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The Cabinet Office is understood to have formally contacted central agencies within the last month and asked them to look for ways to “get rid of Oracle".
No. 10 is believed to be concerned about the amount civil servants are spending on the database giant’s applications and software.
A Cabinet office spokesperson told The Register: "As part of our continuing digital transformation and efficiency programmes, we regularly review technical requirements within a department to see how they may have changed."
The chief problem is the sheer number of Oracle licenses in the UK government, not just their price, although the public sector spent £290m on Oracle in 2013, according to TechMarketView.
Individual IT chiefs will have their own relationship with Oracle and pay for licenses rather than re-use licenses of those within their own department.
In January The Reg reported that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), which has around 10,000 staff, was forking out for two million Oracle licenses at £155 per employee, for an annual cost of £1.3m per year. (That worked out at 200 licences per civil servant in the department.)
That’s contrary to the Cabinet Office’s own guidelines of £93 on licenses, with a view to reducing that down further to £52.
Meanwhile, the mighty Home Office has tried to slash its Oracle budget by moving an ERP contract to a shared-services platform run by Steria. A Register source told us: “Nobody has a holistic view or how Oracle is used across the whole government or looking at economies of scale.”
The source described the the central communication as an “edict” that has been interpreted as an order to move away from Oracle.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:25PM
I only dabble with databases, because I'm more on the programming side, but I really don't understand this. If I see a programmer who only knows one language, well, that's a big strike against. I expect a decent programmer to have experience with several languages - heck, to experiment just out of professional curiosity. Sure, they'll be more current in one language or another, but they ought to know more than one.
Isn't it the same with databases? I've programmed against SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and a couple of others in the distant past. They're all just databases. The SQL dialect is slightly different, the CLI tools are more different, but in the end they all offer the same functions. Shouldn't a DBA be able to move to a new database? Heck, there aren't that many major players, shouldn't a good DBA already be at least acquainted with all of them?
I know, I'm naive...tell me why I'm wrong...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday August 06 2015, @07:52PM
"... shouldn't a good DBA already be at least acquainted with all of them?"
While I'm not or have ever been a DBA I doubt it's much different from other roles in the IT-structure of whatever company or organization you work for. If you are only using one db solution what would be the point of being knowledgeable in others? Sure it's always nice to be well-rounded and all but beyond that. Just by being proficient in one tho you will more or less be able to make your way thru others to, it's not like they are or should be totally alien to you. Why would you look for a person that uses a software solution that you don't use? Nobody is or should be paying for that. As noted it sure is nice if they are well-rounded in all aspects of IT but it's not what the HR drones will look for.
When I worked in the UNIX admin field everyone there was trained in the same things; Solaris, our entire park of machines and systems came from SUN -- if it wasn't SUN it was in the wrong place. It would have made no sense to hire an AIX person since we didn't use that. If by some miracle an AIX machine one day stood in the server-park it's not like we couldn't have figured out how to use the system (ok we would have freaked out at first that a new machine just appeared out of thin air but besides that).
Just like when you know how to program one language picking up a second isn't that hard. If you are an Oracle DBA learning how to use and manage MySQL or MSSQL or whatever you use shouldn't be hard. You should probably be able to pick it up with no issue even without much actual training. So they will be acquainted with them or be able to figure out how to do stuff, but there just won't really be much point.
The old saying of nobody ever got fired for buying IBM (or Microsoft or ...) is probably true here to -- nobody ever got fired for buying a database solution from Oracle.
In this news or case it seems to be more of an licensing issue then anything. It's not a problem with the DB solution. They just overspent and bought the wrong amount of licenses, a problem that usually just get exaggerated over time as you buy more and more but for some reason rarely seem to get rid of the old. But buying millions of licenses for 10k users (and lets for the sake of it say they have a few thousand extra licenses for other things), there shouldn't ever be a need for you to buy ~2000000 licenses. Someone fucked up there.
I wonder if Oracle will now "threaten" to move or some other such thing to keep the money stream flowing -- or it will be a bargaining chip to get them locked in on some new kind licensing deal or scheme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:20PM
That explanation makes for an interesting parallel to monoculture hiring practices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 06 2015, @10:18PM
that would be risky. it's just as likely to backfire and spook other governments into de-oracle-izing as well
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday August 06 2015, @08:51PM
A fair bit of the problem is that Oracle's has a "unique" dialect of SQL with different types compared to other databases. Furthermore, most Oracle projects I've seen (ab)use plSQL quite heavily. There's an entire market of things that put plSQL on other databases, such as EnterpriseDB which creates pgplSQL. While I have no recent Oracle experience, I don't remember there being a whole lot of "free" (aka, part of the database) tools for locating and doing query optimizations which added a lot of pain.
As such, something that was written for Oracle tends to be a nightmare to port anywhere else. In addition, Oracle has a LOT of overhead and pain to not only get running, but get running well. It may be better now, but Oracle 10 was a massive nightmare just to get the database installed, let alone usable on localhost to test some software. I've heard horror stories about RAC and other add-ons to the database; the idea of a clustered Oracle gives me chills (mySQL cluster is bad enough ...)
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 06 2015, @11:51PM
You seem to confuse "good DBAs" with the common garden variety found in many many government agencies.
Even if you run into a competent one, they have edicts handed to them from PHBs above them. Those PHBs were sold Oracle, and they put it in the budget, and by god they are going to use it, and anything else calls their judgement into question.
But all too often it is the DBA making this argument instead of (or in addition to) the PHB.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.