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As per past discussion there should be no company tags. still exists, but as per excerpt:

Oracle Database is a Multi-Model Database Management System created by Oracle Corporation. Do NOT use this tag for other products owned by Oracle, such as Java and MySQL.

It is actually a product tag for Oracle database. As of posting, no such tag exists. Therefore, should be created. As per this comment, should become a synonym for it.

Semi-related: There seem to have been , but it was burned sometime after discussing making it a synonym for . Regardless I would prefer over .

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    When a product's name is the same as the name of the company, I feel like it's ok to have such a tag.
    – Dharman Mod
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 16:47
  • 8
    @Dharman I'd advocate for a change anyway, as do-not-use-for in experts usually hints at the tag being at risk of misuse.
    – A-Tech
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 17:16
  • 7
    Same for tag "apache" (discussed multiple times)
    – Olaf Kock
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 17:45
  • 4
    One potential misuse for the oracle tag is if a user is running their code on oracle's cloud
    – Fastnlight
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 18:28
  • 2
    I said potential. I haven't personally seen any, but renaming the tag may prevent future misuse
    – Fastnlight
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 18:48
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    Let us consult the [oracle].
    – dan1st
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 20:31
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    @Dharman Going through oracle.com, it looks like Oracle exclusively refers to the product as "Oracle Database". Given the number of other "Oracle Xxx" products they have, I don't think "Oracle" is a unique product name at this point.
    – M. Justin
    Commented Dec 11, 2023 at 23:50
  • 2
    How many questions are using oracle to mean the company or another product from them? If we rename it, that will make those questions confusing.
    – DavidG
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 0:26
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    FWIW, I believe the Oracle tag is pretty clean right now. I've personally looked at the title and tags for almost every [oracle] question for over a decade now. About a few times a month I change [oracle] to something like [oraclelinux], [java], [virtualbox], [mysql], [oracle-cloud-infrastructure], etc. In practice, the tag works fine right now. That's no guarantee about the future, but I don't plan on stopping my crusade for tag perfection any time soon.
    – Jon Heller
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 2:57
  • 4
    @Laurel I (and several others) keep the Oracle tag pretty clean. I'll re-tag 99.9% of the off-topic questions in that tag to something more relevant and ensure that it is solely about the Oracle RDBMS and not about other Oracle products. (The ones I miss are when I'm on vacation or the very rare cases where there is a niche Oracle product that uses an Oracle database as a back-end but the question isn't quite about the database but there isn't a tag for that front-end product and I can't find something more relevant).
    – MT0
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 11:33
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    There is something to say for not touching a name that everyone knows. Oracle database engineers have been tagging their questions "oracle" for over a decade now.
    – Gimby
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 12:20
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    As for reducing the workload - it won't do much. Most curation is when [oracle-sqldeveloper] should be [oracle] or [plsql] should be [sql] or sometimes [oracle] should be [oracle-cloud-infrastructure] or [oracle-apex] or [weblogic] or several other products but many of those later ones would still be mis-tagged they use an Oracle RDBMS in the background and people think they have to tag every tech. It is rare that [Oracle] is used as a company tag; that mainly occurs when people want to ask about Oracle's Java JDK (rather than OpenJDK) and I haven't seen that in the last month or two.
    – MT0
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 13:14
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    Is there any evidence the current tag naming is causing any actual problem?
    – Martin Smith
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 14:12
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    @MartinSmith Not a huge amount that I have seen. The biggest historical problem was the [oracledb] tag and confusion between that and [oracle], [node-oracledb] and [oracledb-node] but that got retagged into the correct tags and [oracledb-node] was retagged to [node-oracledb]. Apart from that its just the common misconceptions of tagging the name of the client application when you should tag the database or that PL/SQL = SQL or that any question that looks sideways at a database should have the database tag added to it which won't be fixed by renaming the tag.
    – MT0
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 14:21
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    It's not just about what we're used to, but about making the tag intuitive and accessible for all users, especially newcomers. Oracle has long moved on from being a purely database company.
    – user201891
    Commented Dec 13, 2023 at 0:01

5 Answers 5

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+1 — I'm all for a less ambiguous tag that is unlikely to be misused on questions about other Oracle products.

Without reading the tag wiki, I would assume that would be applicable to any product from Oracle the company and not just to their database product. It seems that many users asking questions don't read the tag wiki either because questions about other Oracle products frequently get tagged with it. It looks clean now only because a dedicated group of curators constantly monitor and re-tag questions.

M Justin points out that Oracle (the company) exclusively refers to its database product as "Oracle Database."

If you search for "oracle" on Google, databases are not prominent. Google even suggests "oracle database" as a related search.

"Oracle" also has another meaning in theoretical computer science: a magic box that provides an answer, which helps with some algorithm proofs.

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  • Ok, but what happened to all the questions previously tagged as [oracle], the new tag (synonym) only has 5 questions attached.
    – thatjeffsmith
    Commented Jan 17 at 13:09
  • @thatjeffsmith I see "150,930 questions" under oracle-database now.
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Commented Jan 17 at 13:23
  • I see 6 @stephen-ostermiller
    – thatjeffsmith
    Commented Jan 17 at 13:26
  • also there's no guidance on the tag, that can't be copied over from the existing [oracle] tag?
    – thatjeffsmith
    Commented Jan 17 at 13:27
  • I copied the tag wiki over using the Google cache version of it with a browser plugin that allows me to copy from a page to markdown. I edited in the new tag name oracle -> oracle-database where appropriate. I did NOT remove the guidance about misusing the tag for other Oracle products. That is hopefully unnecessary new and SHOULD be removed.
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Commented Jan 17 at 13:42
  • Now I took care of that unnecessary usage guidance. In the excerpt, I replaced it with the "When posting questions with the oracle tag, please be sure to always include Oracle edition and version." usage guidance.
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Commented Jan 17 at 13:47
  • I don't think the new tag has the code language for syntax highlighting set to lang-sql like the old tag did. I don't think I can change that, but maybe a moderator can.
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Commented Jan 17 at 13:49
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What is in a name?

The Oracle Corporation release "Oracle version 2" RDBMS in 1979 and the software was called "Oracle" not "Oracle Database".

As Oracle Corporation grew, it acquired more products and from "Oracle 8" it started referring to the RDBMS software as "Oracle Database" to disambiguate its other product lines but the RDBMS is still commonly referred to as "Oracle" rather than "Oracle Database".

This abbreviation is particularly noticeable as other RDBMS are referred to as "SQL Server", "MySQL", "Posgres" or "PostgreSQL" and not as "??? Database".

What is the actual problem?

There appear to be two problems that are attempting to be solved:

  1. Don't use tags with the same name as a company.
  2. Reduce the curation work.

If the only problem we are trying to solve is #1 then that should be applied to all tags across Stack Overflow.

If we are trying to solve #2 then we need to understand what the main curation issues with the [oracle-*] tags are are:

  • Mis-tagging anything that is vaguely related to a database with the database tag even if the question is not actually about the database. That is probably the most common case when the [oracle] tag is applied and then removed. Renaming the tag is not going to solve that problem because people are deliberately using the database's tag because they think its relevant when it is not (and new users often feel that they need to use all 5 tags on questions).
  • Mis-typing sub-tags. One of the most common is typing oracle apex into the tag list and getting the two tags [oracle] and [apex] when they should have typed oracle-apex (hyphen instead of space) and got a single tag. Similarly for oracle cloud instead of oracle-cloud-infrastructure. Renaming the tag may stop some of this but since Oracle Apex is built on top of Oracle RDBMS and people often tag both because the question is about using SQL queries through Oracle Apex's interface I really don't think that this will have a significant reduction on any curation efforts.
  • Mis-tagging. This goes two ways:
    • The most common is using a related tag such as [oracle-sqldeveloper] because the user is interacting through the SQL Developer client and there is a commonly recurring misconception that "client application" = "database". Most of these questions are not specific to the client and actually should be tagged [oracle] because the question is about database functionality and not client functionality.
    • The less common is tagging [oracle] when the question is actually related to client functionality (usually around why does the code run in this client but not that client or why can I run individual statements and not a script). Again, renaming the tag is not going to solve these curation issues because the users believe that the problem is with the database and not with their client application (or that "client application" = "database").
  • There is a very small minority of questions where the [oracle] tag is applied to relate to the company. This is typically when someone wants to ask specifically about Oracle's Java JDK and not about other JDK's. These can probably be counted on one hand over a year (the last one I curated was months ago) and they are almost always off-topic as the either want to know where to download it or about licensing and will swiftly get closed.

Should we change the tag name?

The main curation issues are not going to be solved by renaming the tag. It would have a minor positive effect but will likely not be hugely significant.

My personal opinion is that:

If it is easy to do then renaming the tag from [oracle] to [oracle-database] is not going break anything and may have a small positive benefit of disambiguating things; however, if it is going to take time from a moderator or a Stack Overflow employee that would be better spent on something more practical (or less cosmetic) then this should be (very) low priority.

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    The rename would take less than 5 minutes and can be done by a moderator. However, renaming it will cause all the "Oracle" tag badges to be deleted and new "Oracle-database" tag badges to be awarded all at once, losing the history (i.e., the date awarded will be the date of the rename) and causing some confusion.
    – Laurel
    Commented Dec 13, 2023 at 12:00
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I created the tag synonym for (so no new questions can be tagged ) but the merge (rename) fails because there's 150k questions.

I'm tagging this for a developer to complete the merge

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    For consistency, should we also rename the version specific tags? For example, should "oracle19c" change to "oracle-database19c"? Here are the relevant tags I could find: oracle7 oracle8 oracle8i oracle9i oracle10g oracle-xe oracle-xe-18.4 oracle11g oracle11gr1 oracle11gr2 oracle12c oracle12.1 oracle12.2 oracle18c oracle19c oracle21c
    – Jon Heller
    Commented Jan 18 at 1:32
  • Machavity, the suggestion from the developer is: merge the tags to get everything still with oracle-database on it get moved to oracle, then delete the synonym. After verifying that oracle-database doesn’t exist, perform a new tag “merge” (under the hood it will be a rename)
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Mar 26 at 21:52
  • @Berthold That's just it: it times out if you try. Have the developer try the mod merge tool. I never got it to work. It chokes somewhere around 10-15k questions.
    – Machavity Mod
    Commented Mar 26 at 21:57
  • @Machavity Understood, thanks for confirming that, I will follow up with them and report back.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Mar 27 at 17:30
-2

You don't refer to the Oracle database as "Oracle Database", you call it "Oracle".

Analogously and as a counter-point, you don't think of any one tool from Microsoft as "Microsoft", you think of it in precise terms (Azure, Teams, TeamDynamix, etc).

Don't see a whole lot of value to creating this separate tag.

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    Renaming the 'oracle' tag to 'oracle-database' is about clarity and inclusivity, not creating a new tag. While 'oracle' is a well-understood shorthand among current users, Stack Overflow serves a diverse community. Precise tagging helps everyone.
    – user201891
    Commented Dec 12, 2023 at 23:58
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    @DavidS: What about "Oracle" in a technical context is ambiguous? Every professional context I've heard someone use it, it has always been about the database. If they used a technology they'd prefix it with that. If they were talking about the company they'd either contextualize it with "work for" or "yacht".
    – Makoto
    Commented Dec 13, 2023 at 0:03
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    @Makoto I'D argue that there is some bias in that because you already work with that you think of oracle oracle-database. But someone using different oracle products or is just starting out is more likely to confuse it. E.g. I personally, I didn't think of the database when first encountering the tag.
    – A-Tech
    Commented Dec 13, 2023 at 8:17
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    This would be my line of thinking. It would be very warped if a bunch of people hanging around on MSO get to decide what happens to a high frequency tag such as "oracle"; let the people who have made their nest under that tag decide what is right and wrong with it. It's worked just fine thus far, so let's not do the meta thing and invent problems where there are none.
    – Gimby
    Commented Dec 13, 2023 at 9:47
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    I work with Oracle DB daily, and I definitely explicitly say Oracle DB to my coworkers, I never just say Oracle personally. We do also use other Oracle products like Oracle Linux though.
    – Nexevis
    Commented Dec 14, 2023 at 13:00
  • @Makoto I don't usually work with the Oracle database, so when I'm talking about Oracle professionally, it's usually in the context of the company that currently owns Java.
    – M. Justin
    Commented Jan 13 at 19:34
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Lets do this. Only because this already happens with oracle apex, when Apex is another thing totally different. This will allow us to identify passively the misuse.

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