Life As An Oracle DB Dev - 25 Million Lines Of Code

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[zachmoring]

While working for Undisclosed Big Old Transport Company as a "SQL developer, " the oldest stored proc I had to touch was older than me. First written in 1989, last updated in 1997 by a guy three "generations" before me in that role

[yintercept]

You mentioned the word ORACLE. A team of licensing experts will now audit your channel to determine how much money you owe Larry Ellison.

[Kynatosh]

I love the "DELETE ME DELETE ME" in the description instead of the article source

[kingadayaday]

"Psh, I could rewrite it in a weekend from scratch"

[disieh]

The big problem IMHO with old gigantic, monolithic projects is once you grow past certain size, it becomes impossible to grok the whole thing at once. This is where good design, architecture and people like Linus comes in. Good design keeps dependecies sane, individual parts grokkable and Linus keeps devs from undermining the design.

[matt_milack]

I know a guy who has been working in various IT roles since the mid-90s. Once, I asked him what the hardest role he ever stumbled upon was. He told me that you need to be a literal genius to be a database administrator. Now, I kind of see why.

[alevyts]

The C language is not intended for writing large programs—according to the creators of the language. In a 1978 paper, Ken Thompson estimated that the UNIX kernel consisted of about 10, 000 lines of C code (plus a small amount of assembly language). Other UNIX components were of comparable size; in another 1978 paper, Dennis Ritchie and colleagues estimated the size of the PDP-11 C compiler to be 9660 lines. By today's standards these are really small programs. They thought no one would write programs for 100, 000 or even 1, 000, 000 lines of code in C—this is madness.

[jfernandez]

Fun fact: is you reverse Oracle, then it says "Elcaro", which in spanish means "the expensive". I heard this joke probably 25 years ago.

[erwinkonopka]

Yeah. I worked in code bases like that. Nobody understood how it all worked and it was all strongly coupled so each time you changed something you ran a huge suite of tests and see how much did fail. If 1k+ failed then it was a small mistake and fixing it was easy. If few failed you were ducked since it was a complex set of conditions to cause it.

[Kane]

Still better than being a frontend dev.

[gregjor]

Good story, and a typical programmer perspective. He should have mentioned that Oracle created the market for commercial relational databases, which replaced stuff even more crap. Oracle became ubiquitous and one of the most profitable pieces of software ever written. One might even conclude that code quality, as understood by programmers, has little to nothing to do with customers buying and using the code, and making a shitload of money from it.

[JarheadCrayonEater]

When I was in the Marines, from 1999-2007, Oracle hosted a company party in one of our hangers, and invited a few hundred of us to join.

We drank all of the beer within the first 30 minutes, and they had to order more. They were pissed, and we didn't care. I've always hated working with Oracle products.

[UnFiltered]

This is gonna be good. The bots seem to love it.

[kephireg]

I worked on that code for 6 years. It's not half as bad as it looks. One of the better things I worked on in my career.

[steffenbendel]

So Oracle started a month before I was born. And their code is like DNA. Optimised over generations and tested again the environment. It does not make sense anymore, but it works.

[ivanmaglica]

For a 50 year old product, this is not shocking. The coding styles alone have changed so much in that time. Half of those 12mloc are probably tests anyway. I wonder when was the last time they have done a complete rewrite.

[sdihhk]

I love Linus' unhingedness, God bless his soul lol

[dennisk]

The best comment I put in the code: "I am sorry."

[censoredeveryday]

I worked at Oracle and on that code base for several years and yes it's all very fragile. Even the build system (called ADE) was this horrible Clearcase monster that used NFS to mount up different volumes to pull in various dependencies and other associated files. The bug tracking system is likely still the same and written in the 90s with web 1.0.

[hinzster]

2:00 Unix is not a single product either. It's a collection of a lot of different products and it runs on all kinds of different architectures (non-MMU-Unix anybody?). This modularity means some code has been changed A LOT, while some code hasn't changed (because there was no reason to change it). Oracle is a monolith and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some pieces of 1977 code still in the codebase, and you can't just rip them out and replace them with your own shitty code (Rust mentioned, well, I didn't mention Rust, but you know what I mean).