{"slug": "oracle-database", "name": "Oracle Database", "category": "databases", "category_name": "Databases", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 34, "warners": 20, "score": -11.928, "rising": 0.35, "first": "2025-11-03", "latest": "2026-09-27", "why": "Autonomous DB can run on-premises or in any cloud, not just Oracle's cloud", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 8, "compare": 4, "warn": 20}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "Autonomous DB can run on-premises or in any cloud, not just Oracle's cloud", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "oracle.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.oracle.com/database/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Oracle Database", "Oracle", "oracle"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 795275968, "item_id": 49704748, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704748", "by": "phartenfeller", "date": "2026-09-14", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "So looks like they overcome their limitations.", "excerpt": "Oracle is now doing quarterly DB releases. This is not just patches but including big features. Any SQL enthusiast would most likely find Assertions [1] or Deep Data Security [2] interesting. So looks like they overcome their limitations. [1] https://oracle-base.com/articles/26/assertions-26 [2] https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/security/deep-data-security-technical-brief.pdf", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle\u2019s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts"}, {"id": 764514320, "item_id": 47782145, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47782145", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-04-15", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Autonomous DB can run on-premises or in any cloud, not just Oracle's cloud", "excerpt": "Autonomous DB can run on-premises or in any cloud, not just Oracle's cloud. So it's not quite the same. I think PG doesn't have most of the features I named, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have integrated queues for example (SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED isn't an MQ system), but also, bear in mind the \"postgres\" cloud vendors sell is often not actually Postgres. They've forked it and are exploiting the weak trademark pro", "context": "", "use_case": "local dev database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Do You Even Need a Database?"}, {"id": 760747936, "item_id": 47546746, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546746", "by": "noisy_boy", "date": "2026-03-27", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Oracle's external tables which turned out to be clear winner", "excerpt": "Wow that takes me back. I used to lurk on unix.com when I was starting with bash and perl and would see CFAJohnson's terse one-liners all the time. I enjoyed trying my own approaches to compare performance, conciseness and readability - mainly for learning. Some of the awk stuff was quite illuminating in my understanding of how powerful awk could be. I remember trying different approaches to process large files at fi", "context": "", "use_case": "Processing large files", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Faster Alternative to Jq"}, {"id": 749157955, "item_id": 46822372, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46822372", "by": "theturtletalks", "date": "2026-01-30", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "His other projects like CodexBar and Oracle are great too.", "excerpt": "I\u2019m a big fan of Peter\u2019s projects. I use Vibetunnel everyday to code from my phone (I built a custom frontend suited to my needs). I know I can SSH into my laptop but this is much better because handoff is much cleaner. And it works using Tailscale so it is secure and not exposed to the internet. His other projects like CodexBar and Oracle are great too. I love diving into his code to learn more about how those are b", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw \u2013 Moltbot Renamed Again"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 797795152, "item_id": 49862197, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49862197", "by": "jiggawatts", "date": "2026-09-27", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Oracle requires an opt-in(!) flag that is incomplete and configured on the server instead of the client", "excerpt": "Those trace flags are reset by an implicit \"EXEC sp_reset_connection\" called every time you take a connection out of the pool. See: https://github.com/dotnet/SqlClient/issues/767#issuecomment-714625076 \"So, let's say you created a new pooled connection and closed it, driver will pool this connection but the physical connection is already active on server side. When the driver reactivates this pooled connection, it's ", "context": "", "use_case": "relational database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity"}, {"id": 797493184, "item_id": 49843324, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49843324", "by": "jiggawatts", "date": "2026-09-25", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.", "excerpt": "\"The best\", but you'll be sued if you publish benchmarks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause Every time I use Oracle, I regret it. Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, \"infecting it\". After a half a dozen of those, the ", "context": "", "use_case": "database for .NET app", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity"}, {"id": 790604624, "item_id": 49412789, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412789", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-08-23", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "the queries it can monitor live are a subset of all queries", "excerpt": "BTW, Oracle supports this under the name \"continuous query notification\". https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/26/adfns/cqn.html You can get callbacks from the driver as query results change, or have notifications be sent to stored procedures, or posted to a message queue (and from there turned into web hooks etc). The notification comes with info about the deltas. The main issue with it is that", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Things I want in a modern relational query language"}, {"id": 790104881, "item_id": 49381555, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381555", "by": "jongjong", "date": "2026-08-20", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Oracle database is essentially never used outside of government nowadays.", "excerpt": "They don't produce anything that people like. Everyone using their products is forced to use it. Their Office suite is foisted on governments. For example, several governments in the EU moved off of it starting a few years back... Many are still on it. Oracle database is essentially never used outside of government nowadays. This has been the case for decades. Government is just locked into expensive contracts with t", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA"}]}], "who": [{"by": "tombert", "context": "worked at Apple on iTunes", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46895717", "date": "2026-02-04"}, {"by": "kakacik", "context": "works with an 80s core banking system", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746065", "date": "2026-01-24"}, {"by": "c_shu", "context": "10+ years software developer, job seeker", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46184995", "date": "2025-12-07"}, {"by": "TylerJaacks", "context": "job seeker in Des Moines, IA", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804816", "date": "2025-11-03"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["database", "relational database", "database for .net app", "managed database", "production database", "local dev database"], "compared": [{"slug": "postgresql", "name": "PostgreSQL", "co": 24, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 3}, {"slug": "microsoft-sql-server", "name": "Microsoft SQL Server", "co": 10, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "mysql", "name": "MySQL", "co": 8, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "sqlite", "name": "SQLite", "co": 7, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 802404785, "item_id": 50150299, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50150299", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-10-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "DML can be parallelized and write masters scale horizontally", "excerpt": "MVCC doesn't have to work the way Postgres does it. In some other databases a write like a DELETE or UPDTE directly overwrites disk blocks in place. There are no row copies or vacuums. To provide MVCC the database generates \"undo logs\" which are what they sound like - if you need to read the database at an earlier snapshot it reads the data off disk then use the undo data to revert the writes that happened after your", "context": "part-time role in the Oracle DB group", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "How Postgres DELETE can actually scale"}, {"id": 789142224, "item_id": 49321389, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49321389", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-08-16", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the Oracle cloud has great support for the Oracle Database", "excerpt": "It's an ironic claim because the Oracle cloud has great support for the Oracle Database, which doesn't require \"bouncers\" or equivalent. Its support for server-side connection pooling, client side load balancing (SCAN) and horizontal scaling means it offers exactly what the author wants - a single URL that just magically works and scales to any amount of work or connections cheaply. https://docs.oracle.com/en/databas", "context": "part-time in the Oracle DB group", "use_case": "Enterprise database, connection pooling", "switched_from": "", "story": "Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?"}, {"id": 784775056, "item_id": 49048441, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048441", "by": "venkat971", "date": "2026-07-25", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Oracle has something like this, and I worked on this project when I was there.", "excerpt": "Oracle has something like this, and I worked on this project when I was there. Although I was fascinated by the use cases, the adoption was pretty low in the relational world. https://www.oracle.com/in/database/integrated-graph-database/features/", "context": "Former Oracle engineer on its graph feature", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "DuckPGQ \u2013 A DuckDB community extension for graph workloads"}, {"id": 775098241, "item_id": 48443640, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48443640", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-06-08", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Disclosure: in the Oracle DB group, opinions are my own and not that of the company.", "excerpt": "A bigger issue is scalability. Note that this blog post claims YugabyteDB uses serializable as the default isolation level, but if we look at the latest version of their docs it seems they backed off that and at some point the default became snapshot isolation, and then they backed off again and for new databases the default is read committed i.e. the same as Postgres and Oracle: https://docs.yugabyte.com/stable/expl", "context": "works in the Oracle DB group", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs?"}, {"id": 766712224, "item_id": 47919514, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47919514", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-04-27", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Most of these problems don't surface with a better database engine", "excerpt": "It's interesting how many people are just writing off the whole premise of letting agents work directly with databases. SQL is a language and not an API because it was intended to be hand written and often still is. There are lots of legitimate use cases for this if the safety level can be raised high enough. I'm doing some research on this topic at the moment, along with many other people on the database team at Ora", "context": "database team at Oracle", "use_case": "enterprise relational database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Databases Were Not Designed for This"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778086", "title": "Do You Even Need a Database?", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905555", "title": "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842483", "title": "Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47587935", "title": "Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108297", "title": "How Postgres DELETE can actually scale", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49702239", "title": "Oracle\u2019s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2025-12": {"warn": 5, "neutral": 2}, "2026-01": {"warn": 3, "neutral": 2, "recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {"warn": 5, "neutral": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-03": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 1, "warn": 2}, "2026-04": {"warn": 1, "compare": 2, "neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {"warn": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 797795152, "item_id": 49862197, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49862197", "by": "jiggawatts", "date": "2026-09-27", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Oracle requires an opt-in(!) flag that is incomplete and configured on the server instead of the client", "excerpt": "Those trace flags are reset by an implicit \"EXEC sp_reset_connection\" called every time you take a connection out of the pool. See: https://github.com/dotnet/SqlClient/issues/767#issuecomment-714625076 \"So, let's say you created a new pooled connection and closed it, driver will pool this connection but the physical connection is already active on server side. When the driver reactivates this pooled connection, it's ", "context": "", "use_case": "relational database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity"}, {"id": 797493184, "item_id": 49843324, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49843324", "by": "jiggawatts", "date": "2026-09-25", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Every time I use Oracle, I regret it.", "excerpt": "\"The best\", but you'll be sued if you publish benchmarks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_DeWitt#DeWitt_Clause Every time I use Oracle, I regret it. Just this month, I tried to hook it up to a modern .NET app with the latest Oracle client and discovered that if you cancel a transaction, the connection enters a broken state and is returned to the connection pool, \"infecting it\". After a half a dozen of those, the ", "context": "", "use_case": "database for .NET app", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity"}, {"id": 795275968, "item_id": 49704748, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49704748", "by": "phartenfeller", "date": "2026-09-14", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "So looks like they overcome their limitations.", "excerpt": "Oracle is now doing quarterly DB releases. This is not just patches but including big features. Any SQL enthusiast would most likely find Assertions [1] or Deep Data Security [2] interesting. So looks like they overcome their limitations. [1] https://oracle-base.com/articles/26/assertions-26 [2] https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/security/deep-data-security-technical-brief.pdf", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle\u2019s 6am layoff emails hit staff amid new wave of cuts"}, {"id": 790604624, "item_id": 49412789, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49412789", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-08-23", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "the queries it can monitor live are a subset of all queries", "excerpt": "BTW, Oracle supports this under the name \"continuous query notification\". https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/26/adfns/cqn.html You can get callbacks from the driver as query results change, or have notifications be sent to stored procedures, or posted to a message queue (and from there turned into web hooks etc). The notification comes with info about the deltas. The main issue with it is that", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Things I want in a modern relational query language"}, {"id": 790104881, "item_id": 49381555, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49381555", "by": "jongjong", "date": "2026-08-20", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Oracle database is essentially never used outside of government nowadays.", "excerpt": "They don't produce anything that people like. Everyone using their products is forced to use it. Their Office suite is foisted on governments. For example, several governments in the EU moved off of it starting a few years back... Many are still on it. Oracle database is essentially never used outside of government nowadays. This has been the case for decades. Government is just locked into expensive contracts with t", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA"}, {"id": 783008465, "item_id": 48938029, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938029", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-07-16", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Oracle can add missing indexes on the fly.", "excerpt": "What sort of landmines are you referring to? This is quite interesting. Still it's not just SQL Server and Oracle. PlanetScale - the author of this blog post - also had a DeWitt clause until literally just days ago. They replaced it with a slightly different clause but I wouldn't be willing to benchmark under their new rules. https://planetscale.com/blog/transparency-in-benchmarking It says benchmarking is allowed on", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Making 768 servers look like 1"}, {"id": 780369457, "item_id": 48773091, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773091", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-07-03", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "you should check out the prices to rent an Oracle DB and see how it compares", "excerpt": "If you compare prices vs cloud managed Postgres it's not that expensive. Or rather, cloud managed Postgres is expensive, especially once you get into the cloud-specific forks of it that try to make it scale, because AWS/Azure/etc know that people will pay a lot of money for the Postgres brand but don't want to admin it themselves. So the moment you commit to paying for a managed database you should check out the pric", "context": "", "use_case": "managed database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Postgres transactions are a distributed systems superpower"}, {"id": 779780593, "item_id": 48736287, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736287", "by": "zepearl", "date": "2026-06-30", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "", "excerpt": "> Synchronously updated materialized views... Oh yes, I'd love them too (if you're referring to, in Oracle slang, \"...update on commit\") - and it would be cool to have as well the option for a lazy update (\"on demand\" by taking into consideration only the records that have been changed since the last refresh, to handle multiple updates in a single pass - not sure how Oracle can achieve that technically...). This woul", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Looking Ahead to Postgres 19"}, {"id": 776116976, "item_id": 48507311, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507311", "by": "bhaak", "date": "2026-06-12", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It never came to pass when we used Oracle", "excerpt": "I remember reading about this feature for Oracle in the 2000s and was always interested to use it in a production environment. It never came to pass when we used Oracle, maybe now with Postgres I will finally have a chance at it.", "context": "", "use_case": "production database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time"}, {"id": 765775649, "item_id": 47860978, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47860978", "by": "pjmlp", "date": "2026-04-22", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "it is MS SQL, Oracle, DB2", "excerpt": "We are on the outside, for the types of customers we serve it is MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, or some SaaS product that you can only access via GraphQL. Very seldom I use something like Postegres, last time was in 2018.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Windows Server 2025 Runs Better on ARM"}, {"id": 765123634, "item_id": 47820227, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820227", "by": "johnbarron", "date": "2026-04-18", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "who is not an issue on Oracle, SQL Server, or IBM DB2", "excerpt": ">> Just monitor it and you\u2019re done. This is just anecdote, colliding with documented database behavior, who is not an issue on Oracle, SQL Server, or IBM DB2. PostgreSQL explicitly documents xid wraparound as a failure mode that can lead to catastrophic data loss and says vacuuming is required to prevent it. Near exhaustion, it will refuse commands. Small sample of known outages: - Sentry \u2014 Transaction ID Wraparound ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "PostgreSQL production incident caused by transaction ID wraparound"}, {"id": 764641217, "item_id": 47790076, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47790076", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-04-16", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "Oracle can infer a schema from a collection of documents", "excerpt": "RAC is a default part of any cloud Oracle DB, I think! I must admit I'm not an expert in all the different SKUs so there might be some that aren't, but if you rent an autonomous DB in the cloud you're probably running on ExaData/RAC. That's why the uptime is advertised as 99.95% even without a separate region. > Index creation https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23876479/will-postgresql... I was ambiguous. That's an ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Do You Even Need a Database?"}, {"id": 764565777, "item_id": 47785361, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785361", "by": "sgarland", "date": "2026-04-15", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "their RDBMS has some truly astounding capabilities", "excerpt": "Unless I\u2019ve missed something, Postgres doesn\u2019t have automatic index creation, nor does it have JSON introspection to automatically convert it to a normalized schema (which is insane; I love it). It also doesn\u2019t do any kind of sharding on its own, though of course forks like Citus exist. It definitely doesn\u2019t do RAC / Exadata (not sure which part this falls under), where multiple nodes are connected and use RDMA to tr", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Do You Even Need a Database?"}, {"id": 764514320, "item_id": 47782145, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47782145", "by": "mike_hearn", "date": "2026-04-15", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Autonomous DB can run on-premises or in any cloud, not just Oracle's cloud", "excerpt": "Autonomous DB can run on-premises or in any cloud, not just Oracle's cloud. So it's not quite the same. I think PG doesn't have most of the features I named, I'm pretty sure it doesn't have integrated queues for example (SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED isn't an MQ system), but also, bear in mind the \"postgres\" cloud vendors sell is often not actually Postgres. They've forked it and are exploiting the weak trademark pro", "context": "", "use_case": "local dev database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Do You Even Need a Database?"}, {"id": 761811872, "item_id": 47613242, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47613242", "by": "fock", "date": "2026-04-02", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "a bit like oracle...", "excerpt": "They sell (managed) database appliances (on z and Power) and associated software (think the platform/HANA parts of SAP) - all state-of-the-art in the late 1990s but since then put on maintenance mode and it shows (a bit like oracle...). Their hardware is still cool custom built silicon and imo state of the art, but since k8s, high-speed-network and multi-TB-machines (for <100k$) are here and run Linux no new venture ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "IBM Announces Strategic Collaboration with Arm"}, {"id": 761470706, "item_id": 47591919, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591919", "by": "ErroneousBosh", "date": "2026-03-31", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "and both of them were Postgres", "excerpt": "> 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 g", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email"}, {"id": 761432912, "item_id": 47589557, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47589557", "by": "EliRivers", "date": "2026-03-31", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Why use Oracle indeed....", "excerpt": "Why use Oracle indeed.... Here's a tale from somewhere around the year 2000. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A-Software-Problem%2C-A-Marketing-Solution For Jason R., it was an exciting time. His company was trying to break into the telecom market with a new product that they'd get to build almost entirely from scratch. The only part that he wasn't excited about was that the major customers had very specific requirem", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email"}, {"id": 760747936, "item_id": 47546746, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546746", "by": "noisy_boy", "date": "2026-03-27", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Oracle's external tables which turned out to be clear winner", "excerpt": "Wow that takes me back. I used to lurk on unix.com when I was starting with bash and perl and would see CFAJohnson's terse one-liners all the time. I enjoyed trying my own approaches to compare performance, conciseness and readability - mainly for learning. Some of the awk stuff was quite illuminating in my understanding of how powerful awk could be. I remember trying different approaches to process large files at fi", "context": "", "use_case": "Processing large files", "switched_from": "", "story": "A Faster Alternative to Jq"}, {"id": 756066033, "item_id": 47254127, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47254127", "by": "SigmundA", "date": "2026-03-04", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "So narrow its enabled by default for all statements from the \"big boy\" commercial RDBMS's", "excerpt": ">There are reasons for that, it's useful in a very narrow set of situations. So narrow its enabled by default for all statements from the \"big boy\" commercial RDBMS's... https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.4.0?topic=overview-plan-cache https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/19/tgsql/sql-processing.html#GUID-B3415175-41F2-4EBB-95CF-5F8B5C39E927 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Better JIT for Postgres"}, {"id": 752056705, "item_id": 47003544, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47003544", "by": "tibbar", "date": "2026-02-13", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "thousands of lines of Oracle triggers that you had to edit inline in the web browser with no version control", "excerpt": "Oh, like, I wouldn't actually use this specific implementation. I used to work at a shop with thousands of lines of Oracle triggers that you had to edit inline in the web browser with no version control and I shudder to think of returning again. I'm more interested in the data flow. exa.ai got famous for promising search with massively parallel execution of LLMs on candidate results. In practice, it's never worked th", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 751939329, "item_id": 46996208, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996208", "by": "yndoendo", "date": "2026-02-12", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "I would never choose to use Oracle Database", "excerpt": "Red Hat employees can use Fedora on their MacBook. Fedora Asahi Remix [0]. Unfortunately in the business world you often have to use tools that others outside of your company uses. I would never choose to use Oracle Database but since the client uses it then I must setup a development / QA environment for it. I don't know of any Microsoft Access Database solution that runs on non-Windows OSes. Any time I interact wit", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood\u2013 they pay for proprietary groupware"}, {"id": 750598578, "item_id": 46912411, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46912411", "by": "johnwatson11218", "date": "2026-02-06", "version": null, "stance": "compare", "quote": "I think Oracle is nicer but postgres does what I need for a lot less money!", "excerpt": "I'm using postgres as part of my current project - https://github.com/johnwatson11218/LatentTopicExplorer I had added Spacey to my codebase for one of its features and found that just doing the work in the db was near instant and my containers would not run out of ram. I want to get back to Spacey for more involved nlp work but right now the db \"just works\". I think Oracle is nicer but postgres does what I need for a", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"}, {"id": 750537984, "item_id": 46908624, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46908624", "by": "chasil", "date": "2026-02-05", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Nobody would deploy Oracle Database for new systems.", "excerpt": "I am a DBA for Oracle databases, and XE can be used for free. It has the reference SQL/PSM implementation in PL/SQL. I know how to set up a physical standby, and otherwise I know how to run it. That being said, Oracle Database SE2 is $17,500 per core pair on x86, and Enterprise is $47,500 per core pair. XE has hard limits on size and limits on active CPUs. XE also does not get patches; if there is a critical vulnerab", "context": "DBA for Oracle databases", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"}, {"id": 750514914, "item_id": 46907182, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46907182", "by": "IgorPartola", "date": "2026-02-05", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "it has never not met my needs, unlike Oracle or MySQL", "excerpt": "Where I have used SQLite most successfully is really two use cases. First, I use it for data processing. Say I need to retrieve lots of data and transform it to a different setup. I could do that in something like Python but SQL is just more expressive for that and I can also create a new database, populate it with data I have, fetch new data, combine it together, export the update to a permanent data store (usually ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"}, {"id": 750331472, "item_id": 46895717, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46895717", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-02-04", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we used an Oracle database to do job queue stuff.", "excerpt": "At Apple, on iTunes, we used an Oracle database to do job queue stuff. Initially I will admit I made fun of it because I wanted to use a \"real\" queue like RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ or something, but I have to admit that it worked fine and to be fair it did predate both of those. Anyway, it made me realize that there's really no reason you can't use a SQL database as a backing store for queue stuff. I should try building m", "context": "worked at Apple on iTunes", "use_case": "job queue", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Bunqueue \u2013 Job queue for Bun using SQLite instead of Redis"}, {"id": 749770513, "item_id": 46860657, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46860657", "by": "mattmaroon", "date": "2026-02-02", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "I can\u2019t even imagine what would happen if somebody like Ford wanted to get off of their SAP or Oracle solution.", "excerpt": "A lot of these companies are not small monthly fees. And if you\u2019ve ever worked with them, you\u2019ll know that many of the tools they sell are an exact match for almost nobody\u2019s needs. So what happens is a corporation ends up spending a lot of money for a square tool that they have to hammer into a circle hole. They do it because the alternative is worse. AI coding does not allow you to build anything even mildly complex", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Why software stocks are getting pummelled"}, {"id": 749157955, "item_id": 46822372, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46822372", "by": "theturtletalks", "date": "2026-01-30", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "His other projects like CodexBar and Oracle are great too.", "excerpt": "I\u2019m a big fan of Peter\u2019s projects. I use Vibetunnel everyday to code from my phone (I built a custom frontend suited to my needs). I know I can SSH into my laptop but this is much better because handoff is much cleaner. And it works using Tailscale so it is secure and not exposed to the internet. His other projects like CodexBar and Oracle are great too. I love diving into his code to learn more about how those are b", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenClaw \u2013 Moltbot Renamed Again"}, {"id": 747937040, "item_id": 46746065, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746065", "by": "kakacik", "date": "2026-01-24", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "core banking system designed in 80s on top of Oracle DB", "excerpt": "Also, if you need accuracy stay away from questionable vendors of 3rd party products, as much as possible since they are chaos generators on any project involved. In my work we have our core banking system designed in 80s on top of Oracle DB so everything is just boxes around it, with corresponding flexibility towards modern development methodologies. The complexity of just doing a trimmed copy of production servers ", "context": "works with an 80s core banking system", "use_case": "Core banking backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "How I Estimate Work as a Staff Software Engineer"}, {"id": 747794369, "item_id": 46737148, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46737148", "by": "atonse", "date": "2026-01-23", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "I found Oracle to just be a lot more unwieldy from a tooling perspective", "excerpt": "I love Postgres and use it for _everything_. I've also used SQL Server for a couple of years. I've lost count the number of times I'll read about some new postgres or MySQL thing where you find out that Oracle or SQL server implemented it 20 years ago. Yes they always have it behind expensive SKUs. But they're hardly slouches in the technical competence departments. I found Oracle to just be a lot more unwieldy from ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users"}, {"id": 746482545, "item_id": 46655159, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46655159", "by": "shubhamjain", "date": "2026-01-16", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "abominations like SAP and Oracle", "excerpt": "You mean the big companies who still haven't moved away from abominations like SAP and Oracle? The ones where you require twenty approvals to get a small pilot done? Instead of moving to saner and cheaper alternatives, they would just say, \"hey, why don't we just start making our own software?\" Every effort like this\u2014if it had any takers\u2014will fail spectacularly. I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I c", "context": "", "use_case": "enterprise software", "switched_from": "", "story": "Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?"}, {"id": 744799472, "item_id": 46549967, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46549967", "by": "wahnfrieden", "date": "2026-01-08", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "co-signs https://github.com/steipete/oracle which lets you use your ChatGPT subscription", "excerpt": "Meanwhile, OpenAI co-signs https://github.com/steipete/oracle which lets you use your ChatGPT subscription to gain programmatic/agentic access to 5.2 Pro via automating browser access to the web frontend. Karpathy and other leaders have praised this feature on X. If that is indeed so welcome, imagine what else you could script via their website to get around Codex rate limits or other such things. After all what coud", "context": "", "use_case": "ChatGPT subscription automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Anthropic bans use of API in OpenCode CLI tool"}, {"id": 743973296, "item_id": 46498331, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46498331", "by": "codeulike", "date": "2026-01-05", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Barely any mention of Oracle or MS Sql Server", "excerpt": "Barely any mention of Oracle or MS Sql Server, commonly reckoned to be #1 and #3 most used databases in the world https://db-engines.com/en/ranking", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"}, {"id": 741925489, "item_id": 46370343, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46370343", "by": "chasil", "date": "2025-12-23", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "deep Oracle compatibility", "excerpt": "I was not aware that IBM copied Ada. I was aware that EnterpriseDB developed \"deep Oracle compatibility\" and sold the resulting code to IBM for Db2 several years ago. I think you are [more than] a bit behind the times? https://www.cnet.com/culture/ibm-puts-oracle-to-the-sword-with-enterprisedb/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know"}, {"id": 741512529, "item_id": 46344533, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344533", "by": "forinti", "date": "2025-12-21", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Oracle takes most of my time with endless issues", "excerpt": "I love Postgresql simply because it never gives me any trouble. I've been running it for decades without trouble. OTOH, Oracle takes most of my time with endless issues, bugs, unexpected feature modifications, even on OCI!", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Go ahead, self-host Postgres"}, {"id": 739974546, "item_id": 46248409, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46248409", "by": "prepend", "date": "2025-12-12", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "This replaced a functioning $10k server.", "excerpt": "In 1998 I worked for a small nasdaq company that had a successful software as a service product that was growing quickly. We used Clarion and MSSQL7 on windows because it was cheap. Since we started making real money, some figured we could finally afford Oracle and Sun (back when they were different). I was a junior so my job was to evaluate the migration of one of our sql servers to oracle to test it out. I talks wi", "context": "", "use_case": "Database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price"}, {"id": 739242048, "item_id": 46202628, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46202628", "by": "ManBeardPc", "date": "2025-12-09", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "then the price increases got too much and everyone who could switched to alternatives like MySQL or Postgres.", "excerpt": "My next company\u2018s boss was pretty much Windows only (server and desktops/laptops, some Linux servers). Linux on the server was already replacing more and more machines. Now I am even allowed to use MacBooks or Linux laptops. Current company is already using the Google suite, MS Office was an exception if required for some reason. I saw the same shift with Oracle. Previously nearly everyone wanted Oracle as a DB, then", "context": "", "use_case": "database", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 license prices"}, {"id": 739172978, "item_id": 46198311, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46198311", "by": "kevstev", "date": "2025-12-08", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Oracle comes to mind- would ship with like 6-10 volumes of reference information", "excerpt": "I also find that docs have gotten a lot better over time as well. I feel that Y2K era of numerous large tomes was largely to fill in the gap left after software publishers stopped shipping even their full price boxed software with meaty manuals, assuming I guess that help menus and GUI context (or maybe even Clippy) would get you there. Even some of the enterprisey software- Oracle comes to mind- would ship with like", "context": "", "use_case": "enterprise database", "switched_from": "", "story": "No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me"}, {"id": 738959923, "item_id": 46184995, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46184995", "by": "c_shu", "date": "2025-12-07", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Postgres, SQLite, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Flutter, Bash, AWK, Linux, Windows", "excerpt": "Location: BC, Canada Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: NO Technologies: Rust, Golang, C#, Java, C, C++, JS, PHP, Postgres, SQLite, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Flutter, Bash, AWK, Linux, Windows R\u00e9sum\u00e9/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eDvIfxc6tgSPAV_psg4aPJptOYzpI-1A/view?usp=sharing Email: cshu32@gmail.com Versatile programmer with 10+ years of expertise in software development. Automation enthusiast, rustacean, an", "context": "10+ years software developer, job seeker", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)"}, {"id": 738659648, "item_id": 46166228, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166228", "by": "jodrellblank", "date": "2025-12-05", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019", "excerpt": "> \"Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free)\" Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company w", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"}, {"id": 734866720, "item_id": 45929170, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929170", "by": "jlarocco", "date": "2025-11-14", "version": null, "stance": "warn", "quote": "Charging license fees based on the amount of memory in the host machine", "excerpt": "I meant they've always had a reputation for being ruthless business people. Charging license fees based on the amount of memory in the host machine instead of the VM running Oracle, and things like that. They nickle and dime everything. https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2025/Oracle-Announces-Fiscal-Year-2026-First-Quarter-Financial-Results/default.aspx They don't break it out into products in the", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Oracle hit hard in Wall Street's tech sell-off over its AI bet"}]}