Mladen, looks like you've been in this line for quite some time, and me too.
Been in close quarters with Oracle since v4 - the time of iad/iap etc.
Not sure how things will turn out, so of late, I've been spending a lot of time
with Karaoke :)
On Dec 27, 2016, at 10:29 PM, Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 12/27/2016 09:57 PM, Jack van Zanen wrote:
I think Oracle jobs are dying out...
Of course they are dying out. I've seen the same trend with VMS admin jobs in
the early 90's. The reasons are probably nearly identical. I've seen the
same quasi-religious zeal then, too. Of course, it didn't last. Let me remind
you what happened then:
There was an extreme enmity toward the people saying that Unix on Intel maybe
worth looking at. DEC also took all of their user groups under its wings and
kept the firm control until the very end.
The licenses for VMS 5.5-2 were really expensive. The same was true for the
top of the line machines like VAX 6400 and VAX 9000.
DEC became a sales & marketing oriented company from an engineering company.
There were similar attempts to subvert the standards. Does anyone here
remember the "new and improved SCSI bus" on VAX 4200? It wasn't compatible
with the normal SCSI, which meant that disks were only available from DEC
itself and its licensed OEM companies. IT is the same as OID, which is not
compatible with a generic LDAP server.
The trend of hiding the internal information was quite remarkable. It was
possible to buy VMS source code until version 5.0 and many books were
published on the internals of the VMS operating system, NVAX CPU and various
other products.
The pressure to upgrade to the new and "better" machines was also
present.
Similarities are really striking.
In my area only very few Oracle jobs come up...many SQL jobs though..Most
Oracle jobs also require SQL so looks like they are dying out by themselves
Of course they are dying out. Oracle as a technology investment makes sense
only for the very high demand OLTP, a market on which it has to compete
against very much cheaper DB2, and an extremely large DW, where it must
compete with Greenplum and Netezza, which were both conceived as Exadata
killers. You can create a partitioned table for free in both databases, they
don't charge for the tuning tools separately and, of course, they don't
charge you for the right to create data and they both have columnar store
included in their enterprise edition equivalents. The market will become
really interesting in June 2017, when SQL Server will enter the fray on Linux.
Dying out of Oracle jobs is just a logical consequence. For small and medium
large databases SQL Server has wiped the floor with Oracle. That is why the
employers want a SQL Server DBA, with an exposure to Oracle, not an Oracle
expert with some exposure to SQL Server. The whole market is undergoing a
radical change.
The Oracle-l will also suffer a similar fate. It is already bereft of its
most interesting posters and nobody bothers to post jobs here any more. This
is an ace place, where total beginners come to ask fairly uninteresting
questions. I helped deliver Oracle-l into this world and I might also be one
of the pal bearers.
--
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA
http://mgogala.freehostia.com
