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Amazon Plans To Move Completely Off Oracle Software By Early 2020 (cnbc.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new dept.

Amazon plans to be completely off Oracle's proprietary database software by the first quarter of 2020, reports CNBC. The plans come after the company moved most of its infrastructure internally to Amazon Web Services. From the report: Amazon began moving off Oracle about four or five years ago, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the project is confidential. Some parts of Amazon's core shopping business still rely on Oracle, the person said, and the full migration should wrap up in about 14 to 20 months. Another person said that Amazon had been considering a departure from Oracle for years before the transition began but decided at the time that it would require too much engineering work with perhaps too little payoff. The primary issue Amazon has faced on Oracle is the inability for the database technology to scale to meet Amazon's performance needs, a person familiar with the matter said. Another person, who said the move could be completed by mid-2019, added that there hasn't been any development of new technology relying on Oracle databases for quite a while.

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oracle can keep circling the drain.

    1. Re: Good by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      was annoyed by their suits and thick sparc station laptops.

      Indeed. You see someone in Silicon Valley wearing a suit, and there is a good chance he is an Oracle salesman.

      Don't ever talk to them. If they get your business card, they will start "going up the chain" by calling the company's receptionist and asking for the name of your manager, then doing the same to get the name of your manager's manager. They keep going until they reach a tech-no-incompetent who is unaware of their reputation, or, even worse, has seen their idiotic ads on the back cover of the Economist magazine.

      Pro-tip: If you like hookers and blackjack, then buy a nice tailored suit and convince one of them that YOU are the "decision maker". You will have a great time, but you will never get off their mailing list.

  2. Re:Fascinating by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So far, this many people have said yes: 0.

    You clearly never asked the DBAs and Sysadmin's who have many years of long and frustrating work bashing their heads against Oracle if they're happy with it. They'll tell you no, but then if you ever get the truth out, "I've got a job for life, this shit is so fragile, they can't fire us."

    How do I know? I was a BOFH dealing with about a dozen servers for a mid sized company's Oracle ERP system. They were just RHEL boxes, nothing too special. Generally shit just worked. Stupid simple shit for a Unix sysadmin. I pretty much coasted along for a decade at that job, showed up four hours a day, three days a week. Getting paid $150k for it at that. I pretty much did fuck all at that job. Only reason why I'm not at that job anymore? Company went bankrupt, otherwise I would still be slacking at that place.

    So, yes, I was happy with that ERP system, just not for the reason people think you'd be happy with it.

  3. Re:Half of the story is missing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They're moving to non-relational databases, such as S3 and DynamoDB. The problem with relational databases is that they can't scale beyond a single host. This follows from the CAP theorem: Unless you are willing to sacrifice some amount of consistency or availability, you can't have partitions. S3 and DynamoDB support limitless horizontal scaling because they use eventual consistency.

    The trade-off with going down the NoSQL route is that you no longer have the concept of transactions, and you have to write your software in a way that will tolerate tables being in an inconsistent state. However, the advantage of this approach is that your service will always scale. Therefore, at Amazon, they encourage you to always use NoSQL, because if you choose a relational database, you're assuming that your software won't have to scale.