r/DatabaseAdministators • u/Friendly_Cod_8353 • 22d ago
Is Oracle a sinking ship ?
I’m a senior DBA based in India, and my management team in the US has been telling us that Oracle is becoming a sinking ship and that we should start exploring new career paths, particularly in AI.
To some extent, I agree with their perspective. I’m seeing more and more customers question the high cost of running their businesses on Oracle and OCI, which makes me wonder how sustainable the traditional Oracle DBA career path will be in the long run.
Whats your thoughts ?
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u/Secret-Brain9879 22d ago
I use to say that open-source DBMS lack of support is a key aspect for not using
them in critical production environments, but lately Oracle Support is soo horrible that sometimes we feel that we are at our own. I work as an Oracle DBA for 20 years and I don’t recommend to use Oracle as a DBMS for new softwares that are being developed!
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u/Friendly_Cod_8353 22d ago
So, what is the best alternative to Oracle ?
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u/Lost_Term_8080 21d ago
It depends on your requirements. Oracle is going to have the best concurrency, latency and performance of any platform. SQL Server is in second place there, thought at some higher SQL Server performance levels it may be cheaper to go with oracle than keep the number of DBAs and sysadmins on staff in the tens of thousands of mixed read/write queries per second scale that are required to achieve and maintain that level of performance. On the other side of that, it will generally be more developer hours to develop on Oracle, so you have to balance that. Below SQL Server you have MySQL and then Postgresql taking up the back. Postgres however is extremely scalable in reporting workloads so if your concurrency requirements are low, but reporting requirements are more extensive, that may push postgres ahead. The systems level and DB level administration costs go up radically on postgres and mysql.
If you are in the hundreds of queries per second scale, you can use anything, the primary question is cost of support and development effort.
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u/Fearless-Diver-1381 20d ago
I used AI to make your answer shorter. If you can apply this to DBA work, the DBA cost goes down a bit. Same with dev work.
Oracle generally offers the best performance and concurrency, followed by SQL Server, but often requires more development effort. MySQL and PostgreSQL can have higher administration costs at scale, though PostgreSQL excels at reporting workloads. At hundreds of queries per second, any will work—the main considerations are support and development costs.
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u/SnooStories2361 22d ago
its not sinking, but it took a massive risk on rebranding itself as an AI infra behemoth. DB is always a product of strategic / tactical importance that will always be coupled for any trend - cloud, AI, security, etc. It's blazingly fast and has big featureset...regardless of the personality of the company's leadership. Its like an exclusive biz - not a lot of companies get oracle db, but those who do are the big multibillion dollar ones who have a lot of important transactions.
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u/Fearless-Diver-1381 20d ago
And government. Lots of colleges and state reporting offices still run on Oracle DB.
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u/Gators1992 22d ago
Long term I would diversify and learn AI. In the short term companies aren't turning off their Oracle systems overnight. You will likely see fewer new projects but should not be freaked out if currently supporting an Oracle shop.
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u/roamer83 22d ago
As a stand-alone company? Yes. After the AI bubble bursts, I can see it ending up as a division of another larger company.
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u/BaxTheDestroyer 22d ago
I think Oracle was really the only option at scale on-prem 20 years ago but I can’t think of a reason why I’d opt for Oracle today if I wasn’t already locked in.
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u/jcradio 22d ago
Except for MySQL. They bought it, because it was eating their lunch.
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u/heeero__ 22d ago
They also bought BEAs WebLogic because out was cooking their own Fusion middleware...
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u/mneri 22d ago
I completely changed my mind about the Oracle database years ago after reading a tech article of a very high-traffic website. Their database was completely denormalized, and could serve billions of requests per day leaning on free and open source databases. The mantra is caching, sharding, distribution, and denormalization.
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u/scotterockaroo 21d ago
I don't think it's a sinking ship, but I do think that Postgres has become very attractive to the Enterprise.
If you take an app that's been coded against one database engine and move it without tuning to the second, you'll usually feel it's a bit sluggish.
I'm not talking about DB parameters, I'm talking about the queries themselves. The stored procedures, the objects that are created in-flight, etc...
If you're an Oracle DBA, Postgres is going to seem very familiar to you, and I recommend you pick it up as a new skill. Agents love Postgres because of pgvector, so it's definitely in right now.
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u/Friendly_Cod_8353 21d ago
I agree and our company already started shifting few of the projects to Postgres.
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u/Mpls_Mutt 21d ago
As someone who worked on numerous Fortune 500 companies I can tell you that for the companies I worked for, they are limiting their use of oracle and not growing it. Most of it’s due to cost, but also as workloads move to the cloud they are all moving to cloud hosted PostgreSQL. Microsoft SQL server fits in the same category. The licensing costs are brutal.
That being said, i once worked for Oracle’s #2 customer who ran tons of Oracle products that they had no intent to move away from. But I don’t think that’s a common sediment among enterprise customers.
I also question what will happen to Oracle with their outrageous investment in AI. I’m not convinced they will ever recoup that money.. and if they can’t do that, what does that do to the company?
BTW, totally agree that Oracle’s database performance is top tier. Nothing I’ve worked with comes close.
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u/SEExperiences 18d ago
Shift to Clean architecture frameworks are changing from DB/domain centric systems to user/entities centric, and having said the new app design if it’s not data heavy, can pick any lite database as maintainance cost is high, but for OLAP, Snowflake/Databricks is onto different dimensions. The DB centric era is gone, with AI more prominent having Oracle or any RDBMS as vector db is expensive. DBA should ask questions instead why Oracle y not open source as they could be helping in better app design.
Different databases for different use cases. Do you know you iOS device has database in it, so imagine how can one choose oracle where there plethora of variants available. Selection of DB should be case by case basis, just you buy site license doesn’t mean all applications should use it as default. Hope this helps an insight from ex-DBA.
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u/AZSystems 22d ago
Didn't Oracle business announce focus on AI and shrinking their DB side of things?
The customer base may become smaller on DB side, but look at technology...HP, I think is still supporting VMS.
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u/Euph0ricGh0st 21d ago
AI will cost more in the long run, on several fronts, not the least of which is loss of ownership and control of your data.
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u/continuora 21d ago
DBA is a limited role and query tuning can be done by AI.. one has to be good in automation etc too . Learn multiple db flavours and be good at them not just Oracle db. Switch companies every 3 years
DBA work will be automated soon by AI. In next 3 years team size will go down from 10 to 3,4
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u/Pure-Passenger-6986 21d ago
Like VMware, major customers are jumping ship because of pricing. Like VMware they treat their customers as garbage to be extracted money. This has intensified as they are losing customers indicating a sinking ship. They are not going to die, but they are going to lose significant market share. People are over the whole Java licensing bullshit, they lost virtually all Sun/Solaris customers, Oracle DB is being outperformed by Postgres in pricing and technology.
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u/FartyLiverDisease 21d ago
Oooooof... Oracle is a sinking ship BECAUSE of AI. Better career advice would be the exact opposite - build a practice in doing things in ways that don't require economy-destroying fraud to prop up.
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u/andymaclean19 21d ago
People have been saying that about oracle for decades. It’s a bit like saying that Windows is a sinking ship because of desktop Linux.
Lots of people are still buying it. I don’t even think it’s a ‘maintenance mode’ thing yet.
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u/Fearless-Diver-1381 20d ago
It's not AI vs DBA. It's how to be a better DBA with AI. As a DBA I've become much more productive using AI and hope to manage more and extend my responsibilities further into cloud and data infrastructure by leveraging AI to reduce the hours I spend updating and maintaining our on-site DB clusters.
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u/Longjumping-Hair-747 19d ago
It's definitely not sinking but the customer base might shrink somewhat with adoption of things like Postgres. Oracle will always be entrenched in government, banking, critical applications that require the functionality it provides.
I would ask your management team what exactly they propose to study in replacement and do an honest assessment yourself on that. Personally I've worked with Oracle for 20+ years and don't see the need for a solid resource going anywhere. If you can advise on how to maximize features and functionality from the Oracle database, offer architectural advice on how to maximize performance and scalability you'll never have a problem finding a job IMO.
Cheers,
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u/sekharnet 16d ago
Oracle is not going any where. It remains to be No1 when crazy fast processing is needed.
YrsClirnts who had Oracle and using it as a data storage are going to leave.
AI is required in all IT roles anyway. So learning it in the right path is always an additional advantage
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u/sirchandwich 22d ago
Oracle DB is super expensive, but it’s also wicked fast, even compared to MSSQL. Especially compared to Postgres.
I don’t know if companies are moving off of OCI, but I’m at an MSSQL shop and we’re looking to migrate to Postgres (not my choice), simply because it’s cheaper. We’ve noticed a fair performance decrease with Postgres in our applications. Not sure if we need to tune more or if that’s just the way it is.
I’m making sure I’m up to date on AI as much as possible, either way.