This feels like such a strange acquisition for Oracle. Does anyone have insight on how Oracle envisions the TikTok brand and userbase adding value to the rest of the company?
Oracle needs cloud wins. I doubt they care about the actual functionality of TikTok. (Other than its Trump-annoyance functionality that is enabling this whole transaction, of course.)
Oracle becomes a trusted tech partner of Bytedance:
“ByteDance started opening data centers in India and the US in 2019. This may be strictly for internal purposes, but its possible they plan to launch a cloud hosting service. ByteDance acquired Terark in 2019 which allows databases to run 200x faster by reading compressed data at 50% of the cost. If they launch an external service, the selling point could be faster processing and access to some of ByteDance’s AI tech.
A cloud service combined with enterprise software (and eventually a phone or other hardware) would take a page out of Microsoft’s approach of bundling multiple products and selling them top down through the C- Suite.”
> Does anyone have insight on how Oracle envisions the TikTok brand and userbase adding value to the rest of the company?
Sure. The answer is that there is no such significant added value to Oracle, specifically, but TikTok itself will end up selling for bargain basement prices, meaning that added value isn't necessary for an acquisition to make sense.
I think this makes sense. Oracle isn't really acquiring TikTok, just its "US Operations". They presumably won't be responsible for developing algorithms, the app, or the backend, and will instead be running the service and hosting all of the data generated in the United States. Looked at this way, it's more like an unusually deep relationship with a cloud services provider than a buyout, and a huge win of business and reputation for Oracle Cloud.
But is it really a huge reputational win? Us geeks know that Tiktok's scale is huge, but your average bank is not going to be terribly impressed that Oracle is now hosting an app still widely viewed as some random frivolous teen twerk thing.
> but your average bank is not going to be terribly impressed that Oracle is now hosting an app still widely viewed as some random frivolous teen twerk thing.
Absolutely not. If anything, the young user base makes TikTok more valuable. It will be viewed as an analogue to Facebook before it exploded.
I'm not doubting TikTok's own value, I'm questioning the assertion that owning TikTok will have reputational benefits for Oracle as a cloud hosting provider.
Everyone is making the usual Oracle joke once again... but Oracle owns BlueKai, one of the largest data collection companies.
That is the answer.
TikTok will feed straight into BlueKai.
That data is the value it'll add to their company.
It also matters for the seller, to some extent, because the employees will now work at Oracle. If you're the CEO of TikTok, and now you're "Chief Social Media Officer" or whatever title the buyer will think up, would you rather hold that job at Oracle, Microsoft or somewhere else?
Sure, if you're the shareholder, you may not care what happens to your former employees, but the buyer should care that the value of the asset they just paid for is inclusive of human capital, and that value depends on the opinion of the people working on the seller's side
> Weeks later, China issued new regulations that would essentially bar TikTok from transferring its technology to a foreign buyer without explicit permission from the Chinese government.
> The Chinese regulations helped scuttle the effort by Microsoft, which said the only way it could both protect the privacy of TikTok users in the United States and prevent Beijing from using the app as a venue for disinformation was to take over the computer source code underlying the app, and the algorithms that determine what videos are seen by the 100 million Americans who use it each month.
This makes it clear that China has ties to Oracle management in some form or another, or Oracle wouldn't be the last man standing. This is going to be a shitshow.
There’s a difference with having a contract with a department and being best buddies with an autocrat wannabe. Who then signs an executive order and invokes national security on very shaky grounds to force a sale.
Still, I’m not saying that the $10B DoD contract and the way they tortured the process to avoid giving it to Amazon did not stink as well. Or that Amazon as a company is fine. There can be more than one festering carcass in a swamp.
Nah, all that Microsoft is trying to imply is that Oracle doesn’t give a shit about security engineering, and that the goofy geopolitical business alone does nothing for users. It’s plausible.
You can find a trump donor in basically every c-suite (there are only two parties in the US yeah?). Don’t need to reach for conspiracies at the drop of a hat all the time.
My prediction: Oracle couldn’t care less about TikTok as an entity, but wants their IP so they can sue everyone else who has a recommendation engine. No, it won’t make any sense, but much of that organization’s moves are inscrutable to me.
TikTok is about the furthest you would look for something to pass off as novel. If they were buying some decrepit social network precursor which no one ever used or can recall, that might still make more sense under this hypothesis. As it is, I’m sure Oracle already owns IP pertaining to recommendation engines that even predates TikTok’s existence!
Oracle is a greedy leech on the world and tech in general. Tiktok has something they want to use to sue other companies. Oracle knows almost no other way to do business.
The parent comment is just a super low effort HN trope. Company everybody hates does something so you have to dream up some silly reason that it fits into the existing narrative about them.
There is literally no reason to think this could possibly happen, apart from “Oracle is bad and they do bad IP lawsuits”. Tik Tok doesn’t have any novel IP that could support a theory like this, and Oracle isn’t even getting any IP in this deal.
Doooood. Literally Oracle bought Sun to sue Google. It is not a troll comment. The company on the whole has used IP to attack other companies in the past. It is a well known fact there is no troll about that.
And I would think the magic algorithm that comes along with Tiktok is IP.
Maybe you know the list of patents Bytedances holds? If they do not have IP around that algorithm they are idiots.
It’s not a troll comment. It’s a circlejerk comment. If the only thing you know about Oracle is “oracle bad” and “oracle do IP lawsuits”, that doesn’t give you an insight into why they might be making any particular decision. It’s a super low effort comment, it doesn’t hold any relevance to this situation, and the only reason people upvote it is because we all know that “oracle bad” is just an indisputable fact.
I think a possibility is that Oracle want to increase their competition with Amazon, Microsoft and Google, all of whom own massive consumer properties and/or social networks.
And that product was just pulled out of Europe last week for privacy violations. There is also a pending class action lawsuit against Oracle (and Salesforce) for this type of product violating GDPR.
So I don't think this is a great step forward for US consumers.
It seems as though the whole reason that Oracle is getting this and not Microsoft is that Microsoft insisted on getting the recommendation engine in the deal and ByteDance said no -- not exclusively, mind you, at all. Oracle won't be able to do what you're saying.
"You actually don't need to be open-minded about Oracle, you are wasting the openness of your mind [...] As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."
Perhaps the children's audit problems can be overlooked if they would like to purchase some nearly-usable HR management or accountancy software at this time.
An Oracle salesman once regaled me with tales of the "Larry Bonuses" that were payoffs issued to staff sexually harassed by the boss. He seemed to find it hilarious. I was underwhelmed - I have no idea if Ellison is a serial sexual harasser, but the fact that senior sales staff find the idea hilarious and laudable says that maybe you should be worried about what Oracle staff would do with access to information about teenagers.
"Banned" in India. In countries like India, most people are using Android and a large number are using third party app stores or installing APKs. So market presence will stay. Monetization will be impossible, sure, but India is not really profitable anyways.
I've been to a developing country where I suspect split between play store and bluetooth APK sharing is about 50/50. Most phones have APK sharing application installed at the point of purchase and some people aren't even signed-in on the Play store, despite using the internet and WhatsApp.
As an Indian who is around many non-tech oriented Android users, I am not sure about a large number of people using third-party stores. It will be interesting to see a survey or study about it.
Another thing is that with such bans, all major ISPs and network carriers are instructed to block the traffic to the related domains, so the app won't work anyway unless they roll out with a lot of changes.
I mean, yeah, but it's a super common bug in humans, who frequently want to translate between scales incorrectly (hence law of large/small numbers gambling errors, some kinds of discrimination/prejudice, bad generalizations, being upset when a 90% likely event doesn't happen, etc.)
As far back as 15 years ago, Oracle had the reputation of being the company where people would come to work, close their office door, and then work on a second job or side project in peace and quiet. Oracle was/is powered by zero innovation and all enterprise sales.
I thought the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok was funny, but I couldn't think of a company more effective to dismantle TikTok than Oracle.
True, but they have both operated independently & incredibly successfully with full support from Microsoft’s leadership.
If TikTok had a future, it was at Microsoft.
And Microsoft has a pretty successful consumer products division -- not the cash cow that enterprise sales are to them, but they do have consumer products. Including the Xbox division, which targets a lot of the market that TikTok does. Exactly what direct-to-consumer business targeting people in their teens/early 20s does Oracle have?
How is that possible? Is there just a really high supply of window offices? ie. does the office building have a really high window to floor area ratio?
Thin buildings produce a surprising amount of exterior windows. The last high rise I worked in put most of the common functionality near the core (hallways, bathrooms, elevators, printers) to maximize the amount of work space that had a view.
Sadly it was looking out over the West side of Chicago from the West side of the loop, so the view was mediocre even when the weather played nice.
Depends. I know someone who has an open office floor. The benefit is that the floors that have open offices have newer cafeterias and more amenities than the ones without open offices. Plus, the offices are pretty empty, even if they are open office.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (where I work) certainly does. It's about similar working environment to most tech companies in the area, so not exactly something to be driving me to seek employment elsewhere.
One of the nice things about this pandemic has been how silent my office is. So much easier to keep my head down and churn code / solutions to problems out.
Yes when I worked there a guy literally played WoW in his cubicle all day. It was no secret. He didn’t get fired for performance either, just culled in a RIF lol.
I know people who worked (full time) for Oracle who didn't even need to go to the office, they just did stuff remotely from time to time (never more than one hour/day). They actually had a second full time job that they went to.
No, that is pretty much accurate. Their flagship database is outstanding, worth every penny, the one to beat. However everything else they touch just wilts and dies. They don’t just have a black thumb, they have eleven of them. They killed Sun, Solaris, libdb (remember sleepycat software?), Java, and would have killed mysql if it didn’t fork. They are the bane of anyone looking for a job that encounters their horrid candidate management software. Forget COVID, murder hornets, and global warming - my nightmare is that one day Richard Hipp retires or falls ill and Oracle takes over SQLite.
Regarding the MySQL forks, what is the story? Do you mean MariaDB, or some other fork that I'm not aware of? Honestly I'm surprised at how MySQL managed to survive... Among all those other products that you mentioned, I would have thought it would be the first to die, because some people at Oracle might see it as a competitor of Oracle DB.
Percona is not really a fork, it's the upstream MySQL (8 currently) with some patches which add more visibility to what's going on inside (and some performance stuff like the thread pool).
Arguable these kind of "forks" are the one that keep mysql development and innovation progressing because those vendors would often submit those patches upstream.
Their flagship database was outstanding 20 years ago.
Today..not worth the price tag. And if you do pay the price tag, you're going to need some high priced DBAs to baby it along.
To your list I would add that with Hudson they achieved such an own-goal that all anyone knows is the renamed fork, Jenkins. (Which I believe was named after Leeroy Jenkins...)
> Their flagship database was outstanding 20 years ago.
Agreed. Having worked with and delivered some great solutions with Oracle DB in the 2000's, I've been telling people since at least 2010, that Oracle used to be the answer to the question, "which enterprise database?", but now is the answer to "which is the one vendor I should avoid at all costs?"
Doing business with Oracle is a very risky thing. Their hard selling tactics are despicable, bordering on blackmail.
Oracle software licenses are so opaque that there's almost no way to be compliant and that's by design.
So in essence: Either you pay more for your existing installation or buy some additional shit, which you don't need, or else.
The or else is the threat of a software audit, which is almost guaranteed to find you non-compliant and gives you 30 days to either pay up or get rid of every Oracle software component. Best of luck with that.
There are umpteen stories about this behavior on the web. For example this: [1].
Oracle's business model is not really technology, but a licensing racket for enterprise customers. Sort of
Nice company you have here, would be a shame if something happens to it
>Oracle is set to be announced as TikTok’s “trusted tech partner” in the U.S., and the deal is likely not to be structured as an outright sale, the person said.
Bytedance isn’t actually selling TikTok, and the White House gets its win.
I'd say they have been successful with a lot of their acquisitions: BEA, PeopleSoft, Seibel, and many more. Also, I think they have been a better steward of Java than Solaris had been since Java 6.
All our clients (some with massive deployments for the time) dropped Weblogic and other BEA products the moment of the acquisition. Where did they do well?
They're doing the deal as part of a consortium, Oracle is getting TikTok's cloud hosting in the US market (at least). Assuming TikTok doesn't fade in the next few years, it'll substantially increase the size of Oracle's cloud business and they can use it as a marketing point.
It suggests that Oracle's cloud business has such dire traction that they can't acquire prominent customers for it any other way than to directly buy part of them. It also speaks to that Ellison & Co. view the cloud shift as a terminal threat for Oracle, one that is getting worse by the day, and that if they don't succeed at building up their cloud business, they will erode and die (and they're right).
Oracle stayed in the game in the last round through massive consolidation, buying up the competition one after another (eg Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc). They'll try the same thing this time around as their organic efforts have largely failed; we'll see how much success they have given they're far outgunned this time around (and running from much further behind).
Theoretically they do. Practically I couldn't even get an account last time I tried (a few months ago). It would attempt to charge my credit card a 1 dollar "check the payment is working fee" and fail (even though the charge was going through successfully).
They offer 2 free Oracle databases. The catch is they're Oracle databases.
In other words it's the same as every cloud provider: They hope you'll build a business system that uses enough of their proprietary tech that you can't easily move to another provider.
You can run mysql on any other free database on the 2 free compute instances. It is totally up to you.
The autonomous database is Oracle's offering of their Oracle database - that requires no DBA or tuning and runs on Exadata infrastructure.
They are offering it for free - because they want enterprises using existing on-premise Oracle databases, to move their existing DB applications to the cloud.
Oracle Autonomous databases comes with free Oracle APEX - which is a low code / no code toolchain.
Zoom is not a Chinese company. Its founder and CEO happens to be Chinese, and they have operations in China, but the company was founded, incorporated, and initially exclusively operated in the U.S.
Just like GM operating in China is not transferring any IP, this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Monza_(China) being manufactured under SAIC-GM, a forced joint venture between GM and Chinese state-owned SAIC Motor is fine and dandy.
probably not because it's basically a Pyrrhic victory long-term. It'll drastically increase the chances of Facebook facing those issues in other countries, which would be devastating to the global business model of US software firms, and Facebook might get regulators attention again if the only significant competitor dies. I think Zuckerberg even said as much.
No one thinks this has to do with the relationship between the US President and Oracle? Amazon is throwing a fit because they weren’t chosen to be the Pentagons cloud provider. Now this. It’s favoritism.
I remember tech CEOs complains when h1B visas got cut bc they loved the cheap labor. Silicon valley only jumps in if it benefits their bottom line or for good PR
“Cheap labor” people with visa in FANG companies get paid the same salary as the non visa people, and it was the FANG ceos who complained, so I’m not sure I understand your comment.
TikTok is a black sheep because as soon as you defend it against the US, you’re painted as a Chinese shill advocating for Uighur genocide.
It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley is uninterested in defending it, despite the fact that this sort of deal is likely to severely fracture how tech services are treated by governments in the future.
It's sad that we are even looking to what stance tech companies have on human rights issues. The government should have sanctioned China severely already, tariffs, you name it.
At leas the pentagon deal was government related. Why the hell is the government putting it's nose up private deals like this and also asking for a cut?
I love the cynicism of believing that the presidency is interfering in the deals, but the optimism of believing that it must then go towards Federal budgets and not certain people's pockets. :)
It’s not cynicism that he’s interfering when it’s obvious - literally Trump making statements on his Twitter. As for the money into his pocket; no need, the reasoning for Trump is that it makes his voters like him (since they dislike China), which gets him reelected.
Because in this case the executive branch effectively forced the sale to happen by threatening to ban the platform. TikTok on its own wasn't looking to sell. Now, they have to sell to an American company in order to make Trump happy. So what else do they have to do to make Trump happy?
Well it's borderline acceptable to indirectly forcing them to sell by threatening a ban, but to actively oversee the sale and micromanage it is far beyond the line.
> it's borderline acceptable to indirectly forcing them to sell
It really is not. One of the biggest horrors of the Trump years is the extent to which this kind of capricious executive action has been normalized. A ban is a ban. If you genuinely think an app poses a security risk, then you use one of the executive tools available to shut it down.
There was no "ban" enacted here. It was a bargaining chip used to muck with the markets in an outrageously explicit way. We don't do that in this country. Or we never did before.
The closest equivalent to this in terms of effect would have been the trust busting of the early 20th century. And that involved all three branches of government working over years. This happened because One Guy decided he didn't like TikTok.
Well that doesn’t mean much, the White House could have signaled to ByteDance on the DL that they’d torpedo any non-Oracle deal... who knows, banning a single company from operating domestically without any immediate proven national security threat is unprecedented, the president just does whatever he feels like.
The hate around Oracle seems very emotional without reason and reminds me of the hate around Microsoft back in the day.
Oracle's latest acquisition [0] by is a consumer video creation company called sauce.video [1]
It could be that Oracle is looking for a new challenge in video technology to demonstrate the capabilities of their cloud services, even Zoom chosen them for their infrastructure [2].
> The hate around Oracle seems very emotional without reason and reminds me of the hate around Microsoft back in the day.
Seriously? There were plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Microsoft "back in the day". Less of them now, but hating Microsoft in the 90s and 00s was not "without reason".
yeah, there's a huge difference between "emotional" and "emotional without reason." operating in bad faith will indeed make people emotional, but for a very good reason.
Maybe so. It seems like that will be the case given that TikTok will be on Oracle's infrastructure as part of the deal. So there's one thing at least.
> Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, told TechCrunch Oracle’s scoop of TikTok “will add plenty of load to their infrastructure service.”
Honestly? They barely asked me to do any work in later years.
A lot of people were just checked out at the office, even management. I mostly collected a paycheck and worked on researching my own projects, so that when I quit, I hit the ground running with a startup.
It helps to know the context. I got wiped out in the dot-com boom of 2000. I needed a safe haven, Oracle was shelter from the storm. I got married, bought a house, had kids, and so for a while I was coasting.
They probably didn't want the app to survive and be competitive in the US. They didn't want a company capable of nurturing it and expanding it to buy it (Microsoft). They were contemplating just killing, at least this way they get a pay out.
It's very bizarre. What could Oracle possibly gain from TikTok from a business perspective? It seems so far away from their core business. MySQL, SUN, I kind of understand, but TikTok? Why didn't say Google or Amazon make a bid?
> What could Oracle possibly gain from TikTok from a business perspective?
Further credibility with the US government as they deepen their ties with the NSA and US intelligence. Leads to winning more massive government contracts and more favor from future administrations.
Oracle is ahead of the game. It has realized that ingratiating itself with the government is a recipe for long-term success.
I wonder how the deal is structured with respect to employee stock compensation. I was negotiating with them late last year and most of the comp was going to be in funny-money of the bytedance variety, which is both highly illiquid and hilariously valued. If US tiktok employees get converted to shares of Oracle, that's a substantial upgrade. Of course, they work for Oracle now, but still.
Oracle can audit the app code and also probably sandbox the back end in such a way that they can be fairly sure things aren't escaping, at least not on a large scale.
This is a fantastic idea - the only thing missing (that I see) is that Oracle would need to see the source code and verify that the checksum of the apps built from that code matches the downloads from the Google Play Store and App Store.
Otherwise the guarantee that no data is being sent to China is not airtight. Oracle could audit the app every time it gets an update and watch network traffic, but this would miss anything sent by code activated remotely after the fact. It wouldn't work for long, but the US government will look for any reason to deny this deal. I don't think Oracle will audit the app constantly anyway. Come to think of it, that could apply to the source code too, if the malicious code was extremely well hidden.
It is a video app. Couldn't you embed the embargoed data into the media content using steganography. All the receiver of the data would need to do is download a modified version of the client, then collect the data. From the server side it would just look like a normal TikTok app watching videos.
Yes. I think you are right. ByteDance is not selling Tiktok outright. They will be using oracle cloud infrastructure. But not sure if that will be enough for the current administration. It feels like tiktok is playing smart.
If it was that simple, Google would have been the obvious choice. They have already started migrating to GCP and signed an $800 million dollar three year deal.
Yes. It's made THEM billions of dollars. If you've ever been on the other side of the pipeline, as an advertiser or a web site owner, you know you're treated as a statistic. Businesses suddenly disappear when Google delists them on either end. That's most visible on Youtube, where random Youtubers find themselves demonatized with no apparent rhyme, reason, or appeal, but it happens all over the Googleyweb.
If it's one of a dozen places you advertise, that's fine. If you're trying to run a business where it's a core platform, you quickly run into the limits there.
So, the user graph will be bifurcated, with US users isolated from those in the rest of the world? If so, I don't see how the US-only TikTok remains popular for much longer.
350 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] thread“ByteDance started opening data centers in India and the US in 2019. This may be strictly for internal purposes, but its possible they plan to launch a cloud hosting service. ByteDance acquired Terark in 2019 which allows databases to run 200x faster by reading compressed data at 50% of the cost. If they launch an external service, the selling point could be faster processing and access to some of ByteDance’s AI tech.
A cloud service combined with enterprise software (and eventually a phone or other hardware) would take a page out of Microsoft’s approach of bundling multiple products and selling them top down through the C- Suite.”
https://turner.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-tiktok-and-underst...
Sure. The answer is that there is no such significant added value to Oracle, specifically, but TikTok itself will end up selling for bargain basement prices, meaning that added value isn't necessary for an acquisition to make sense.
Absolutely not. If anything, the young user base makes TikTok more valuable. It will be viewed as an analogue to Facebook before it exploded.
You don't just pick the highest paying bid, necessarily
Sure, if you're the shareholder, you may not care what happens to your former employees, but the buyer should care that the value of the asset they just paid for is inclusive of human capital, and that value depends on the opinion of the people working on the seller's side
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/technology/tiktok-microso...
> The Chinese regulations helped scuttle the effort by Microsoft, which said the only way it could both protect the privacy of TikTok users in the United States and prevent Beijing from using the app as a venue for disinformation was to take over the computer source code underlying the app, and the algorithms that determine what videos are seen by the 100 million Americans who use it each month.
This makes it clear that China has ties to Oracle management in some form or another, or Oracle wouldn't be the last man standing. This is going to be a shitshow.
Oracle also has ties to Trump. This stinks.
Still, I’m not saying that the $10B DoD contract and the way they tortured the process to avoid giving it to Amazon did not stink as well. Or that Amazon as a company is fine. There can be more than one festering carcass in a swamp.
Me thinks this was all a massive gambit to win the JEDI deal, hobble Oracle with a turd, and then pull out.
Oracle is a greedy leech on the world and tech in general. Tiktok has something they want to use to sue other companies. Oracle knows almost no other way to do business.
There is literally no reason to think this could possibly happen, apart from “Oracle is bad and they do bad IP lawsuits”. Tik Tok doesn’t have any novel IP that could support a theory like this, and Oracle isn’t even getting any IP in this deal.
And I would think the magic algorithm that comes along with Tiktok is IP.
Maybe you know the list of patents Bytedances holds? If they do not have IP around that algorithm they are idiots.
Anyway it will be interesting to watch.
So I don't think this is a great step forward for US consumers.
What an irony given Oracle's own roots in USA's espionage agencies.
"You actually don't need to be open-minded about Oracle, you are wasting the openness of your mind [...] As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."
- Bryan Cantrill, https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2046
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8279606
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24360449
Oracle is where things go to die.
RIP TikTok.
Any source for this? I wasn't aware that third party stores are used by the general population as commonly as the play store anywhere.
Another thing is that with such bans, all major ISPs and network carriers are instructed to block the traffic to the related domains, so the app won't work anyway unless they roll out with a lot of changes.
I thought the idea of Microsoft buying TikTok was funny, but I couldn't think of a company more effective to dismantle TikTok than Oracle.
You're not wrong - it is a little funny.
But on the other hand, they have been running LinkedIn (and Github!) pretty successfully, so it's not that ridiculous.
Ah, but therein lies the genius of the purchase.
In 40 years, the current TikTok userbase will be technology-hating, risk-adverse VPs -- a prime Oracle demographic.
They're just getting in early.
Minus the avoidable password breaches
I guess I'll be polishing my resume.
They paid for an apartment and car as well!
It’s a great place to be, actually.
Sadly it was looking out over the West side of Chicago from the West side of the loop, so the view was mediocre even when the weather played nice.
One of the nice things about this pandemic has been how silent my office is. So much easier to keep my head down and churn code / solutions to problems out.
Oracle has one of the last couple of proper industrial research labs left in the industry.
It regularly publishes at the top venues in multiple fields and funds a lot of academics.
2018: https://sigmod2018.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml
RAPID: In-Memory Analytical Query Processing Engine with Extreme Performance per Watt
2020: https://sigmod2020.org/sigmod_industrial_list.shtml
Database Workload Capacity Planning using Time Series Analysis and Machine Learning
Less sarcastically, I’d like to see some examples of this as I have a genuine interest in the topic.
I'd say they are doing a mediocre job on the whole. But I may just be bitter over recent bugs like renaming a table crashing the server.
Any ideas why?
Today..not worth the price tag. And if you do pay the price tag, you're going to need some high priced DBAs to baby it along.
To your list I would add that with Hudson they achieved such an own-goal that all anyone knows is the renamed fork, Jenkins. (Which I believe was named after Leeroy Jenkins...)
Agreed. Having worked with and delivered some great solutions with Oracle DB in the 2000's, I've been telling people since at least 2010, that Oracle used to be the answer to the question, "which enterprise database?", but now is the answer to "which is the one vendor I should avoid at all costs?"
IIRC, they wanted an English butler name[1] snooty enough to match "Hudson" - and Jenkins fit the bill (you can almost hear the British accent)
1. https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2011/01/11/hudsons-future/
Nah. If it were any good then the license wouldn't prohibit you from benchmarking it.
Instead of a license, the SQLite source code offers a blessing:
May you do good and not evil May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
[0] https://www.sqlite.org/different.html
Oracle software licenses are so opaque that there's almost no way to be compliant and that's by design.
So in essence: Either you pay more for your existing installation or buy some additional shit, which you don't need, or else.
The or else is the threat of a software audit, which is almost guaranteed to find you non-compliant and gives you 30 days to either pay up or get rid of every Oracle software component. Best of luck with that.
There are umpteen stories about this behavior on the web. For example this: [1].
Oracle's business model is not really technology, but a licensing racket for enterprise customers. Sort of
Nice company you have here, would be a shame if something happens to it
[1] https://www.netnetweb.com/content/blog/oracle-audits-will-ge...
edit : rephrased a sentence
Bytedance isn’t actually selling TikTok, and the White House gets its win.
https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/
Sun (the company), not Solaris (the OS). But yeah, Java has done relatively well.
Peoplesoft was pretty entrenched when Oracle bought it, and the state of other options in that field remains pretty grim.
Anybody remember PeopleSoft?
First posssttttt.
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/llacb47/2beb750b56bc98a5d...
?mod=djemalertNEWS
https://www.rd.com/article/the-dangers-of-tiktok-that-are-wo...
This is the real risk.
It suggests that Oracle's cloud business has such dire traction that they can't acquire prominent customers for it any other way than to directly buy part of them. It also speaks to that Ellison & Co. view the cloud shift as a terminal threat for Oracle, one that is getting worse by the day, and that if they don't succeed at building up their cloud business, they will erode and die (and they're right).
Oracle stayed in the game in the last round through massive consolidation, buying up the competition one after another (eg Siebel, PeopleSoft, etc). They'll try the same thing this time around as their organic efforts have largely failed; we'll see how much success they have given they're far outgunned this time around (and running from much further behind).
In other words it's the same as every cloud provider: They hope you'll build a business system that uses enough of their proprietary tech that you can't easily move to another provider.
The autonomous database is Oracle's offering of their Oracle database - that requires no DBA or tuning and runs on Exadata infrastructure. They are offering it for free - because they want enterprises using existing on-premise Oracle databases, to move their existing DB applications to the cloud.
Oracle Autonomous databases comes with free Oracle APEX - which is a low code / no code toolchain.
Does the ceo/founder have family in china that can be held hostage?
It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley is uninterested in defending it, despite the fact that this sort of deal is likely to severely fracture how tech services are treated by governments in the future.
He wants one to score with the voters. Given the unusual nature of the ask , it could be a donation to the project of his choicing like the wall
It really is not. One of the biggest horrors of the Trump years is the extent to which this kind of capricious executive action has been normalized. A ban is a ban. If you genuinely think an app poses a security risk, then you use one of the executive tools available to shut it down.
There was no "ban" enacted here. It was a bargaining chip used to muck with the markets in an outrageously explicit way. We don't do that in this country. Or we never did before.
The closest equivalent to this in terms of effect would have been the trust busting of the early 20th century. And that involved all three branches of government working over years. This happened because One Guy decided he didn't like TikTok.
This is the correct question to ask, but the answer is quite simple - because Donald Trump is corrupt and thinks he can get away with it.
You had a republic, can you keep it?
'ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft.' [0]
[0] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/13/microsoft-statem...
Oracle's latest acquisition [0] by is a consumer video creation company called sauce.video [1]
It could be that Oracle is looking for a new challenge in video technology to demonstrate the capabilities of their cloud services, even Zoom chosen them for their infrastructure [2].
[0] https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/
[1] https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/sauce-video/
[2] https://www.oracle.com/customers/zoom.html
Seriously? There were plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Microsoft "back in the day". Less of them now, but hating Microsoft in the 90s and 00s was not "without reason".
Never said that, read what I said again.
(emphasis mine) Okay, what am I missing? That looks like exactly the same statement.
> Seriously? There were plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Microsoft "back in the day".
That validates the second half of the comparison as much as it contradicts the first.
> Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, told TechCrunch Oracle’s scoop of TikTok “will add plenty of load to their infrastructure service.”
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/13/oracle-wins-bid-to-buy-tik...
"You are not allowed to spy on our citizens like that."
"Well, someone has to spy on them."
"You're right, we'll do it."
"OK, just don't interfere with OUR spying/propaganda programs and you can have all the US data for your own purposes."
"Deal."
It helps to know the context. I got wiped out in the dot-com boom of 2000. I needed a safe haven, Oracle was shelter from the storm. I got married, bought a house, had kids, and so for a while I was coasting.
-Microsoft Employee
Now Tiktok has to please not one but two authoritarian governments.
Further credibility with the US government as they deepen their ties with the NSA and US intelligence. Leads to winning more massive government contracts and more favor from future administrations.
Oracle is ahead of the game. It has realized that ingratiating itself with the government is a recipe for long-term success.
- Bytedance retains some ownership and control of the app and the algorithms
- Oracle runs the entire back end on their infrastructure
- Oracle guarantees to the US government that no data is going back to China (because they control the release of the app and control the back end)
- This satisfies the USA's (supposed) national security concerns and also satisfies China because TikTok is not actually being "sold" to a US company.
Otherwise the guarantee that no data is being sent to China is not airtight. Oracle could audit the app every time it gets an update and watch network traffic, but this would miss anything sent by code activated remotely after the fact. It wouldn't work for long, but the US government will look for any reason to deny this deal. I don't think Oracle will audit the app constantly anyway. Come to think of it, that could apply to the source code too, if the malicious code was extremely well hidden.
Also they will probably take over responsibility for the Play and App Store accounts and be responsible for pushing the new versions (after audit).
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tiktok-agreed-to-buy...
If it's one of a dozen places you advertise, that's fine. If you're trying to run a business where it's a core platform, you quickly run into the limits there.
Plenty of companies store their users’ data in the US, but user profiles and content made public is visible from anywhere in the world.
- TikTok ruined Trumps rally
- Facebook is threatened by TikTok growth in US
- Zuck testifies before congress, pointing fingers at China and companies like TikTok
- Zuck met Trump, shaked hands under the table
- Trump asks TikTok to sell
- to Oracle.... best US company to curb TikTok growth
- Facebook does nothing about Trump posts
- Profit for Trump, less competitor for Zuck
- Things probably staged. What is one reason TikTok "chooses" Oracle over Microsoft?
edit: formatting