Amazon doesn’t have any control of its IP, Oracle does. Public clouds are becoming commoditized just like a majority of x86 vendors and eventually they'll abandon the low margin business or be required to increase pricing. Not every organization is going to move to a public cloud and therefore the areas of real growth in cloud is private and hybrid, which Amazon doesn't do. What happens when your startup company grows to an Enterprise and you start having governance requirements that don't allow you to run in a public cloud? You can't go private with Amazon. Oracle cloud allows you to seamlessly move from private, hybrid to public cloud and back, providing cloud goers freedom of choice with different levels of security and integration.
Oracle doesn't care about the developer experience? Oracle doesn't care about startups? Disrespect geeks? Huh? Do you have any real justifications to these or are you just basing this on your perceptions? Why would Oracle continue driving developments in JAVA, MySQL, OpenSTACK, etc and many other open source projects if it wasn't after the developer community? And have you seen the latest Software in Silicon Cloud Development platform that’s free?
https://swisdev.oracle.com
And did you know that Oracle has the Oracle Database Personal Edition which is designed to provide software developers a cost effective, yet full featured Oracle Database environment on which to develop, test and run custom or packaged applications?
I think the MySQL strategy is something like this: Oracle knows MySQL is defective, so they promote it as THE open source database, in the hopes that serious customers will get frustrated and just buy a license for a real (Oracle) database.
Elsewhere on this thread, somebody posted a link to a DB use survey which showed PostgreSQL as the #4 DB, behind Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server. Can't let that leak out, though.
Oracle Sales are far from eroding, and the opposite is true. Very misleading article and analysis, and questioning which vendor is in writers pocket? "Figures don't lie but liars do figure"
According to the leading analysts, Oracle has grown software revenues by over ~2.5% in 2014 vs 2013 and Oracle has grown Database revenue as well having a world wide DBMS share above 40% with growth of over 4% in 2014. If you look at who's got the most popular database(s) in the world, by ranking, Oracle Database is ranked #1 and Oracle MySQL is ranked #2. http://db-engines.com/en/ranking
While the article infers fewer licenses sold means Oracle is eroding, article doesn’t mention that Oracle is showing growth in software upgrades, DBAAS, and overall, growth in cloud- private, hybrid and public. The “c” in “Oracle DB 12c” stands for “cloud”. Oracle has over 400,000 customers, where over 310,000 are Database customers according to the Oracle Fact sheet http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219....
You say Oracle Database is expensive-compared to what? Its all about what level of business value you require? Oracle sells several editions of Oracle DB from Oracle Database Personal Edition that starts at $92 per named user license to Oracle Database Standard Edition One with License costing as little as US$180.00 to the Oracle Database Standard Edition version starting at $350 per User license. Not everyone requires the enterprise features of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Database&p2=Or...
Theres no such thing as free software unless you consider peoples time free, from administration, patching, management, support, upgrading, etc. You can surely download any open source Database but no ones going to support it for free. If you’re an enterprise, you're surely seeing your OPEX budgets sky-rocket, and a lot of that is due to "free" software and commodity hardware and the integration and management of a very complex, multi-vendor stack requiring armies of people to get it and keep it running.
I won't argue that support is not a necessary cost of doing business. Of course it is.
It's nice to be "free" to spin up a handful of disposable test instances of a database when doing test driven / agile type development.
Oracle is difficult and arcane to create a DB instance. I had the sys admin at work help me to try to set up an instance (he insisted it was "easy"). It takes MANY steps, some of which were shown to me in tools that did not lend themselves to scripting.
I have a script that can create a ready to rock PostgreSQL instance in 5 seconds, no "Mother, may I???" required to run it. Well, ready to run a schema creation / migration, but the "tablespace" and schema name with admin/app user were in and ready to go.
If you are twiddling a few lines in a legacy app, this doesn't matter. If you are doing a big chunk of new development, automated regression testing data sources matter.
