Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price

You’re going to have to elaborate on that last bit! SAP HANA is used by enormous organisations as the core database for their entire operations, so pervasive data corruption bugs would be rather… concerning.

I've found the only stocks where I can personally be successful stock picking are companies I have some sort of unique relationship or experience with that is uncommon or unavailable to sophisticated investors or analysts.

E.g. you're an IT admin at Big Co overseeing software contracts. You can often get interesting insights by looking at things like how aggressive their sales reps are with end of quarter discounts (how desperate are they to meet numbers that quarter?). Or if you see a company completely dropping the ball within your org, but on CNBC you constantly hear how great the company is by pundits and analysts -- maybe you know something the pundits don't.

Often times the consensus view of a stock trails reality by a few weeks to a month - there's a lot of non-public but also non-confidential information that isn't readily available to analysts, but exposed to employees of customers/vendors/partners/end-users.

TLDR: when stock picking or day trading, pick companies within the niche of the world where you're a SME.

Yeah 10yr long contracts aren’t the norm. Typically 3-5 years if it’s not on annual basis

I know of one largish bank moving away from Oracle middleware and RDMS. It's happening in pieces starting with low hanging fruit and for awhile the two will run in parallel (with the new data stores starting off as a comparison check to reconcile any bugs that crop up). Some early wins were account transaction logs that can go into better suited DBs, etc.

My understanding is that they were relatively lucky in that most of the hard parts are in the middleware layer and rarely the DB itself - the bank has been around since the 1800s, so has a huge mishmash of technologies that go from old IBM mainframes up to more modern cloud infra. So they're already kind of used to using middleware logic to stitch together various data sources.

The funny thing is that my contact there said the primary impetus is that they see the writing on the wall for a lot of their "legacy" Sun hardware, and figure if they're going to have to redo a lot of it, they may as well re-architect the rest. There'll still be oracle DBs running in the bank for a looong time, but there'll be less and less of it.

If it's the same for others as it was for us recently then very difficult... but the cost savings were so massive in terms of margin the risk was worth it. What taylodl mentioned about growing institutional knowledge and experience with Postgres in other apps first rang true as well. We are not 100% Oracle free, but we have migrated much away already.

In the larger discussion, I also wonder what their new contract rate is for these solutions. Even if 0% were migrating off, if 0% were migrating on then the net rate would still be decently negative because of natural business/app attrition.

They have some funny accounting like Google and Microsoft where everything is "cloud" but the revenue streams are certainly diversified from straight Oracle DB such that PostgreSQL equivalence or superiority does not affect the viability of the company or the stock price. Communities like this often over index technical and personal opinion with reality.

I worked at a midsize that was core internet infra, where we had an in house OS and ODM hardware and FOSS DBAs. The one Oracle DB and Oracle HW was slipped in the door through finance for ERP as you say. Although I suspect that would be cloud hosted these days.

> Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it

only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies.

There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens.

I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.

True words. I've seen this technique used to force people to think realistically. It goes like this (example):

- Is it possible for a 3 person team to manage 1000 distinct Kubernetes clusters?

- No way in hell!

- What if we hypothetically pay you $2M salary each?

- Well, let me think about it, we could figure this out...

It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know.

Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”

Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.

That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically.

It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.

It's not really going to benefit ME anything. It will benefit my employer this amount. I might get an extra bonus for successful migration, but it's peanuts compared to the savings.

So in such situation, I'd be tempted to actively oppose this initiative.

Imagine you think you save… You only save after you have paid…

Now imagine the switch is going to cost you $100M in downtime and change consultants, if it succeeds at all, and your new provider will up the price in a few years time anyway.

I believe that is mostly due to Sun's stagnation and lack of funding. Oracle released Java 7 in 2011 and Java 8 in 2014, which is arguably the start of modernizing Java.

The Java goodwill is mostly gone and I see zero new orgs trying it so while Java is still alive and well the mindshare has definitely been squandered given the capability that Java has.

I'm going to take this as the HN effect, if something isn't doing 500% a year its dead.