I love Splunk, it works so well after data is ingested so... who are you if you're better?
The only number you need to compete with Splunk is a smaller price tag. I'd bet a lot of people would switch solutions and not look back
The performance of it depends heavily on a variety of factors which may it or may not apply to you.
Like a lot of software, the devil is in the details.
It seems like more of a threat stance to various partners and ecosystem players than anything else.
As I'm the author of the blog post in question, I can think of including your account there, if you'd like to.
In this case, never run Oracle software. Not only will it vastly improve your mood during budget season; your developers will be less likely to stab you in your sleep and you will never worry about their primary line of business: lawsuits.
And you don't care how they benchmark.
I'm certain someone in say, China or Russia, could pirate the database and run benchmarks on it with no repercussions. Surprising that this isn't a business model for an overseas technology analyst firm.
This feels horrible and would make me look away from any software that has such a clause. Then again, i use very little proprietary software in place and when i don't, it's mostly due to someone else choosing it for a project and me just needing to bite the bullet.
Though in regards to databases, i'm not sure why you'd fork over the cash and use something proprietary, unless you're trying to get rid of any sort of liability on your own end. Then again, i'm pretty sure that you could also find someone to offer support for your PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB deployment, if you wanted to waste money (or did anything so interesting where such support would be warranted).
> Some cloud vendors permit you to benchmark their service but require reciprocity: you must make the benchmark reproducible and allow benchmarking of your own service or tool in response.
This is a bit better in comparison.
Though licenses in general puzzle me. For example, MongoDB is licensed under SSPL so anyone who offers it as a cloud service would have to open source their entire infrastructure: https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license
And yet i don't think that Digital Ocean is: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/managed-databases-mong... (or maybe they offer the older non-SSPL version).
The whole enforcement angle feels like it would probably impact an individual who benchmarks databases instead of reading bunches of legalese more, for example, than it would impact a larger company that could "figure things out".
Some things better in Oracle vs Postgres (and I might be dated on my postgres knowledge):. The active/active failover story of Oracle is better with RAC. Auto vacuum horror stories don't exist in Oracle.
Also pro oracle: The 'enterprise' ecosystem is better. Everything enterprisey integrates with oracle, postgresql is still a toss up.
But at the end of the day, I still vastly prefer postgresql. The endless list of weird idiosyncracies and weird limitations in oracle makes you always feel a bit dirty, compared to the relatively clean syntax of postgresql. In oracle land, it is common to wait 1 major version before using new features, because they are unstable when released.
And dealing with oracle support is hell with an additional bonus of pain. They take months for a simple bug fix. They won't admit a bug exists, then call you at 3AM and give you a patch written 2 years ago.
Oracle licensing is a game for advanced poker players. It will be expensive. Then you negotiate, walk away with a 40% discount, making it more expensive than competitors, and find out later it was still a bad deal. They'll interprete standard words like CPU in a slightly different way in their licenses, and finding out in an audit will cost you a lot. Licensing is a never ending drain on your time, and you will loose their games in the end.
Stay as far away form it as possible. It only exists to milk already 'captured' companies, and all competitive niche advantages it had were slowly taken over by postgres.
However, by now, MariaDB and especially PostgreSQL have caught up so much that this edge is gone and it feels like they are just siphoning money from companies who have invested in their big oracle cluster years ago. I do veto any new oracle-first or oracle-only development at work.
However, we have provided bigger customers, or customer willing to pay for it, with performance testing environments. We have, however, usually survived into the curiosity phase - "just how much to I have to throw at this thing to break it?".
To be honest, if a cloud vendor has technical problems with someone running a few benchmarks then that would make me very wary of said cloud vendor. What's the difference between a "benchmark" and "using all resources I paid for" anyway?
For established players it’s lost in the noise, but if it were me I’d appreciate a heads up for big changes.
Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?
(While I understand that BSL/SSPL lack certain liberties, I deemed it okay to mark them as "open source" for the purposes of this post.)
No, they shouldn't be there because they aren't open source; OSI approval has nothing to do with it. (Though it's still a good indicator, similar to how FDA approval doesn't change whether/how well a drug works/is safe.)
I'm sure they are at least purchasing some modern-day 'indulgences' by - for instance - donating food to starving north korean elites?
This isn't line the traditional case of no name vs trusted name: due to the law you _must_ br anonymous to post this, so anonymity isn't a red flag, it's the standard.
Why would you assume people generally do background/credential checks on researchers?
Sure its nice to have it on phoronix or something, but its by no means a deal-breaker if it isn't.
Have you met programmers?
Jokes aside, I'm surprised they're so touchy about these things. They can make plenty of money without it, they can also save plenty of money with less lawyers.
The big deal is that it's slanderous.
Oracle isn't making an attestation about performance that the benchmark addresses, the benchmark aims to make statements about Oracle for some other reason, and that's important: Rights to free-speech generally end when they cause harm, and bearing full costs in the defense of false benchmarks is certainly harm.
Look at it this way: The clause aims to prevent purchases (entering into agreement with Oracle) under false pretenses. Oracle sells software to solve business problems, not you-need-a-paper-that-makes-Oracle-look-bad problems, and I think vendors are wise to protect themselves from that.
On the other hand, if you actually bought Oracle to solve a problem, and it didn't do that, you're still free to make those benchmarks and sue the shit out of Oracle with them, and this agreement can't by itself prevent the benchmarks from reaching the public record at that point.
> Is this only limited to marketing claims where you post it on your company's website?
If your company makes X and your company website contains a benchmark saying Oracle is slower than X, you're not just making a statement that you observed Oracle was slower than X, you're also making an attestation that the benchmark is a fair representation of both Oracle and X. And judge and jury are going to be wondering if it's as fair as you say, or if it's unfair as Oracle says.
Now, if you're a university and you don't make X, you might be able to argue that even if it's unfair, it was done in good-faith, and judge and jury may believe that, but Oracle will ask, if you truly believed X was fair, why didn't you get our feedback before publishing? and you'd better have a good answer to that.
On the other hand, if you choose to be anonymous, you may be able to avoid the judge and jury, but the community has to wonder who you are, whether you are motivated by a relationship to a company or product that competes with Oracle, or an impatient researcher who can't meet the standard of professional publishing. The community will wonder, but they have lots of other things to wonder about too, so they probably will not wonder for very long. So what's the point? Techdudes already know what they think of Oracle, and nobody who writes code talking or Oracle thinks that Oracle was chosen for its benchmarks, so who is this anonymous benchmark for?
Then you don't need to forbid benchmarking in the terms, if someone posts a slanderous/libelous benchmark then sue them for that.
It is surprisingly difficult to reproduce many workload benchmarks and quite easy to engineer a benchmark that misrepresents real-world database performance. There are tools that exist to generate optimally pathological workloads that target specific database implementations, while looking completely reasonable and innocuous. It doesn't even need to be a bad faith benchmark by a competitor, there is a high probability that the person configuring the environment does not know how to do it correctly and/or optimally.
The DeWitt Clause is a defense against the unfortunate pervasiveness of incompetent and/or bad faith benchmarking. Companies have a well-founded reason to not trust third parties to do a good job of representing the performance of their product.
Imagine a hypothetical FooDB by Bar, Inc. If Bar never put that clause in the FooDB license, then I think you’re absolutely right. People would come up with some awful-looking benchmarks that made it look bad. However, what a golden opportunity for Bar! They could step up with some free or steeply discounted consulting to help the benchmarker fix the problem and publish new, good results. They wouldn’t have to do that too many times for word to get around on sites like this: FooDB is nice and fast when you tune it correctly! That would come along with some enormous goodwill, and also the assumption that if your FooDB installation is performing poorly, then it must be your fault because all the benchmarks say it’s really fast for everyone else.
I’m not going to tell Bar what their business model should be. I have my thoughts on it, but it’s their business to run as they see fit. But if I see Bar being open and helpful with a freely-accessible tech blog telling you how to make FooDB stand up and dance, I’ll tend to believe that it’s probably an interesting product to look at. If they guard those secrets behind a wall of lawyers and sue people who speak ill of FooDB, I’ll tend to believe they’ve got something to hide. Either one of those beliefs might be completely wrong, but that’s still how I’m likely to perceive it.
We should all be free to express our thoughts and backing data, and participate freely in the marketplace of ideas.
No corporation should be able to put gag orders on people especially when they are biased and have good reasons to want to control the discourse
Conversely, If the right to distribute is revoked, say a GPL to closed source license change you have still the right to distribute any versions originally distributed under the open license.
A good example off all this is the sordid history of the berkely db.
Another good thing Oracle could do, is to release a CDDL update that is GPL-compatible.
However, just like AWS, Azure, and GCloud, their admin UI is complicated, slow, frustrating and full of invented acronyms and quirks.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/10/07/North-Kor...
I wonder how many of their sales reps have gone after Spectrum and Comcast since the whole work from home thing started.
And for what it's worth, I did actually work for a few small SaaS businesses, but a few reasonable benchmarks wouldn't have been a problem.
Of course, if your benchmarks are going to take 50 hours it's a different story.
Also: I suspect a lot of these database SaaS services are a lot smaller than you'd might think. I know at least one of them is anyway because I worked there (and there's no DeWitt Clause).
And naturally, they were able to break it eventually, but they could have had all global employees trigger request 10 times per second and the system would've held and it recovered as soon as the load was gone. It was a silly deal, but now it's a great business partner.
Give the vendor a heads up so the engineers can sleep.
MSSQL is destroying its own market by its pricing (and the licensing thicket, jesus christ, I've been looking at them for 2 days now and... shudder)
As you say in that section, "Open source licenses usually grant users permission to use open source software for any purpose." These source-available licenses (SSPL/BSL) are not open source exactly because of that: they place restrictions on users from using the software for any purpose. For example in the case of SSPL, it includes purposefully draconian language in the license that basically means that it can't be used freely to provide a "service". These kinds of "poison pills" obviously stop you from using the software for certain purposes.
What parts of the license mention that?
From mariadb site: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/#limits
"Q: What are the usage limitations under BSL?
A: The usage is limited to non-production use, or production use within the limits of the “Additional Use Grant” defined by the vendor using BSL and specific to each BSL product."
[1] obvious Additional Use Grant for Couchbase, included clearly in https://blog.couchbase.com/couchbase-adopts-bsl-license/
[2] it is extremely difficult to find the Additional Use Grant for Mariadb products themselves. For MaxScale, which is their proxy product, it is buried in a file within the source code (which on the surface level might be a good place for it, but it's not very easy to find and I had to go through lots of legal print to get to it) : https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/2.5/LIC... or https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/MaxScale/blob/6.3/LIC... depending on which version you are trying to use, etc.
How much are you willing to pay for a legally dubious benchmark?
Or are they web content used to lure in new contracts?
Person A installs database on a shared or to-be-sold computer, requires a license for the installation process to make a copy, "agrees" to EULA.
Person B then runs benchmarks on said computer, which does not require a license because no copy is being made, and publishes the results.
The only flaw in this is that Oracle will send its mafia enforcers to break your kneecaps despite not having a valid legal case. So you'll lose even if you technically can win.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haynes_v._United_States
Convicted felons are exempt from the portion of the National Firearms Act that requires that machine guns (and other NFA items like short barreled shotguns) be registered as it would violate their 5th Amendment rights.
I would be very curious to see that logic hold up in court these days. They got Al Capone on tax evasion for instance, but wouldn't paying his taxes on ill-got funds have been incriminating?