Thread

1. giancarlostoro · 1790262685 · focus · HN ↗

   I really don't get who keeps using Oracle outside of Java, and how they make their money, must be some legacy contracts or something, but Oracle has always been customer hostile, from all the things I've heard, they sound like a ransomware company (idk if they still do it, but they'd sell you the database, then "audit you" and if you used anything that wasn't in compliance, fine you, until you converted that to Oracle DB too or whatever wild stuff). I just don't get it. I get even less how its execs are okay running what could be a much more successful company so poorly. You can change Oracle for the better and become even more profitable if you change how you do business.

   Take Java as a solid example, they removed JavaFX from the core of Java, which made everyone think JavaFX was dead, recently they started providing enterprise support for JavaFX, which signals its production ready, but, who wants to trust Oracle? I sure don't. I can use C# for free without any of that baggage, and if I get all sorts of stable options for a GUI, and with Avalonia (and Uno?) I can run my GUI on any OS.

   1. galleywest200 · 1790263527 · focus · HN ↗

      My company uses Oracle BRM to bill for millions of phone calls each month. It would be such a crazy upheaval project to move from that.

      1. ginko · 1790263796 · focus · HN ↗

         Millions per month is tens per minute. That doesn't seem like all that much to me?

         1. sophacles · 1790264688 · focus · HN ↗

            There's likely an awful lot of tricky logic in the queries, stored procedures, etc. Dealing with taxes (very location and situation depending), details of any given customer's plan, equipment charges, etc etc for lines going back for decades... this stuff is hard to migrate correctly. It's not necessarily about qps.

            1. htrp · 1790272447 · focus · HN ↗

               why is business logic embedded in the queries?

               1. sophacles · 1790275472 · focus · HN ↗

                  I don't know specifically, I'm not the person who posted about that database. But it happens all the time, even in 2026 at good tech companies.

                  It tends to come from a couple of common places...

                  * efficiency - triggers, stored procedures and constraints can often speed up throughput in terms of transactions per second by reducing the number of round trips from the application to the db. I know above i mentioned its not about qps necessarily, but a telephone billing db probably includes records of calls and txts and so on, which across millions of people adds up.

                  * Older architecture patterns didn't put a single service in front of a database for that service. Instead theres a single database for the company, or for a function within the company, and many programs and services interacted with that database. In such an architecture, stored procedures and triggers are really useful for some business logic, to ensure consistency between various systems... Need to update tax rules for one state? Just donit in the db instead of the sales pos system at the stores and the billing system and the phone operator sales system and the website and the gateway for 3rd party sellers, etc. there's a certain logic to it too... This data is fundamental to the business and has lots of rules associated with it, those make sense to place together - the rules change independently of the systems accessing those rules, and over the life of the company those rules tied to laws and accounting may last far far longer than any given pos system or website rewrite.

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