oracle is so widely hated among developers, entirely justifiably, that this guy's take really shocked me. I've literally never heard another glowing recommendation for that company before or since.
Under most circumstances, you should still pick non-oracle-DB on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Single-sign on, in-person support, certificated software, offering training courses to onboard people, undeletable logs, help with upgrading major versions..
All from a single vendor so you can pick up the phone, yell "fix it" and go on with your day.
Unless they decide to ~~extort~~audit you.
Adding AI to the oracle infrastructure cancer will certainly a boon to it's business model. Sure it might kill 10-20% of it's customers, but if it can become a pure AI parasitic play and spread it's seed, it's going to grow.
People dont realize that capitalism is size agnostic: As long as you can sell 1 boner pill for $1 million, you only need one customer rather than say 1 million pills for 1$. And, isn't it easier to keep one customer happier if they pay your bills?