Oracle Database and schemas...please help!

scottalanmiller

Also MySQL and MariaDB are the same product. Put them together and Oracle isn't on top even in that list.

scottalanmiller

But more importantly than position is change rate. Oracle shows as falling for years. A falling system has incumbent specialists in the field with seniority and experience that you will never get. How do you plan to unseat them when there are fewer and fewer jobs in the field year over year.

stacksofplates

@scottalanmiller said in Oracle Database and schemas...please help!:

@MrWright4hire said in Oracle Database and schemas...please help!:

@stacksofplates and @scottalanmiller the ranking still shows Oracle as #1. Somebody has to be spending the money on the product if it's still listed as #1. Am I missing something here?

What defines number one? It's certainly not the most used. It's nowhere close. How do they collect that data? They don't have access to my info or any other database user that I know. So how do they get that info?

And number one doesn't make something a good career. Are there Oracle DBAs out there? Yes. And there many new ones? No.

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_definition

Just general popularity.

MrWright4hire

All I'm hearing are good points as to why Oracle sucks and dying. Nothing about other DB alternatives. I'm open for suggestion. I'm looking on some feedback as to which DB is best to get a cert for. I don't want to get a cert that's turning legacy the day after I received it.

stacksofplates

@MrWright4hire said in Oracle Database and schemas...please help!:

@stacksofplates and @scottalanmiller the ranking still shows Oracle as #1. Somebody has to be spending the money on the product if it's still listed as #1. Am I missing something here?
Scott, the reason why I would like to learn DB is to try a different field. I need to build up my certs on my resume. I'm tired of doing contract work here in Ontario. I want to permanent gig.
So what DB certs do any of you gents suggest to go for? I'm curious as to what your thoughts are.

Big ones are things like Amazon Aurora/Redshift (or any Amazon product), Google Spanner, Sybase, etc.

I don't know if they have DBA's that specialize in things like Elasticsearch and MongoDB. I think it's similarly following the DevOps movement like with SysAdmins.

However, I could be 100% wrong as I'm not a DBA.

scottalanmiller

@MrWright4hire said in Oracle Database and schemas...please help!:

All I'm hearing are good points as to why Oracle sucks and dying. Nothing about other DB alternatives. I'm open for suggestion. I'm looking on some feedback as to which DB is best to get a cert for. I don't want to get a cert that's turning legacy the day after I received it.

Honestly, none. You are asking the wrong question. You aren't asking if there are database jobs or certs that are useful for that. You are leading the horse by the cart. Tons of databases in use, none that are big on certifications that I know of. Oracle was relatively unique in that they had a big cert process. They were also pretty unique in that running an Oracle database required specialized skills. No one running other databases really needs DBAs. It's not a field that people hire very often.

Think about what a DBA does... how many databases do you know require management?

scottalanmiller

I don't know if they have DBA's that specialize in things like Elasticsearch and MongoDB. I think it's similarly following the DevOps movement like with SysAdmins.

That's exactly what I've seen. The whole "we need a dedicated team of people to run this one database product" along with the "we only run one database product" worlds seem to be dead. The idea that you can get a cert and find work as a DBA seems to be an old one. DBA work has been dying for decades. Even ten years ago going into DBA work was unheard of. Twenty years ago it was common, when Oracle was hot and SQL Server was up and coming.

scottalanmiller

Here is the info on how they rank the databases...

Number of mentions of the system on websites, measured as number of results in search engines queries. At the moment, we use Google, Bing and Yandex for this measurement. In order to count only relevant results, we are searching for <system name> together with the term database, e.g. "Oracle" and "database".
General interest in the system. For this measurement, we use the frequency of searches in Google Trends.
Frequency of technical discussions about the system. We use the number of related questions and the number of interested users on the well-known IT-related Q&A sites Stack Overflow and DBA Stack Exchange.
Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned. We use the number of offers on the leading job search engines Indeed and Simply Hired.
Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. We use the internationally most popular professional networks LinkedIn and Upwork.
Relevance in social networks. We count the number of Twitter tweets, in which the system is mentioned.

So let's break that down to explain why Oracle might be being talked about a lot.

Menions on websites. This is historical and cumulative. Oracle is the oldest database and so those mentions, over time, just keep generating rankings. Plus sites like this one are talking about it right now, in the context of it being a dead end. That "warning people that it is dead" contributes to its ranking here. So this could reflect the inverse of what we want to know.
Google Trends. This is a little better than the above, but still could be people talking about problems rather than interest. It would make a broken product rank higher than a quality one with the same popularity otherwise. Needing help to get a system working increases rankings, that's bad.
Frequency of technical discussions. Again, this is an inverse. No one talks about Redis, Cassandra or MongoDB because they "just work". Yet we deploy them because they just work and avoid Oracle because it is complicated and expensive. Plus conversations around licensing and cost drive up Oracle rankings and don't exist for most of its competition.
Number of job offers. This is obviously false as that info is private. This is the number of job postings which, as anyone that's done IT work can tell you, are often fake. And this could signal almost anything under the hood. It's not a usefull gauge. If it was actually offers it would be different, but still poor as many offers could all be to one person that turns most of them down.
Number of profiles. Against, Oracle is an old skill. This is cumulative over time. The world is also full of VB6 people, none of which would accept VB6 work today. This is, again, totally useless. Also, while this number being high does not make a thing popular, it does the opposite of the intent for a job seeker. The more people have Oracle skills on the market, the more competition there is for the few Oracle jobs.
Relevance in social networks. Things like this conversation, talking about how it is a bad career move, drive up the "popularity".

Basically, that anything is high or low in this weird ranking system is completely and utterly useless to even being able to figure out if a product even exists today. Clearly, Oracle is a big product and still very much around. But if Oracle went out of business today and literally every customer replaced it tomorrow... it would almost certainly RISE in the rankings for quite some time as people talked about it failing, talked about migrating off of it, offered jobs that mentioned migrating FROM it and people with Oracle skills flooded the market looking for non-Oracle work. It might even double in popularity if it ceased to exist overnight!

Reid Cooper

In the past I used to know a handful of active DBAs. Today I'm not sure that I know any. I have the impression that the field has been shrinking. Do many databases really require that much care and feeding any longer? We can just throw CPU, RAM and IOPS at them or pass a query problem on to the developers. DBAs backing up, tuning and monitoring databases seems like a dieing art.

travisdh1

@Reid-Cooper said in Oracle Database and schemas...please help!:

In the past I used to know a handful of active DBAs. Today I'm not sure that I know any. I have the impression that the field has been shrinking. Do many databases really require that much care and feeding any longer? We can just throw CPU, RAM and IOPS at them or pass a query problem on to the developers. DBAs backing up, tuning and monitoring databases seems like a dieing art.

I just saw a local company advertising for a Senior Sys Admin where they wanted Oracle DBA experience for. I kind of want to try to grab an interview, could be interesting conversations. Plus I know a guy that works there, who I'd enjoy working with. The more I talk about it the more I'm going to contact him tonight.