Re: OT: Job Posts

  • From: Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Jack van Zanen <jack@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2016 23:29:55 -0500

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

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