Amazon Goes After Oracle (Again) With New Aurora Database

Sez Zero writes with news about the latest from Amazon Web Services. "Once again Amazon Web Services is taking on Oracle, the kingpin of relational databases, with Aurora, a relational database that is as capable as 'proprietary database engines at 1/10 the cost,' according to AWS SVP Andy Jassy. Amazon is right that customers, even big Oracle customers who hesitate to dump tried-and-true database technology are sick of Oracle’s cost structure and refusal to budge from older licensing models. Still there are very few applications that are more “sticky” than databases, which after typically contains the keys to the kingdom. Financial institutions see their use of Oracle databases as almost a pre-requisite for compliance, although that perception may be changing."

Comments

What's the Difference?

[gizmo2199]

I'm a bit of a DB n00b, but know my way around MySQL. What's the difference between Oracle and MySQL for example. In my experience Oracle DBs tend to be a lot faster, than open source implementations. But is this inherently true, or is it all in the implementation, are there things you can do in Oracle that you can't do in MySQL, or MSSQL?

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is what can you do in Oracle that you can't do in Postgresql. The answer is very little, but there are must-have features that keep the biggest customers locked in.

Having said that, Oracle must see the writing on the wall. They won't lose these most-entrenched customers but lots of middle tier customers are seeing the light (and massive cost savings are *really* enticing). Efforts like this from Amazon chip away even more.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

PostgreSQL and Firebird make Oracle and MySQL look like pathetic jokes.

Re:What's the Difference?

[DougOtto]

If you're doing straight select, insert, update, delete operations there really isn't much functional difference between any of them. They all do locking a bit different and their are some syntax differences but it's all manageable.

It's when you start looking at procedure code, triggers and such that MySQL(or Maria) is lagging behind in that thing get a bit wobbly. We've been looking at dumping Oracle for exactly the reasons mentioned in the article. Apparently Larry needs some new toys or something because they also seem to be going a bit 'audit happy' as of late. We're completely in compliance but it's taken dozens of man hours on our side to prove it. The worst part is there's really nothing you can do about it.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm as big a postgres fan as the next guy, but there's still no multimaster replication.

Of course, unless you have millions of dollars to burn on Oracle, you're not going to get multimaster replication there either.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

oracle's ability to scale-up is only limited by the amount of hardware you can throw at your installation... and most importantly, your willingness to open up your checkbook as license fees also scale-up (and exponentially so).

Re:What's the Difference?

[mlts]

Oracle is a mixed bag. One one hand, it is really nice to be able to get up and running without having to make sure you have every single license key somewhere. On the other hand, there are the audits.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia's comparison of RDMS's

Oracle's comparison of MySQL and the Oracle database

Can't get much clearer than that.

As to performance, I'd say it varies by application/configuration. I don't use Oracle myself, but last I heard, MySQL performed better in low-resource scenarios.

Re:What's the Difference?

[NotFamous]

Oracle - MySQL = PL/SQL. PL/SQL is a full-blown programming language apart from ANSI SQL. There are objects, table variables, maps, arrays, etc. This is what makes it very hard to switch from Oracle. Once you have been bitten by the PL/SQL bug, it is very expensive to move away from.

Re:What's the Difference?

[larien]

As other posters have said, there are enough features in Oracle (some of which are added cost options) to keep it (or DB2, Sybase etc) mandatory in some cases because Postgres & MySQL simply aren't up to the job.

Once you have that in play, companies will tend to standardise on one DB platform for most deployments because (a) you don't want to have to keep multiple skillsets up to date and (b) you never know when that new application will suddenly evolve into requiring feature X which MySQL doesn't support properly, possibly simply by organic data growth.

Also, in some cases, it's probably more expensive proving you can run on MySQL than it is to simply open your wallet to start the deposit for Larry's next yacht...

Re:What's the Difference?

[Charliemopps]

MySQL is a good example! I to do MySQL... but where I work, I'm the only one. Everyone else does Oracle. When they try to hit my database, they get all confused and come over to my desk. What on earth is going on?!!? I look at their SQL and say "This should never work. What on earth are you doing?!"

After looking at this for a while, I then learned that Other forms of SQL, especially Oracle, fix your bad code. Not kidding... So code that should not work, the database figures out what you want to do and fixes it. That's both good and bad. It saves you development time, and it lets you hire... well, to be frank, cheaper report guys. Even an idiot can write basic reports for Oracle. Move them to MySQL and they need to know what they are doing. It's not fixing anything for you. It also has it's downsides... you get lazy. I was writing reports in it for a few months for a project and I came back... oh, I can't do that here. That's right. Oh, I can't do a join like that... etc...

On the DBA side, Oracle makes some major tasks easier. Sometimes when I want to do some major things in MySQL I have to write actual applications or scripts to get the job done. Plan several steps, do them in the right order, etc... and some tasks like that in Oracle are just basic commands. Do X... it ticks away... done. That's nice. But again, it makes you lazy. Leads to you having staff that doesn't really know all the steps required to do X manually.

That said... I dont think any of that matters. Oracle costs insane amounts of money. MySQL (and a dozen others) is free. And the differences aren't that big of a deal. Any person that does Oracle should be able to get up to speed in MySQL or whatever, in no time. Those major operations that Oracle makes easy? How often do they happen?

The Oracle guys around me hate anything but it though. "Get a real database!" they say (for real) They have this general feeling that the company should fork over the cash for it so they don't have to bother with the trivial tasks they find annoying in the same way that the company should pay for free coffee. They seem to forget that if the company went with a free option they could literally triple every DBA and SQL guys salary and still save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. That's how expensive Oracle is.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me look that up for you.

Point is -- there's no magic. ACID and network together means you have to go either with 2PC or with eventual consistency (thus getting just half-a-C from ACID). Of course, a well paid salesperson will know how to handwave that away.

I'd say that (perhaps besides really big iron), PostgreSQL is on a par with Oracle (and much easier to install and handle.

MySQL? Pfeh.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Whorhay]

As a security oriented guy the big difference for me is the complete lack of built in security features in pretty much anything that isn't Oracle or MS SQL. MySQL is especially bad in this regard in my experience. Some agency will decide to switch to it because it's free and they expect a lot of savings. Then they discover that lots of the security features that were givens with Oracle or MS SQL just aren't there in MySQL. Sure they can license packages and whatnot to provide for those security options in many cases but then it's not free anymore. They could write their own security packages, but again that will take a lot of time and money to develop, so not actually free. It could definitely end up cheaper in the long run but most program managers I've worked with don't seem to look at that as a viable sell to their customers.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Major Blud]

"What's the difference between Oracle and MySQL"

Well now that Oracle owns both, not much really :-)

I've always felt that the biggest threat to Oracle has almost always been MS SQL Server, especially in the past few years. Unfortunately for MS, when they changed their licensing model with SQL 2012, the threat has waned to a certain degree.

Re:What's the Difference?

[userw014]

There's also differences in administrative properties - such as access rights, how different users & schemas might interact, how database backups, replication, fail-over, mirroring, etc. all work. There's also subtle differences in some data types - such as what kind of date or time types are available, whether geographical information system (GIS) data types are available - and how much they might cost, etc. With older versions of MySql (5.1), you can have trouble joining the same table multiple times - unless you create a view on the multiple tables. I'm not sure if that's been fixed in the modern variations of MySql.

Like other's have remarked, if your database needs are modest then you can likely use most any database. It's when you have high reliability, high volume needs that you start designing things that tie you to a particular database system.

SQL is a "standard" much like "romance languages" is a standard...

Re:What's the Difference?

[postbigbang]

There's also a HUGE ecosystem, very profitable, that after two dozen years, actually works-- expensive as it is. Oracle DBAs and SQL coders aren't the sort of person that's after the latest "edgy" new db scheme.

I would venture that most of them don't like JSON, have no clue for hadoop, and are the online/never-fail sorts. They're not going to use REST against an AJAX app, are clueless about puppet, and believe in middleware. Not gonna get them to fix what they perceive as not-broken.

There is a small amount of wisdom in this philosophy, but like COBOL, mainframes/minis, and AS/400s/AIX, time will eventually pass them by, slowly, but unerringly, IMHO.

Re:What's the Difference?

[bobbied]

I'm a bit of a DB n00b, but know my way around MySQL. What's the difference between Oracle and MySQL for example. In my experience Oracle DBs tend to be a lot faster, than open source implementations. But is this inherently true, or is it all in the implementation, are there things you can do in Oracle that you can't do in MySQL, or MSSQL?

What's the difference?

Mainly, for most customers, PRICE is the only real difference.

It's not support, it's not functionality, it's not even performance (usually), it's about what you pay.

For some customers, there are some unique features that Oracle brings or performance increases they have, but you pay though the nose for it. Usually the people that need these features can afford to buy from Oracle so that's what they do. There is some name recognition that gets your product into some place it wouldn't go otherwise, but that doesn't happen all that much.

Apart from that, it's about money and Oracle fleecing people who could get a database and support cheaper from other vendors using other products..

Re: What's the Difference?

[Redbehrend]

I agree I worked at a company with a certified "oracle" expert that got paid big bucos and man was his code sloppy. Since the free ones don't troubleshoot or debug like Oracle you actually got to plan and do it right the first time lol Not sayin that's everyone...

Re: What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

What security features?

Re:What's the Difference?

[jbolden]

ASM = control your SAN volume manager from within the database
Real Application Testing = simulate workloads
Data Guard = pass databases offsite automatically as it is running
Flashback = roll the database back to a arbitrary earlier points in time
Index key compression
Cluster tables = prejoin
table and index partitioning = gigantic tables that go across disks and systems
oracle vault = complex permissions for data with varying level of access that even dbas shouldn't have access to

etc...

Re:What's the Difference?

[hey!]

I've used Oracle (as well as practically every other major RDBMS platform) on and off since v4. Oracle has been around a long time and over that time it has acreted features and along with them complexity. For example it's got excellent features for storing and querying geographic objects. One of my favorite neat-o features is "virtual private databases" -- fine grained row-level security. You can set it up so some logins can't even see certain rows of a database -- e.g. if you log in as a regional manager you can see and manipulate only your region's records.

But of course if you've learned to program apps in the last fifteen years or so, you're probably thinking, "How are you supposed to use that feature when the connections are pooled?" And there's the rub. The way people typically use a database is different than the way they did 25 years ago. Now often what people are lookign for is a data store for a handful of object types in their website, and Oracle is overkill, and if you're thinking about serving thousands of users a minute it'll cost you a fortune for features you probably aren't going to use.

So for many if not most apps today really doesn't matter much which RDBMS you choose -- or whether you choose an RDMS at all, so long as it provides the performance and reliabilty you need. The nastieness of MSSQL's Transact SQL and the idiosyncracies of PL/SQL are hidden away by peristance providers so you hever have to deal with them. There are stills some apps where you have dozens or even hundreds of tables that are continually being combined in queried in idiosyncratici ways, and this is what a traditional RDBMS is designed to solve. If you've got dozens or even hundreds of tables and millions of records with a modest number of users, it's hard to beat Oracle.

Within the traditional RDBMSs, Oracle provides rich feature sets that are irrelevent to many developers today. Some of its SQL was non-standard (don't know if this is still true), and some of its JDBC driver features were non-standard (BLOBS -- again don't know if this is still true), but this doesn't matter to users who are working with some kind of persistence provider like Hibernate that papers over the differences.

As for performance, it's very good for an RDBMS out of the box -- which is to say mediocre. That's the deal with RDBMS: guaranteed mediocre perofrmance for no programmer effort. As load climbs, Oracle in my experience works very well if you have someone who is a capable Oracle DBA. If not Oracle performance has a way of collapsing catastrophically due to resource starvation (e.g. exceeding the memory allocated to the System Global Area etc). Managing an Oracle database that will get hammered is not for amateurs. Oracle databases have all kinds of parameters to tweak, many of which can cause disaster. Beware.

On top of that Oracle's licensing practices are (or at least were) ridiculously complicated and predatory. They don't care if you screw up and it costs you a ton of money, once they have their hooks into you. I've been to Oracle offices many times, and the corporate culture always gave me the creeps. Of course, if I had to pick a competitor for creepiest corporate culture, I'd have to name Amazon. That may be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Hognoxious]

Not much. They both use joins, so they're not webscale.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your application? If you're storing small scale data, MySQL is fine. If you really need to scale, need 24x7 support, etc... then Oracle is starts to shine.

Re:What's the Difference?

[sg_oneill]

but like COBOL, mainframes/minis, and AS/400s/AIX, time will eventually pass them by, slowly, but unerringly, IMHO

.... and they'll still be there. Grey and defiant.

Re:What's the Difference?

[postbigbang]

So are 1957 Porsches. Some designs are timeless, but entropy will get them all but a few samples preserved for posterity.

Re:What's the Difference?

[vux984]

the database figures out what you want to do and fixes it.

SQL is declarative not procedural.

The entire raison d'etre for SQL in some sense is precisely that you tell it what you want and it figures out how to do it.

Basically you've just criticized Oracle for being better at what SQL is SUPPOSED to be. :)

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me look that up for you.

Point is -- there's no magic. ACID and network together means you have to go either with 2PC or with eventual consistency (thus getting just half-a-C from ACID). Of course, a well paid salesperson will know how to handwave that away.

I'd say that (perhaps besides really big iron), PostgreSQL is on a par with Oracle (and much easier to install and handle.

MySQL? Pfeh.

PostgreSQL clustering, replication, and connection pooling are all jokes compared to Oracle.

No. They all really are.

PostgreSQL doesn't do true database clusters - it's all based on replication from a single master database. That's not a cluster. Not only that, failover reliability absolutely sucks because even the "best" option listed in your link - pgpool - is a giant flaming turd. (Don't think so? Set up a pgpool/PostgreSQL cluster and start doing things like pulling network cables and turning machines off and watch the "cluster" fall apart. I've done it. Problems like pgpool processes would hang waiting for a signal from a process that pgpool itself had already shut down. My open-source-enamored customer was not happy that they wound up paying me more to prove PostgreSQL wouldn't work than it would have cost just to buy Oracle licenses in the first place...)

PostgreSQL doesn't do active-active shared-storage clusters. So you need to pay for two or three times more online disk storage because of that. Oracle can use one set of backend shared storage for all servers in the cluster. If you have to buy 1,500 terabytes of enterprise-level redundant disk storage instead of 500 TB for your three-server cluster serving half a petabyte of data because PostgreSQL doesn't do shared storage, that license fee you pay for the Oracle database is small potatoes compared to the cost of that extra fucking PETABYTE of disks that the limitations of PostgreSQL force you to buy.

And for databases that big, PostgreSQL is a lot slower.

Now, add back in the fact I mentioned above that pgpool/PostgreSQL "clusters" are not reliable. Period - they're not.

That's who Oracle's customers are. And once you get a few of those in house, why bother with other types of solutions? You have the Oracle expertise in house (or otherwise available) and your Oracle DBA/server SA staff can install/maintain small Oracle databases in their sleep. Or just make your 100 MB tiny DB available on the 500 TB big iron database in half an hour.

And if you've never worked on databases like that, your experience is with toys.

Oracle's competition isn't PostgreSQL - get over your grass-roots open-source fetish. It's DB2 and now - thanks to funding from Google and other large corporations - NoSQL databases.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Cyberax]

Except that Oracle doesn't really do multi-master. They have share-everything RAC, effectively moving the replication requirements onto the block layer. At this point you're better off simply running PostgreSQL on a fast SSD-based storage with synchronous replication for reliability and read-only queries.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Trailer Trash]

...Apparently Larry needs some new toys or something...

s/toys/entire fucking islands/

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

what security features ?

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle's partitioning, parallel query, and materialized views, are way ahead of anything that PostgreSQL has. Shame you need to own a bank to afford them, of course, but that's why banks use Oracle I suppose.

Re:What's the Difference?

[RabidReindeer]

One of the most common underpinning infrastructures to the NoSQL databases is MySQL.

Oracle and DB2 may have virtues in certain circumstances, but they're a royal bitch to deal with, and in many cases, not worth the money, even in major shops for anything except the very largest applications.

From an administrative point of view, they're a joke. Ever tried to dump a DB2 database out to raw SQL using the IBM-supplied utilities? Ever tried to port a DB2 database from an iSeries machine to a Linux DB2 server? Or even an LUW Windows DB2 database to a an LUW Linux database? DB2 can't even do a decent job of creating a new table from a selection off an old table - at least Oracle can do that much. Boolean data types? Nope. Error messages that can be decoded in under a day? How about this this Oracle classic (translated into the vernacular) "One of the 145 columns in your SELECT statement has an invalid data type. Guess which one, sucker!" DB2 has an almost identical message. Almost as useful as the old mainframe error message that says "EROPT = ABE OR AN INVALID CODE", explanation: "An invalid code or ABE was specified for EROPT", actual meaning: either your COBOL program specified a wrong length record or the tape drive's on fire - usually the first, but only by consulting the system data areas and decoding the status bits would tell you for certain.

It's a LOT cheaper to install, maintain, and even repair MySQL and PostgreSQL than it is to do any of those things from Oracle or DB2, and these days, the cost of the support personnel and their available time figures more highly than the cost of the software. Even if the software wasn't free.

"But Oracle and IBM provide Fortune-level service!" Yeah. Right. "Please stay on the line, approximate waiting time is now 45 minutes. Your call is VERY important to us". Been there. Or maybe a forum where you can be told to cycle the server in Bombay Welsh. In other words, unless you bulk-order mainframes in lots of 6 or more, you'll get better support in most cases from the FOSS stuff, PLUS if all else fails, you can examine and even modify the source code.

Last Oracle shop I worked in was one of the largest financial institutions in the state. I'm not sure ANY of our systems needed anything on the order of an Exabyte server - even the Financials. Most of the stuff would have run just fine on PostgreSQL with hardly any code mods and without the $64K-plus cost of an Oracle server. Then again, they cut the size of the Oracle support team in half when the recession hit, so I guess they didn't figure that Oracle expertise was worth a whole lot.

Re:What's the Difference?

[RabidReindeer]

One of the reasons why I avoid stored procedures wherever possible is because the convenience is outweighed by the vendor lock-in.

Yes, there are times when you need the kind of performance that only complex server-based functions can provide Or times when no more distant means of access can keep a complex environment properly ACID.

And when that's the case, I'll used stored procedures.

But for run of the mill stuff, no. You end up with half the application in Java/C/.Net, whatever, and half in the database and you constantly have to scramble back and forth to figure out where important things are happening. And if the CEO comes in and decides no more money for Larry, you've dug a real deep hole.

MySQL was late to the party when it came to transactions and stored procedures. It's pretty good these days, but PostgreSQL has more practice at it, and the PostgreSQL query language is more like Oracle's PL/SQL, so the conversion costs are lower.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Grishnakh]

What security features, and are they present in PostgreSQL?

I'm not sure why everyone automatically goes to MySQL as the only choice for open-source RDBMSes, when Postgres seems to be superior in every way.

Re:What's the Difference?

[RabidReindeer]

There's also a HUGE ecosystem, very profitable, that after two dozen years, actually works-- expensive as it is. Oracle DBAs and SQL coders aren't the sort of person that's after the latest "edgy" new db scheme.

I would venture that most of them don't like JSON, have no clue for hadoop, and are the online/never-fail sorts. They're not going to use REST against an AJAX app, are clueless about puppet, and believe in middleware. Not gonna get them to fix what they perceive as not-broken.

There is a small amount of wisdom in this philosophy, but like COBOL, mainframes/minis, and AS/400s/AIX, time will eventually pass them by, slowly, but unerringly, IMHO.

Well, that's a real shame, because my Oracle XML book's about 10 years old now. Presumably Oracle's done equivalents for JSON, and I'm pretty sure that they've got some AJAX tools in the mix, too.

Not that I follow that stuff very closely. Most of the ReST, AJAX, and JSON stuff I've done is either in the general Oracle Sun Java libraries or from one of the major third-party suppliers such as Apache or CodeHaus.

I'll grant that some people do dig their little hole in the ground and never get any bigger, but that hasn't been a safe way to live for at least 20 years.

Re:What's the Difference?

[RabidReindeer]

As a security oriented guy the big difference for me is the complete lack of built in security features in pretty much anything that isn't Oracle or MS SQL. MySQL is especially bad in this regard in my experience. Some agency will decide to switch to it because it's free and they expect a lot of savings. Then they discover that lots of the security features that were givens with Oracle or MS SQL just aren't there in MySQL. Sure they can license packages and whatnot to provide for those security options in many cases but then it's not free anymore. They could write their own security packages, but again that will take a lot of time and money to develop, so not actually free. It could definitely end up cheaper in the long run but most program managers I've worked with don't seem to look at that as a viable sell to their customers.

I have no idea what you're talking about. The MySQL server has extremely fine-grained security and it took me a long time to get happy with what it would let me do. Likewise for PostgreSQL. If the rules aren't just right, you can be bounced and nary a log message in sight to give a clue.

Most of the major security issues I've seen in database-related systems had nothing to do with lack of security in the database (of which Oracle often makes headlines), but rather in the apps that are accessing the database. In fact, one of the biggest security holes I routinely encounter outside of blatant SQL Injection comes from "clever" people who don't use the industry standard login and security mechanisms and invent their own.

Clue: I don't care if you ARE the Lord High Architect and Stephen Hawking routinely calls you when he needs help on hard problems. If you are not a full-time security expert with no silly distractions such as actual applications and if you don't have serious security training, DON'T try and invent your own security system. Use one that's already been vetted, proven, debugged and documented. By people who ARE full-time security experts.

Re:What's the Difference?

[john.sheley]

I'm at re:Invent, and as they laid it out, the difference is in storage, read replication, and provisioning. Storage is in log-based files, and they've set it up so that crash recovery runs in seconds since the redo log playback runs differently. Storage is also all in SSDs. They've optimized read replication and between that and the log-based files, read replicas do very little write processing and are thus able to serve more read requests. Finally, it auto-provisions in 10GB chunks up to a max of 64TB, and the storage cost depends only on what you use. You do have an hourly charge for the master node instance. TL;DR: It has fast I/O and read replication because AWS can leverage the knowledge of their infrastructure, and it provisions itself.

Re:What's the Difference?

[MurukeshM]

Did you really just say that Oracle fixing "what" you told it do makes it better at SQL, because SQL is about the engine figuring out the "how"?

Re:What's the Difference?

[Charliemopps]

Right, I'm not a security guy so that's not my problem though :-p

My general response though is: The database shouldn't be doing the security.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the GGP as talking about carefully structuring the joins, etc. in their queries such that the MySQL query optimizer could actually do something reasonable with them, effectively doing the work the query optimizer is supposed to do, but it's unclear if that what they actually meant.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAC. To simplify, it's a real multi-master clustering. I'm not saying "replication" because it is not that. It's distributed transaction system, meaning your applications really don't have to know anything about it (you don't have to adapt your schema for it - everything is supported) and you can simultaneously write to all instances WHILE maintaining full ACID.

Ok, there are occasional bugs and rarer limitations. Implementing distributed locking system is so ridiculously hard that after 15+ years they are still perfecting it. In fact, no major competitor has anything similar. MS SQL server doesn't. DB2 doesn't.

Unless this Aurora database implements proper multi-master clustering with distributed transactions, it is not really going after Oracle. Neither will PostgreSQL. Sorry.

Re:What's the Difference?

[guruevi]

PostgreSQL isn't the only kid on the block anymore, there are some great implementations to be made in other engines that could outperform Oracle for specific datasets. The problem is that Oracle (as said) is easy to 'certify' which usually means a beancounter can check off a box that means absolutely nothing in the real world.

Re:What's the Difference?

[bondsbw]

The difference? MySQL allows more than 30 characters for table/column names.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has some high-end features which work better in certain applications.

Things like materialised views if you are running OLAP. Or massive parallel redundancy if your system is critical. Or transaction logging if security is ultra important. Backup, especially fast and parallel backups with high data volumes are better. There are also spatial plug-ins if you are working with geo data.

Re:What's the Difference?

[LordWabbit2]

I'm sorry, you are completely wrong. I work with big data, Postgresql and MySQL even MSSQL would shit bricks. The only two viable relational databases for large sets of data are DB2 and Oracle (with MSSQL limping in behind).

Re: What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

DB2 has PureScales, which provides similar functionality.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

MySQL is owned by Oracle. Oracle is a company. MySQL is a particular product. When people are talking about the Oracle Database, there is really a large ecosystem there. It supports clustering for high-availability and performance (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/clustering/overview/index.html). That is a big one. There are also many backup products that can backup a live Oracle DB.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Whorhay]

That approach can work but as soon as you have any kind of compromise you've essentially handed out the keys to the kingdom. Defense in depth while a pain in the ass is effective in limiting the negative outcomes from security lapses. For instance would you be happy with a company that you did business with storing all your payment information in clear text because it was on a "secure" server? Defense in Depth says that regardless of how many security measures are in place between that data and the rest of the world critical information like that should be encrypted.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Whorhay]

The first thing that comes to mind with MySQL was the lack of automated account management. Yes, you can do it manually but that is inherently less secure than having an automated process that can be counted on to do things the same way every time.

The last time I had to evaluate a MySQL database was around a year ago and there was a whole lot of "MySQL doesn't natively support that" coming from the MySQL expert. It is possible that the expert didn't know what he was talking about but each of the features that I tried googling for came back with sales pitches for 3rd party software packages to get that functionality. And there is nothing wrong with that, if whoever is in charge is willing to pay for those products. The problem I kept running into though was the attitude they wanted a complete replacement for Oracle or MS SQL at zero financial cost, instead of just significantly less.

Re:What's the Difference?

[tigersha]

Thanks for keeping the OSS Oracle/Apple/MS haters in the real world. Oracle does have attributes that PostgreSQL can't match, for large datasets. The problem is that a almost none of the hackers here work with really large datasets. The other problem is that hardware is cheap. The data stored on them is so expensive as be irreplacable.

That said, I use PostgreSQL for most projects because I don't HAVE really large datasets (I have a lot of small ones).

Re:What's the Difference?

[tigersha]

You must be joking, right? Postgres can kick MySQL's ass, sure, but Oracle? For seriously large sets and reliability? No way!

Re:What's the Difference?

[tigersha]

Look at the value of an actual business. The hardware on which the database runs is cheap. The data is the product of all the work of all the people who worked there for the last 10-15 years, in the case of companies that do not manufacture things. Do you really think thay paying a couple of thousand Dollars even compensates for that? If you pay an average worked 60000 per year, and you have 200 of them, that is a 1.2 mil per year, and over ten years you gave out 120 million bucks. In comparison to that, the datastorage container is a joke.

My father had a one man business (a drugstore). He once moanes about eh price he had to pay for replacing his borked backup tape drive. Until I pointed out that if his HDD fails without a backup HE WILL LOSE HIS BUSINESS. He saw the light real quick.

Oracle is the same for medium to large businesses.

Re:What's the Difference?

[RabidReindeer]

Still unclear. The core account management DDL for MySQL is just about the same syntax as any other SQL-standard database, although you can also muck with the raw security tables if you prefer. Are you looking for an LDAP tie-in? Or maybe just a DDD (drag/drop/drool) GUI management tool?

In general, you'll find that while Oracle and Microsoft offer a lot of stuff under their respective brand labels, FOSS projects usually spins off side projects from third parties. The net effect is about the same except that in proprietary systems, you get exactly what the vendor wishes to offer but they'll tell you what it is, versus the FOSS approach where you typically spend a couple of hours googling (and/or checking the "featured products" page on the main product site), but you often get a choice of tools.

And, of course, the FOSS systems are generally more open to general external tie-ins in order to facilitate the development of tools without wreaking havoc on the core product. Which is why people scream so loudly about the "black box" approach that Linux systemd offers. Or was in "inflicts"?

Re:What's the Difference?

[Daniel Hoffmann]

Nobody ever got fired from buying Oracle

In all honesty the FOSS solutions at one time (~10 years or more ago) were not nearly as good as Oracle was, that created a snowball effect that people know Oracle, so they want to buy Oracle so the next guy who has to maintain it needs to know Oracle, so he wants to buy Oracle next time.

It is kind of the same thing that keeps Windows inertia still going, database setup, configuration and maintenance are pretty much completely different across all databases, even the SQL is different across them with each one providing their own proprietary extensions and supporting/not supporting different parts of the spec.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Unordained]

You might check NuoDB, as that's their target audience.

RAC was indeed pretty cool. We did have to fight with the Ops guys, though, over the advertised auto-retry feature, which was dangerous for multi-statement transactions, and the documentation (at least at the time) didn't make that clear.

Re:What's the Difference?

[simonsz]

Yes that is correct. For commodity low end servers, mysql will perform much better than oracle in oltp typ transaction throughput. I did tests myself and saw 10X better performance with mysql vs oracle. Complex queries are different story however.

Re:What's the Difference?

[simonsz]

Yes that's why Aurora will not make any dent in converting companies from using Oracle db to mysql like databases. The barrier in conversion of stored procedures with complex business logic is formidable and Aurora does nothing to lower this.

Re:What's the Difference?

[simonsz]

Oracle only owns brand name "mysql". That's it. As for the code base, it can be forked and improved by anyone (e.g. mariadb, drizzle etc). If Oracle decides to deliberately slow down mysql development and try to kill it, it will not work. In the long term, I think mysql and other open databases will devour oracle's proprietary database marketshare.

Re:What's the Difference?

[Cederic]

So how the fuck are you securing the data at rest?

How do you make sure that the OS admins can't see the data? How do you assure that people doing low-level data access (for performance or other reasons) can't see the data? How do you prevent a compromised app tier from seeing the data?

The database shouldn't be doing ALL the security, but it had fucking well better be doing SOME.

"which after typically"

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is "which after typically"?

Re:"which after typically"

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor proofreading.

Re:"which after typically"

[pr0t0]

No, WAT is "which after typically". WTF is something else entirely.

Re:"which after typically"

[Godwin O'Hitler]

You're quite right to point that out, Sir. The correct expression is "post-typically".

Will take years to tackle Oracle crown

[FRAKK2]

For the kind of organisations that use Oracle, you do not switch unless you having a fucking big reason. People use oracle for things that have to run properly all the time, or the business goes bust. The CTO that desides to swtich the database better have bollocks the size of a small planet.

For new projects maybe, but for the day to day running of the company, Oracle will not be shaking in their boots just yet.

Re:Will take years to tackle Oracle crown

[mlts]

Oracle is expensive, but they have a niche that nobody else can take them from... where almost every application will work with Oracle as a DB backend. They are similar to AutoCAD in the safe bet regard [1]. Not because they are light years ahead of the competition... but they have ended up in a place where it is easier to pay for upgrades rather than switch to another RDBMS.

Their only real competition in their market is DB/2 or maybe Sybase (because Sybase works as a backend to SAP.) For something used for a backend Web database, there are other solutions that work just as well, if possibly not better.

[1]: IBM used to have this, but I'd say the crown of "you can't be fired by buying this company's stuff" really belongs to Microsoft.

Re:Will take years to tackle Oracle crown

[Cyberax]

Yeah, sure. Like the banking systems of entire countries. Except that sometimes Oracle does crash...

Re:Will take years to tackle Oracle crown

[Ed Avis]

Don't SAP have their own RDBMS, called SAP DB or MaxDB? It was even released as free software a few years back (then they changed their mind and went back to proprietary). Do you mean that despite that, the only database backend that works well with large SAP installations is Oracle?

Re:Will take years to tackle Oracle crown

[Anonymous Coward]

From my experience, if a company is going to invest in a very expensive application like SAP, they are going to go Oracle and do the job "right". Yes, SAP can run with Sybase ASE, DB/2, or MS SQL server, but SAP is a major commitment, and there are not going to be half-ass measures taken.

Fight Fight!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle vs Amazon fight. Phew, for a minute I thought it was a boring article about a company trying to sell a product.

What is under the hood?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's under the hood of this? Is this just a specialized storage engine used with normal MySQL? Or have they created a whole new MySQL-compatible system from scratch? Come on, we need these kinds of details, people!

Re:What is under the hood?

[wiredlogic]

MySQL/MariaDB can't be positioned as a competitor to Oracle. It takes too many liberties with one's data. PostgreSQL on the other hand...

Re:What is under the hood?

[afidel]

PostgreSQL lacks a lot of features needed to compete with Oracle, things like online index rebuilds and multiple active instances for HA are critical for many businesses where the option to take down the database or a table for maintenance isn't acceptable. Even MS SQL hasn't really been a competitor for many of these mission critical installs until SQL 2012 where finally MS is at near feature parity with Oracle, but they've stuffed up their licensing enough that there's now little incentive to move given all the costs associated with changing anything in such environments.

Re: What is under the hood?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which liberties exactly? Please enlighten us.

Re:What is under the hood?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fud, fud and fud
http://sourceforge.net/projects/postgres-xc/

Re:What is under the hood?

[F.Ultra]

Exactly which liberties does MariaDB take with your data?

Microsoft Office

[Anonymous Coward]

A few years back there was no shortage of competitors who claimed to do everything MS Office did (or Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) at 1/10 or 1/100 or 1/10**6 of the price.

Guess what product most people want to use today? Sounds like Amazon's Oracle killer is another OpenOffice or "Yeah, Write".

Re:Microsoft Office

[mlts]

Even with office suites, one could export whatever documents to some "standard" and switch to a new product, although some formatting would be lost/destroyed. For example, a document open in Pages, saved, then opened in LibreOffice would take some editing to have it formatted correctly.

Databases are permanent. Realistically, unless there is absolutely no other way to do it (for example, if the RDBMS program is written for a 16 bit OS), no company or organization will change database backends. It just takes way too much time to rebuild applications, make sure the data is exported/imported correctly, all tables are in place, and doing all this in production so it impacts day to day business as little as possible.

Amazon's product may be good, but I would be leery of trusting a cloud-only solution. What happens if there is a new regulation that forces certain data to be in house, or what happens if there is a data breach? At least with Oracle or SQL server, I have some options with both local machines as well as cloud based RDBMS backends. Of course, what happens if Amazon decides to stop being a provider? With an RDBMS, it just means running obsolete software until one can get around to moving. With a cloud provider going under, one has to have a solution before they turn off the lights in place, or else all data is gone.

Finally... what about backups? Someone takes down some Amazon cloud servers, and the company using them is royally hosed. There are no tapes local, if there are backups on AWS or Glacier, they might be on the same datacenter or even the same SAN as the failed cloud servers. A conventional solution at least has the ability to have some tangible medium where the data is stored so it can be recovered.

Re:Microsoft Office

[bobbied]

A few years back there was no shortage of competitors who claimed to do everything MS Office did (or Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) at 1/10 or 1/100 or 1/10**6 of the price.

Guess what product most people want to use today? Sounds like Amazon's Oracle killer is another OpenOffice or "Yeah, Write".

Hey, I use Open Office all the time on my Windows laptop... But I'm a confirmed penny pincher who has some IT experience.

But I think you miss the point that we are discussing infrastructure level stuff that the end user NEVER sees. So your example doesn't really wash. MS Office is entrenched because it's what people know and use at work, it's what they are used to. Who knows what relational database the application uses? Not the end user.

What's actually happening is Oracle is falling out of favor in new development. There are cheaper options that do the job just as well. So Oracle is facing a declining user base as they loose market share. It may take decades to die, but Oracle is done unless they can start to capture more of the new development market share. The end user doesn't care what database is the application uses, as long as it works.

Re:Microsoft Office

[Cyberax]

We're using Google Docs. What about you?

Re:Microsoft Office

[Anonymous Coward]

The analogy I was trying to make was that OpenOffice or Aurora is sold using the 80/20 (or 80/50, etc) rule - "We provide the 50 percent of the functionality that delivers 80 percent of what people need." Maybe in some sense, but damn near every serious user will have needs in the missing 20 percent that they're willing to pay serious money for. To them, not having it is living with a broken, unusable product.

Re:Microsoft Office

[PRMan]

Not to mention that cloud databases are far more likely to expose your business to (potentially government-assisted) industrial espionage.

Re:Microsoft Office

[rvw]

Finally... what about backups? Someone takes down some Amazon cloud servers, and the company using them is royally hosed. There are no tapes local, if there are backups on AWS or Glacier, they might be on the same datacenter or even the same SAN as the failed cloud servers. A conventional solution at least has the ability to have some tangible medium where the data is stored so it can be recovered.

This is basically MySQL, so you can make a backup like normal. With Amazon you can always store that backup in S3, and download that to a local server.

What's the Difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two primary features of the Oracle Database:

1) Oracle has existed in various forms for nearly 40 years, which means there are lots of applications written for Oracle
2) Oracle will almost certainly exist in some form 10 years from now (and probably much longer), which means there is simply no mission critical reason to rewrite existing applications that use Oracle.

Would I use Oracle for data that I could migrate different database engine (or even throw away entirely) for less the Oracle licensing price? No.

Would I use Oracle for data that would cost me tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to migrate to a different database engine? Yes.

Methinks the article sensationalizes!

[Slashdot Parent]

If you look at AWS's actual announcement, they say nothing about Oracle. They say that Aurora is compatible with MySQL, which happens to be owned by Oracle, but it is not what most people think of as "Oracle"!

What's my migration path from Oracle to Aurora? Does it support PL/SQL, XML, APEX, Java, etc. stored procedures? Does it support Oracle syntax, index types, etc? How sophisticated is its data dictionary?

From AWS's announcement, it looks like Aurora is meant to be mostly a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with much higher scalability and durability and more advanced backup features. If I had to call it something, I'd call Aurora "MySQL RAC", because Aurora seems to buy you more RAC-like features but with MySQL syntax/features.

It absolutely does NOT appear to be an easy migration from an existing Oracle application to the Aurora database. Maybe Aurora will attract some new applications, but if you're a big Oracle customer, don't salivate on that 90% cost savings so quickly, because it ain't there!

Re:Methinks the article sensationalizes!

[Shoten]

If you look at AWS's actual announcement, they say nothing about Oracle. They say that Aurora is compatible with MySQL, which happens to be owned by Oracle, but it is not what most people think of as "Oracle"!

What's my migration path from Oracle to Aurora? Does it support PL/SQL, XML, APEX, Java, etc. stored procedures? Does it support Oracle syntax, index types, etc? How sophisticated is its data dictionary?

From AWS's announcement, it looks like Aurora is meant to be mostly a drop-in replacement for MySQL, but with much higher scalability and durability and more advanced backup features. If I had to call it something, I'd call Aurora "MySQL RAC", because Aurora seems to buy you more RAC-like features but with MySQL syntax/features.

It absolutely does NOT appear to be an easy migration from an existing Oracle application to the Aurora database. Maybe Aurora will attract some new applications, but if you're a big Oracle customer, don't salivate on that 90% cost savings so quickly, because it ain't there!

I think you don't understand how competitors get displaced in the IT market.

Nobody is going to state that their product is a drop-in replacement when it comes to applications. It's not possible, it's never been true, and nobody would believe it even if it were. But Oracle has a huge number of extremely unhappy customers (direct and OEM) who hate their licensing cost and behavior (see the comment a bit of a scroll above about Oracle being "audit-happy"), and want another option. Oracle sells not just databases but full-on applications as well; they're a competitor to SAP in the ERM space for example, and against PeopleSoft in the HR space. But there are ways to roadmap away from them, so that instead of just dumping Oracle tomorrow and replacing the database, you plan to replace them. One extreme case is ArcSight, which used to OEM Oracle for all of their products. They wrote their own DB engine to get rid of Oracle, and their pricing has become much more sane as a result. And, since their DB is purpose-built for the single purpose it serves, it's actually better at what it does than Oracle was. It was a major effort, and other parts of ArcSight were rewritten to facilitate it, but the end result is pretty badass.

So, in the end, a database does not need to support PL/SQL or Oracle syntax to displace Oracle. It just needs to do what Oracle does, with the understanding that the interfaces to it have to change to some degree...which isn't really the end of the world anyways. Things like service-oriented architecture being in place already make this kind of change a lot easier, as well. But there's no need to act just like the product you want to replace, any more than Dell servers needed to be able to use Compaq power supplies and hard drives when Dell first entered the server market. Customers simply switched, and switched their inventory accordingly along with it.

Re: Methinks the article sensationalizes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in the room when it was announced. You are correct in everything. Aurora can be running in multiple availability zones easily, something very very expensive and difficult to do with MS SQL.

Oracle or MS SQL were not mentioned. He listed all the things hard to do with the other two.

Real financial institutions...

[kraut]

... still use Sybase, and not some Johnny-come-lately like Oracle. Even for compliance stuff.

Postgresql is no Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

... The real question is what can you do in Oracle that you can't do in Postgresql. The answer is very little ...

The one thing that keeps Oracle customers, especially the corporations, coming back to Oracle is that critical data can not be guaranteed if you use Postgresql or any other 'chicken branded' database engine

Face the fact, dude --- until now there is yet to be anything powerful and robust enough to replace Oracle

No, I am not pro-Oracle. I hate Oracle's pricing structure as much as anybody else, but I am being realistic --- until such time people CAN come out with something that is as robustful as Oracle, no matter how much we whine, Oracle will still be the database corporations rely on

Re:Postgresql is no Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

The one thing that keeps Oracle customers, especially the corporations, coming back to Oracle is that critical data can not be guaranteed if you use Postgresql or any other 'chicken branded' database engine

Why? Everything I hear about Oracle makes me wonder why anyone uses it! We currently use Standard edition though, I don't know if that has a bearing on it..

Re:Postgresql is no Oracle

[Zappy]

... The real question is what can you do in Oracle that you can't do in Postgresql. The answer is very little ...

The one thing that keeps Oracle customers, especially the corporations, coming back to Oracle is that critical data can not be guaranteed if you use Postgresql or any other 'chicken branded' database engine

Correct one of the very few things you can do with Oracle compared to PostgreSQL is shunt the blame to them, while you might get the full blast when the same thing happens to PostgreSQL.

I have btw never see either of them fail at preserving your data.

Re:Postgresql is no Oracle

[tehcyder]

And this week "robustful" comes straight in at Number One in the Most Pointless Neologisms chart.

Re:Postgresql is no Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

... The real question is what can you do in Oracle that you can't do in Postgresql. The answer is very little ...

And that, my friend, is why proprietary software exists.

Re:Postgresql is no Oracle

[Cederic]

I hate Oracle's pricing structure as much as anybody else

I doubt this. You aren't displaying the bitter despondency, psychopathic tendencies and desperation I feel when I have to deal with Oracle's licensing, and I know I'm relatively balanced on the matter compared to certain colleagues.

Larry, your customers hate you only mildly less than your staff, and you should try a spot of smalltalk to find out how lucky you are that none of them have snapped and caused another 2nd amendment debate.

Oracle RDBMS is great!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a highly sought after Oracle DBA, I love that Oracle costs companies so much to purchase and support. After a company spends millions on Oracle licenses, how likely are they to "cheap out" on the admin to make it all work as it should? Not very is the right answer to that. I believe I get at least a 25% higher salary because I admin Oracle instead of some other DB, it could be higher, I honestly don't care enough to find out. It's a sort of self-fullfilling prophecy, the best and brightest gravitate to Oracle because the salaries are higher and technology far more interesting (admitedly, sometimes in that Chinese proverb sort of way). You really do get what you pay for in the enterprise-grade database world, both regarding the software and the personel. It's ok if you want to liken me and my platform to the IBM mainframe engineers of the last century, but they had a real nice gig while it lasted, and I will probably be dead before Oracle's database reign comes to an end. I am not trying to recruit young people to be Oracle DBA's, it's a tough specialty to get into and may not play out as well in their lifetime as some of the newer DB's.

It's the apps, stupid!

[0xdeaddead]

Nobody buys Oracle because they need a DB, and that sounds sexy. They buy Oracle because their application needs a database, and it either ONLY runs on Oracle, or is highly recommended to run on Oracle.

And then there is Oracle commerce which I see nobody mentioning. The backend of most businesses, which shockingly needs an Oracle database.

Got some random data you want to organize? have a budget? If so MSQL, otherwise MySQL. Have a real world app? Oracle.

CWE-783: Operator Precedence Logic Error

[nickovs]

Presumably when they OP author wrote "a relational database that is as capable as 'proprietary database engines at 1/10 the cost,' " what (s)he really meant was "a relational database (that is as capable as proprietary database engines) at 1/10 the cost".

Amazon Misses Again

[TheNinjaroach]

The reason people aren't switching away with Oracle has nothing to do with the lack of cheaper alternatives.

Reasons why Oracle rules the roost...

[knwny]

...in big-scale implementations:

1. The existing high-profile customer base across industry domains which demonstrate high-availability, security, scalability and all the other attributes that organizations look for when choosing a database

2. Vendor lock-in due to the myriad Oracle-owner applications that are strewn across an organization's IT landscape

3. IT implementers who keep pushing technologies offered by the big-ticket ERP vendors such as SAP and Oracle

4. The technical support that Oracle provides for its installations

Not DB, people are the problem.

[ThePhilips]

Still there are very few applications that are more “sticky” than databases, which after typically contains the keys to the kingdom.

DBs are rarely a problem. But DBAs and developers are the problem.

I had limited to exposure to Sybase and MySQL, before spending several years with a company deeply tied to Oracle RDBMS.

Most developers and DBAs are completely clueless about competitive alternatives. Over the years I have heard so much blatantly stupid crap, that it is even hard to believe that it can come from a person with higher education. MySQL can't transactions. Sybase locks completely everything for every update statement. You can't backup MySQL DB. There is no admin interface in Sybase. PL/SQL is Oracle specific, thus server side functionality can only be implemented with Oracle. Only Oracle implements server-side Java, thus you can connect from Java only to the Oracle DB. And so on.

With this mentality, several projects which required a local DB were stonewalled and simply buried. MySQL (aka MariaDB) was a viable candidate - in fact already successfully deployed by other R&Ds in other locations for the similar purpose - but people more or less refused to even learn how to work with it. Couple of open-minded developers within week actually ported the Java-based software to MySQL, but nobody was listening to them, because, duh, MySQL is impossible to work with.

Enterprisedb's Postgres Is Also A Good Option

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't work for them, but we migrated from Oracle to Enterprisedb's Posgtres and it is great. They add an Oracle compatibility layer which mimicks all of Oracle's system packages like dbms_* and Oracle specific functions like DECODE, etc. So you can migrate an Oracle database that has a lot of Oracle specific PL/SQL with hardly any modifications. Plus you get all of features of open source Postgres. It has been working great for us.

And the winner will be;

[Anonymous Coward]

NuoDB and definitively, acceptance and validation are coming, and because his database model is really innovative, NuoDB can beat all features that are already implemented in Oracle DB. NuoDB will become the next Winner Database all around.