I work with engineers and technical managers with 25+ years of experience, building and maintaining serious business software 'you could run a country with' - people here build react web apps or do scientific research, or work for a SaaS provider - completely different view than building highly complex, regulated, mission critical software that supposed to run for decades and be supported at this level.
I think it's an arrogant and naive mistake to think nobody reading hacker news has ever built anything complex, regulated, mission critical, or intended to last.
A more useful line of conversation might be discussing the vastly different requirements and environments (both physical and bureaucratic) that span our industry. Right now I'm a one man dev team slinging multiple products as fast as I can, trying to find revenue as the runway burns up. It would be silly to think everyone is in my same position with my same tradeoffs and I don't expect that to be particularly controversial.
If you have some good insight about when Oracle products are particularly well suited to the task I think many folks would love to read and discuss it. If you just want to act like you're the only one taking your job seriously then I suggest you just save your keystrokes and everybody's time.
From my anecdotal experience: no. It is arcane, user hostile and buggy. And performance for many workloads is roughly in line with open source databases.
Some of the tooling around it is nice and it has some nice features but I would not recommend it even if it was free.
Edit: unless the great database is MySQL, they are actually decent stewards of it and while I still strongly prefer PostgreSQL MySQL is pretty good these days.
It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org).
As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.
Even worse. It skews the architecture decisions towards few large physical database servers instead of many small VMs, because licensing cost is per core in the whole VM cluster, so totally unaffordable. So you get reduced availability, higher risk, reduced separation, reduced security, higher datacenter cost, and they bill you an arm and a leg on top...
This often isn't related to a monolith vs microservice comparison. Large enterprises and institutions tend to run a lot of completely separate applications, which then end up sharing database infrastructure unnecessarily. Think of universities, for example.
Oracle extends the problem to the opposite end of microservices, by encouraging monolith DB consolidation, with unrelated monolith applications on the same db cluster for purely budgetary reasons.
> unrelated monolith applications on the same db cluster
If your "db cluster" is split into containers on one VM as you would do in any other cloud (because VMs are expensive), then you would have the same problem.
> encouraging monolith DB consolidation
Does it? I don't think so. I've worked with Oracle's stuff and the only real difference between Oracle Cloud and other clouds is that Oracle cloud is more expensive overall. There's nothing stopping you from running virtual machines and kubernetes in the same way you'd run it in any other cloud.
Yep. And then when the DBs are already on the same servers, when there's a need to connect previously unrelated apps to some master data, a shortcut presents itself. The DBA thinks: After all, why not? Why shouldn't I take it?
If you handle large amounts of geographical data you'll need to invest quite a bit to move to Postgres. It's possible but you're going to need to touch a lot of existing code and figure out new performance characteristics and so on. A lot of it will be hard for an average organisation, not because it's very sophisticated and complex but because it will be large amounts of boring rote work that many developers don't see how they could do programmatically.
Rumour has it the same holds for some other types of data as well but I lack immediate experience in other areas.
With Oracle you also have a rather robust, exhaustive documentation of error messages and even obscure stuff is likely to be figured out in some forum thread by someone and an indian guy. Postgres isn't exactly bad in this area but you can run into things where you need to go deep in debugging yourself and figure out minutiae of your specific version.
Containers also remove most of the issues with running several instances in development and CI environments.
I still don't recommend anyone to pick Oracle for greenfield stuff, instead you should work around shortcomings in other database engines, but for a large organisation with certain demands that already has buyin it makes sense.
PostGIS seems leaps better to me (like the PG DX in other aspects). Eg in Oracle you don't have 2d points. Adding a geo index can fail in the middle and leave the table in a unusable state that requires DBA magic to untangle. Etc.
This is just on top of the general technical inferiority (eg there are no transactional schema changes, so you don't get the safe go/no-go in those when applying those as part of app deploys with a migration tool)
SDO_POINT(x, y, 0) or SDO_POINT(x, y, NULL) ought to do what you want. Index corruption can be a nasty problem on Postgres too.
You need to decide if and how to perform a rollback, similar to how you would define a down() procedure in migration files. A schema change might imply changes to data, and in that case you might turn off client writes, copy the table, change it, validate, do rename dance, turn on client writes again. If it doesn't it might be much cheaper to operate on a single copy. How does Postgres decide on such strategies automatically?
Many moons ago when I was green and my skin was a lot smoother I pointed out to my then boss that we could relatively easily (a few weeks of work) move our product from Oracle to Postgres and save n x $1000 for each installation we shipped to a customer.
My personal goal was to avoid becoming an Oracle expert. (Why? Because even as someone who passed advanced Oracle training easily it was still extremely painful. One mistake towards the end of an installation could easily result in 2 days extra work to clear it out.)
Stupid as I was I said nothing about all the work we went through and only mention all the money we could save.
The response was something I learned a lot from.
It was mild and friendly and something along the lines of "here's what you don't get young lad: the customer pays for the Oracle license on top of our original price and we get a 10% cut. Changing to Postgres will effectively cost us money. Also for <this industry> when we say it is based on Oracle they feel safe."
I'm back at Oracle today after a decade of less painful options and Oracle is still painful but these days I'm not the DBA thankfully and only have to deal with connectionstrings that makes every other database look easy, different SQL syntax etc.
EPM products were originally built on SQLServer (or on nothing, like Essbase), and then adapted to run on Oracle. So it's more like "the products commercially forced to run on Oracle, like EPM".
Not that it matters that much - there are better EPM/CPM products now available, like OneStream ;)
Hey, to chip in: try cardio, especially running. Men loose muscle mass with age, as you are already aware, resistance training is important, but cardio should be on top of your list.
I was there with you in terms of brain fog, general mental slowdown, what is called cognitive decline, and mind you, I presume we are healthy, without cognitive degeneration or serius injuries or conditions.
Running 3 times per week should get you on track in about a month. Try it and notice the difference. We are made for movement. If you're healthy and don't feel like running, in my case, i immediately know i should be doing the thing I don't feel like doing. Running. 1x interval training, 1x hill repeats, 1, long run in cardio zone 2. If you can, get s Garmin watch. Stats will help you maintain focus on the big picture. Streaks can help reframe for consistency.
I started training when corona hit, this is the best I've felt ever. Slowly progressed to cycling on off days for better recovery. Bought smart watches for friends, now we keep each other in check, we sometimes even meet at the pool at 6 am for a quick swim session. I now do some kind of activity 6 times per week. If i ever stop working on software, I'll help others train and get better to feel good and feel healthy - that's how much it gave me and i absolutely love it.
hint: optimize for training the next 20-30 years (I'm 39) which means injury prevention, recovery activities, everything else as nutrition and rest follows as you observe your own body and get in tune with what it needs. Honest good luck to you, I'm excited for you!
I've always been a runner of sorts, but not super consistent. On average I would say I run 2-3 miles a week. But that could mean 15 miles in 1 week, followed by 2-3 weeks of low, or even zero running.
My main problem is consistency and I can only hazard a guess that its consistency that produces the really beneficial effects? Because on those weeks where I do run a lot, I generally don't feel much better. In fact, in the last 2 years I've started feeling worse. Beat down, tired, and not energized by the run.
I've recently tried going from distance running (5 miles) to speed running. I'll run two miles, in a 6:30 pace, rather than 5 miles in a 8:00 pace.
The result is actually a much more brutal feeling, with much heavier breathing, and much more soreness. But surprisingly, I actually feel a little bit of that positive feeling. I've only JUST started doing this so its too early to tell, but the really high cardio and heavy breathing seems like it may have some potential to reverse some of the negatives I've accrued.
To sum it up - I've actually always been active and I'm in good/ok shape, but I generally am not really pushing it. I run distance, not speed. I rest a lot. Maybe I'm just not active ENOUGH.
I hear you. Consistency is key. Scheduling a race few months in the future can clarify the immediate 'why' - the big picture is not the race but health. The path is the goal, really. This becomes clearer with consistent training. Like with anything, progressive overload comes naturally as consistent training builds endurance and an/aerobic capacity. You just operate at the increasing levels of effort your body and mind can handle. Consult your doctor if any health concerns arise as you progress and observe your body. Good luck, I'm off to my morning run!
Agree. Also testosterone. I was lucky enough to have lab work before and after getting covid twice. My T numbers halved in less than a year. I was still within the “normal range” so it took some arguing with the doctors to get a prescription for a very low dose. Within 24 hours of starting, I felt like myself again. Brain fog was gone, energy was back, my mood rebounded. No negative side effects thus far. I had tried a lot prior to starting: intense therapy, ketamine, lots of exercise, losing weight, supplementation, lots of lab work. Nothing was as impactful as getting that jab.
Side note: the normal range for T is so wide that it’s meaningless.
> A significant proportion of male COVID-19 patients also display persistent low testosterone levels, reminiscent of absent or aberrant GnRH production, and SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to invade the brain. Taken together, these findings raise the possibility that in such patients, the GnRH system may be infected or dysfunctional, leading to the accelerated aging and cognitive deficits observed in patients with “long-COVID” or post-COVID syndrome. However, in what way and for how long GnRH neurons or their function may be affected in COVID-19 patients is still unknown.
This piques my interest because when I first started noticing these symptoms that's actually the first thing I thought of. I'm in my mid 30s and I've heard that's around when T starts to drop off. Probably worth mentioning this to my doctor eh?
Doesn’t hurt. Be prepared for resistance though. The steroid taboo means there are very few doctors in the US that are both experienced and comfortable prescribing.
I saw massive results at 1ml per month, try pitching that. The dose is so low it rules out abuse and lowers the possibility of side effects.
I use DriveSync on Android to sync selected Gdrive folder to my phone.
It works.