It seems I'm the only one shocked at how much this is.
Going up to $484/hr as I read it, seems out of the ballpark to me reasonability-wise. I'm sure they do a good job, but just like a lawyer that might charge that rate, high rates don't mean mistakes are never made.
I'm pretty sure if I wanted to get a primary contributor to any open source database software to consult on a project, it would be far far less, and they'd know it just as well (if not better) than an Oracle consultant knows Oracle. I'm guessing the majority of these consultants don't touch the core code of the product that often.
I guess I still haven't been properly explained the real value of Oracle yet. We use it at my dayjob, and every time I have to deal with it I am frustrated. Its so expensive, but why again is this significantly better than PostgreSQL?
I'm pretty sure if I wanted to get a primary contributor to any open source database software to consult on a project, it would be far far less,
Of course you could. But there's a bit of a fallacy w/r/t hiring consultants, if you hire someone directly (ie not through a company or agency) you can expect to pay about half of what you'd pay for the same person through an agency . The benefits of going through Oracle (as stated above) is if your consultant disappears you have another a phone call away, and because "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". However you pay for this privilege.
Your boss has heard of Larry Ellison and figures if he's so rich he must be doing something right. (Or your boss's boss, or whatever, depending on the size of your company.)
That's about what it seems to come down to. I have yet to hear a compelling technical argument for Oracle aside from vague mentions like, "It's what an enterprise uses" or "It's so strong it could run X"
But then I find that companies with huge datasets like Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc... don't use it. And I go back to scratching my head.
There are two reasons most people use Oracle. In some cases, they have a product that requires it, and doesn't support anything else. If this product happens to be unique in the industry or core to their business, they will generally happily pay the Oracle tax and be done with it.
The other good reason is that Oracle hires some of the very best sales people in the world, and nobody is selling postgres, mySQL, etc to the same extent. There's a huge difference between being a 'technically better' product and being able to convince a PHB of that. Also, Oracle tends to support damn near everything, and damn near everything (Enterprisey) supports Oracle.
What does Oracle do that a programmer wouldn't write as compatible with other databases? Just trying to figure out why a product wouldn't be written to work with more things.
Lots of things, really. They don't have a real 'limit' capability that I've found that works in any way like mySQL's.
To mimic MySQL's "SELECT last_name FROM employees LIMIT 50,50" you have to do something like this:
SELECT last_name FROM (SELECT last_name, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY last_name) R FROM employees) WHERE R BETWEEN 51 and 100;
Aside from that, it's general operational differences and variations from the SQL spec on a pretty grand scale. The flip side to that though is that most serious Enterprise companies are generally using Oracle already anyway, so it's safe to target Oracle or MS-SQL and know that almost all of your customers will have one or both.
Going up to $484/hr as I read it, seems out of the ballpark to me reasonability-wise. I'm sure they do a good job, but just like a lawyer that might charge that rate, high rates don't mean mistakes are never made.
I'm pretty sure if I wanted to get a primary contributor to any open source database software to consult on a project, it would be far far less, and they'd know it just as well (if not better) than an Oracle consultant knows Oracle. I'm guessing the majority of these consultants don't touch the core code of the product that often.
I guess I still haven't been properly explained the real value of Oracle yet. We use it at my dayjob, and every time I have to deal with it I am frustrated. Its so expensive, but why again is this significantly better than PostgreSQL?