Once had Optimum (the ISP) do this to a business I was working with. Just yeeted all their emails account and their contents and all backups thereof one day. Declared it was because no user on the account was accessing their email via the webmail system so all the email was nuked for inactivity. IMAP and POP do not count, apparently.
Short version, do not use Optimum unless they are the only option, and if they are the only option seriously consider moving to fix that.
Google, meta, apple, they all will do the same. I had it with vercel and ebay. This is corporations abusing their power, no accountability.
a good reminder to back up your shit regardless of what service you’re using.
If one copy of all of your data is deleted, you should be able to recover it.
- Maintain three copies of your data: This includes the original data and at least two copies.
- Use two different types of media for storage: Store your data on two distinct forms of media to enhance redundancy.
- Keep at least one copy off-site: To ensure data safety, have one backup copy stored in an off-site location, separate from your primary data and on-site backups.
https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html
Someone that was following best practices would have regularly made a copy of their data and stored it somewhere that doesn’t depend on anything Oracle does, since I’d consider depending on Oracle to store all of your data to be storing all your data at one site.
This guy Backups
In my experience this happens either because TOS breach or security reasons related to TOS.
On the one hand, sure, oracle rep could have handled it better
But on the other hand…
The TOS do say you are only eligible to sign up once
Now, on the not telling you the reason why the shutoff happened, it’s totally logical. No company will let you know what was the TOS violation to help you or others to avoid future detection and commit fraud. Anyone on IT knows this.
Not saying the guy did it, but apparently Oracle believes they did. It’s the same as Google. One simple fuck up on an add in adwords and your account is screwed for life. Could be for the most innocuous of things, like a flag raised by usage patterns, or going to the extremes, a possible compromised instance got nuked preemptively
In any case always remember that the resources occupied in a free instance may and will be freed up when needed without warning.
And if stuff is THAT IMPORTANT, always go on prem , with at least two different providers for cloud services and backup
Also, read the terms of service. It’s not that hard
TikTok being forced to host on Oracle instead of Google/Microsoft all but confirms that Oracle is CIA Cloud.
Nice to know that they go above and beyond to uphold GDPR
We don’t move your data across borders… Because we don’t have it any more!
Oracle cares so much about your privacy they delete your data before you even send a request.
As someone who had that misfortune to work woth their products, this tracks just great. Honestly. I’ve used their Apex and SQL developer. Both of them are unintuitive to use, inconsistent, lacking features, and just a complete resource hogs in their own ways. Makes me wonder how they are still keeping themselves afloat, considering the abhorrent state and quality their products are.
Makes me wonder how they are still keeping themselves afloat, considering the abhorrent state and quality their products are.
Their main business model is patent/trademark infringement lawsuits.
We used JCaps for hospital interfaces… when the time came to renew licenses, they literally ghosted us until we just moved to a different engine
Oh god, Apex. I was trying to enjoy my morning. Unintuitive isn’t even the right way to describe it. It has to be the most complicated way to build an application and that’s just sticking with the templates. Even knowing what I would need to change would require guess work and 5 minutes of hunting to find the action that may not even work
I sincerely despise how it hides the primary keys of a table when creating a interactive grid with a form subpage for entering new data, I have to unhide the primary key twice, on two different places. I know it does that for the master details as well, and I think it does the same for reports as well. Like, come on! It’s so infuriating how much time i have to waste just changing the primary key to be visible. Won’t even gonna mention how much it’s necessary to scroll to change a field to a dropdown list. The RESTful services are at least somewhat straightforward. Really like when it gives me “Under unscheduled maintenance” and then I gotta figure if it’s my SQL or they being down for real… Also for some reason, all of Oracle’s pages just take foooreever to load on my network. It’s not my router, it’s not my connection, since all other websites just load fine…
In both cases, I was using Oracle products for seminar projects. Specifically for Apex, I had to make a simple database with 15 tables, and visualise all of them in the Apex as a page. I am empathetic to anyone who has to use either in a production environment on a real project…
I thought you could just go to the UI settings within the SQL Workshop and unmark the PK as Hidden for that
I don’t seem to be able to locate that option in the SQL Workshop… If true that’d saved me so much time, since that wasn’t shown to me during the course. Thanks anyway, though! 👍
It’s been a while since I’ve used Apex so I hope you find the solution, I remember messing with the default settings a lot before it became useful at all
I recall My company at the time was getting free rehosting pro serve and 6 months active credit. Heavy oracle rac shop. Now, 6 years on they are stuck. I offered to migrate them off oracle but the CEO likes oracle. Down with the ship, I guess.
Ancient service contracts with companies who wouldn’t be able to afford migrating to a new ecosystem. That’s all that’s keeping most of these older tech companies afloat.
Historically, the only thing Oracle ever made which was good was their database, and even that is only worth it beyond a certain size of dataset and number of simultaneous requests being served.
Nice try, larry. While their database is completely decent, you cannot use it beyond certain size/performance requirements because that would require buying yet another yacht for the fucker.
They didn’t make Mysql if that’s what you’re referring to and Oracle DB was nothing revolutionary.
I think your most demanding use of databases was in tiny environments with tiny datasets and relaxed performance metrics compared to my own experience in designing systems that include databases.
MySQL and Oracle DB are totally different beasts for totally different needs, even if they’re both relational databases.
Further, the Oracle DB predates MySQL.
MySQL was created exactly because at the time there were either these massive Enterprise Class behemoth expensive databases such as Oracle DB and IBM’s Db2 or stuff like Access and hacked Excel sheets being used as “databases”, so there really wasn’t a proper database for things like inventory systems for small and mid-sized companies - they either used Access which was a joke (didn’t even had Transactions, so prone to get corrupted) or they paid a lot for licenses for the big databases which also required expensive machines to run them on.
One could say that MySQL made a lot of the modern Internet possible because it was Open Source and ran on Linux so you could for free make a dynamic website (say, a small online store) on top of a stack with it at the bottom (and Apache at the top and some custom middle layer in something things like PHP - remember that these were the 90s and Python only became popular later) on a pretty basic Linux server somewhere and that was enough until you got really big. You could do it with Oracle DB at the bottom also, but it was expensive and not really worth it unless you were serving tens or hundred of thousands or requests per minute.
That said, I agree that Oracle DB wasn’t revolutionary, it just worked well with all kinds of loads, even extreme ones, as long as you knew what you were doing.
The point I was making was that the Oracle DB was the only decent product Oracle ever created, not that it was revolutionary.
I think you replied to my comment combined with someone else’s. All I said was OracleDB was nothing special and they didn’t create Mysql which was revolutionary for many reasons including some of the stuff you mentioned. So I think we’re in complete agreement, but
DB sizes from 1980s are laughable by modern standards and by the time storage got cheap enough to have TBs in DBs OracleDB was not significantly better at handling those datasets than MySQL.
A couple other entertaining Access facts: 1) Access databases did at least have an audit table - which was manually editable; 2) Access databases were used by the Diebold electronic voting machines that were in use in numerous states during the 2000 presidential election cycle. It’s possible that 1 and 2 are unrelated.
On a more amusing note, I remember making fun of Access on StackOverflow around 2008 or so and running afoul of a dude who was still making a living doing Access work. I’ve never been more fearful that a person online was going to track me down IRL and attempt to kill me.
Not just oracle. Couple years ago Google nuked an Australian pension fund cloud environment with no way to restore. Just poof all data gone.
That was mistake on Google part if I remember correctly, it wasn’t intentional.
Oopsie, the photos of your dead wife/husband/father/mother/pet/children are all gone. Pleasure doing bussiness with you! 🤗
We’re sowwwie.
Pretty sure Google did restore it, no? It was Google’s fuckup, but there were backups.
No, the org had their own backups because of compliance reasons.
thank fuck! Guidelines are written in blood, and lost bytes
It’s the problem with their “always free” virtual machines. Use too much, and they delete it for abuse. Use just a little, and they delete it for inactivity.
Those aren’t free because Oracle is benevolent, but simply because probably they had a contract with Ampere to purchase millions of those arm server CPUs and they have vacancy
They’re “free” in the hope that they will catch a whale: someone gets used to their infrastructure with a test, then spin more paid virtual machines
If in a specific datacenter, suddenly a whale is asking more resources, the free ones are getting the cut
Ah but this guy said he was paying them, in this reply on Mastodon, and that in fact they didn’t even stop the charge for next month.
I’m kinda excited about my free tier. Gonna see what happens in the future.
I wanted to try them but then I would have to register with Oracle… Yuck
Something about eggs in one basket.
Two baskets of eggs? Have you seen how much they cost?
It’s just the basket not the eggs
I am moderately surprised that this didn’t have anything to do with Trump or Elon Musk. I was pretty curious what activist organization Erik Uden ran. But, the punchline wasn’t that, and was in the Mastodon replies.
Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle’s CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.
https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113879369270806353
What a weird coincidence
I think the Oracle CEO was the original CEO asshole before the current batch became the new big thing. No that it means that he’s actually deleting accounts left and right, but he’s been a dick before it was cool.
Sounds about right for Oracle. I worked for a company that got bought by Oracle, and the support ticketing system we used was owned by Salesforce. Now, Larry Ellison hates Salesforce. So everyone was told to eliminate use of all Salesforce software.
Only problem was the Oracle software they wanted me to switch to - Service Center - was terrible. It was designed for massive call centers, not my team of five. It had almost zero automation, and the UX was circa 1985.
So I had a meeting with the Service Center team to go over my concerns. One feature I needed was an autocomplete field for ticket macros. This let us quickly process messages in our workflow. And it was just an autocomplete field, something I’d built myself dozens of times.
The Service Center folks acted like they’d never seen anything like that. They said it would take a year to add that feature to their product, but management still said I had to switch. So my boss, who had my back, got it thrown up the chain of command at Oracle. And then again. And again.
After a year and a half of this, averaging about a meeting a quarter, I finally got on the phone with an EVP who asked a very good question: “How much is this costing us per year?”
“$5,000” I said
“Why are you wasting my time with this?” she said
“Good question” I said.
I ended up getting to keep my ticketing software. I don’t know if Service Center has autocomplete fields yet.
What a weird coincidence
There’s a really good chance it IS coincidence. Oracle Cloud has a history of straight up deleting “always free” tier VMs and data in Oracle Cloud. This has been going on for years.
But he said he was paying: https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113930315726322526
I haven’t done any extensive looking at his situation specifically, but your link is more confusing than clarifying. He originally said his access was revoked and all his data deleted, but in your linked post it says his access to was revoked, but his server is still running. Is he saying that his VM still exists, the OS still running, but someone logged into the OS and specifically deleted all of his data leaving the server intact? That doesn’t sound likely, so I don’t understand what his situation is.
Yeah that didn’t make sense to me either. Sounds to me like just because the billing is still running he concludes the server still runs as well.
Perhaps the billing or perhaps the server is still responding to public remote requests (just not private authenticated administrative ones). Not enough data to form a conclusion, but enough to know things aren’t adding up yet to agree with his conclusion.
Does that include permabanning the users too?
What a weird coincidence
Those coincidences are going to keep happening unless you start Mario Brothering CEOs
Larry Ellison being a contentious, petty cunt? Must be a day ending in y.
