alt Hacker NewsShort answer: today I think there is genuinely nothing that anyone should use oracle for, but their database used to be seriously far ahead of the competition.
A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability and those were Oracle and Sybase and Oracle was really the only game in town if you actually wanted certain features like online backups and certain replication configurations.
At the time, MySQL existed and was popular for things like websites but had really hard scalability caps[1] and no replication so if you wanted HA you were forced to go to oracle pretty much. Postgres also wasn't competitive above certain sizes of tables that seem pretty modest now but felt big back then, and you used to need to shut postgres access down periodically to do backups and vacuum the tables so you couldn't use it for any sort of always-on type of use case.
Oracle also had a lot of features that now we would use other free or cloud-hosted services for like message queues.
[1] in particular if you had multiple concurrent readers they would permanently starve writers so you could get to a situation where everyone could read your data but you could never update. This was due to a priority inversion bug in how they used to lock tables.
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There was also DB2. DB2 was (still is) an excellent database that IBM has completely fumbled.
"At the time, MySQL existed ..."
You had to be careful with MySQL back then as constraints were syntactic sugar but not enforced. PostgreSQL was indeed much tougher to manage but more full-featured.
SQL Server was pretty good until they went the Oracle way with their licensing shenanigans, but even with that they were a lot cheaper than Oracle. In fact SQL server was one of the few great products that came out of MS.
IIRC they also had the first native (100% Java) JDBC driver, so you could run from any platform and without weird JNI locking issues when using threads.
What's about DB2? I have no experience with it but I guess IBM specifically designed it for enterprise-scale transaction processing workloads...
Just curious, how was SQL Server perceived at the time compared to Sybase and Oracle? I know it originated as a port of Sybase.
I keep landing into projects with Oracle, SQL Server, DB 2.
Naturally our customers aren't companies that care about HN audience.
I disagree as I was running clustered sql server 6.5 and 7 in 1998 for hundreds of concurrent users doing millions of reads per hour on NT basically commodity boxes. Replaced it with Oracle for 100x cost and lost performance.
I think even back then you were usually better off with distributed databases running mysql or postgres over Oracle. Although people liked to think a giant Oracle db was better.
> A very long time ago (circa 2000) there were basically 2 databases that worked for use cases where you needed high availability and vertical scalability
... and both of them were Postgres.
I used it in the late 90s for the backend for websites written in PHP3, but everyone said this was ridiculous and silly and don't you know that everyone's using the MySQL thing.
So I used this MySQL thing, but by about 2005 I'd gone back to powering my lawnmower with a 500bhp Scania V8 because I just preferred having that level of ridiculous overkill in an engine.
Nowadays? Key/Value store in RAM is probably fine for testing -> Sqlite is often Good Enough -> Ah sod it, fire Postgres into a docker container and warn the neighbours, we're going down the Scanny V8 route yet again.
I was around back then and I call Bullshit on everything you claim. There were more database options in 2000 than there were in 1996. Even before that there was FoxPro… c’mon man. Oracle’s only value was they built a NO EXIT clause into their contracts…
We were building a payments system in the early 2000s and got a diktat to not use Oracle. The amount of things we had to build to satisfy the availability and durability requirements were so huge it consumed the first few years of work. We didn’t get to the business side of things until much later. Funny thing is we ended up giving up on MySQL and went back to oracle after all that work. The whole thing was scraped after a couple of years.
To get to the level of scale that oracle can handle we had to build sharding and cluster replication from scratch. It still didn’t get to even 1/10th of a single oracle node. Obviously we made a lot of poor architecture decisions as well - in hindsight, of course.