this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Oracle is the choice if you need a high performance RDBMS capable of processing extreme amounts of data at extreme io rates. Nothing comes close for enterprise level applications. THAT SAID, it requires a special kind of individual to be able to get the most out of it. Even better if that person knows of the existence, value, and use of the many undocumented v$ tables, etc.

Once you can migrate most of your data out of an RDBMS, you options open up significantly.

For smaller projects. Oracle makes no sense, unless the expectation is vast and rapid growth.

EDIT: Oracle is the most evil corporation in tech. Those who know, know.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm not even sure that's close to true anymore. Like, the biggest companies in the world, when they need to use a relational database, typically go for something "not oracle".

Wikipedia gets more traffic than most enterprises and they use mariadb. They don't even really do it in the weird ways that AWS does, where they use it as a bizarre caching layer.

It's kinda like how for the longest time "mainframes" were the go-to computer for enterprise applications with extreme IO needs. You probably wouldn't recommend someone go talk to IBM if they need to process a lot of records in this day and age unless they were already neck deep in cobol, the go-to language for enterprise applications.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 day ago

Our clients are some of those "biggest companies in the world" (US and Europe). Sadly, Oracle is very much so in it.

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

processing extreme amounts of data at extreme io rates

For anybody trying to take that seriously, keep in mind that the Oracle's query planner is absolutely shit, the write performance can go to shit depending on the contents of your transactions, any advanced transaction insulation also destroys performance, and single-machine performance is completely shit, the extreme numbers are all on scalability and when compared to other (unpatched on the case of Postgres) ACID databases.

Also, it's not clear if those claims are still real, because you can only run Oracle databases if you sign a contract saying you won't compare it to other systems.

[–] namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Also, it’s not clear if those claims are still real, because you can only run Oracle databases if you sign a contract saying you won’t compare it to other systems.

What the hell?? That can't possibly be legal/enforceable, can it?

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago

No idea.

Oracle is known to throw millions into lawsuits with no fundaments at all, and I'm not aware of anybody that published a comparison involving their database recently. Those two may be related, or not, IDK.

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

you can only run Oracle databases if you sign a contract saying you won’t compare it to other systems

lol, now that's a policy that speaks to being confident in their product!

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

The usual whataboutism people reply with every time I point this is that Microsoft does the same.

What is correct, Microsoft does the same :)

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

How would you know ... unless you compared them?

Lawsuits incoming!

[–] marcos@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

Well, the stuff in my post is obvious enough that you don't need to actually look for it.

My first experience with Oracle was taking out all the government services from my state because I passed a DBA a script that inserted too much data in a transaction...