Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's Consumer Business Has Turned Off Its Oracle Data Warehouse (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon.com Inc. has taken another step toward eliminating software from Oracle Corp. that has long helped the e-commerce giant run its retail business. An executive with Amazon's cloud-computing unit hit back at Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison, who ridiculed the internet giant as recently as last month for relying on Oracle databases to track transactions and store information, even though Amazon sells competing software, including Redshift, Aurora and DynamoDB. Amazon's effort to end its use of Oracle's products has made new progress, Andy Jassy, the chief executive officer of Amazon Web Services, tweeted Friday. "In latest episode of 'uh huh, keep talkin' Larry,' Amazon's Consumer business turned off its Oracle data warehouse Nov. 1 and moved to Redshift," Jassy wrote. By the end of 2018, Amazon will stop using 88 percent of its Oracle databases, including 97 percent of its mission-critical databases, he added.
Just when I was getting unhappy about the refurb Mac situation, Amazon brings me back by saying "fuck you" to Oracle. I honestly don't know what to feel now...
Love to hear this!
some good products, some not-ready-for-primetime (junk) products, pricing and support suck balls.
I hated dealing with them before they bought Sun. Then I actually started to hate dealing with them more than Microsoft.
Kudo's to Amazon. Hopefully they'll start giving away their DB just to stick it to Oracle some more.
If Amazon can actually survive Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season on their new database, they might be able to sell it to others who are trapped by Oracle. It would be interesting to know the back story on how much pain and suffering was required to leave Oracle. My suspicion is that they forked PostGresSQL and Amazon enhanced it. Can anyone comment on the details?
Incase anyone missed the memo, if this stands, it's a serious blow to Oracle. Though they use different databases across the company, Amazon is certainly not a small customer. Guess loosing a few million in contracts when you make billions doesn't matter. Oracle can still suck it.
Due to creative pricing practices, they'll turn off 88% of their installed Oracle instances, but end up paying 150% more.
I've never seen an Oracle contract renewal cost go down, no matter how much 'less' Oracle software the company uses.
Redshift has been a great data warehouse for a long time, an MPP variant of Postgresql (forked from ParAccel) unlike the monolithic Oracle DB. What locks people to Oracle is the tech debt and the migration effort, people get stuck with Oracle's proprietary features. What Andy Jassy is saying is the they finally got rid of the tech debt.
Pretty basic concept. Self evident to most people. Not Larry, apparently. It's amusing to consider that inside Larry's mind he believes that dishing on Amazon's database products will attract more customers to Oracle.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Many people think that for really big databases you need Oracle, for handling lots and lots of transactions. MySQL and Postgres are great for smaller businesses, but our business needs Oracle, they think.
Monday morning I'll be telling my boss that even AMAZON doesn't need Oracle. Facebook uses MySQL / Cassandra. If it can handle Amazon's volume, it can certainly handle ours. That's the big cost to Oracle - the press, the realization among other companies that even at Amazon's size there is no reason to use Oracle.
Oracle would do well to GIVE their products free to Amazon and Facebook just so they can say "we power the world's largest companies and databases".
Amazon guys used Oracle for a reason: I've heard them say, basically, that it's great until it's not, but once you reach a certain level of need for scaling your ops time scales with the size of your deployment and that just becomes unsustainable.
That's the mission critical reason for Amazon to move away from Oracle. But they also get two major strategic bonuses: (1) they make competing products and the transition away from Oracle is good for their advertising and bad for Oracle's, and (2) money. Cheaper to build in-house on their own products exactly what they want than to be dependent on Oracle in a way that scales with Amazon's business. Unless Oracle can deliver a better product than Amazon's engineer's long-term, there's no reason Amazon should pay Oracle long-term. And Amazon hires some good engineers.
So what you end up with is particles, that are donut shaped, and themselves are spinning dipoles (due to the twisting effect of being bound in a circle).
You can also notice that this binding effect (of dipoles of the same frequency being attracted to each).... aka gravity, is easy to understand at this level.
Gravity through space is harder to understand, so I deal with it in K. But even a 14yo can understand it, its not *that* difficult.
As a 25 year veteran Oracle DB admin, Oracle is fast becoming an anachronism in the modern fast paced world of NoSQL and and serverless cloud tech. I remember when the rage back in the early to mid 90s was to have huge data silos, you bought big tin, built big monolithic databases and you processed things on the biggest hardware you could. Then FOSS and cheap hardware started to appear plus the idea to move business logic from the database and put it back into the apps, thus the DBs started to become bigger and more "stupid" just simple big blackbox data stores.
You don't need huge tin anymore, you don't need huge DBs for new projects, with cheap afforable scalable tech you build proper scalable architectures that can make use of NoSQL or RDBMS tech like PostgreSQL ( Redshift is simply PostgreSQL on monster steroids ). Larry used to be a great visionary, I remember back in the mid 90's Larry said that soon everyone will have terminals connected to huge networks, we won't need PCs in every office and home. People laughed their arses off at him but here we are almost 2020 and we all have tablets and mobile phones connected to the biggst network in history with datastores with the whole knowledge of human understanding at our finger tips. Larry is making Oracle DB a self-managing system and that will cause many like me to move on, if there's little do with maintaining the DB let some £5/hour operations dept out in India look after it, my company needs me to move to more interesting things as they want more value for money from my skills.
Oracle and SQL Server are good systems but they're now simply just another choice and no longer the only choice. I love the new plethora of DB choices, nosql DBs and serverless tech from the cloud providers who also supply the supporting tech like on demand scalable processing engines like Lambda(AWS) and Athena(AWS). RDBMS has it's place, it's good solid, trusted reliable tech but it's simply just another choice. Amazon have seen that you don't need big tin, just lots of small scalable tin and you can process more data in 24 hours than you would in an entire year, store more data than ever before. Times are changing and it feels like the 90's again in IT tech, so much change and so many exciting opportunities available right now, it's why I wanted to work in IT tech and it's great!
I read it on Matt cutts blog.
Oh boy. If you're world was falling apart, if your career was endings, you'd be modding down too.
You expect people's careers to end because of a random post on tech forum under a completely unrelated topic and for some reason don't understand the idea of offtopic being a reason to mod down?
It gets modded down, on on topic things too, which are few and far between.
It makes NO difference because the model makes particles, and if it makes particles, its true, and breaks a lot of physics. It's not MY comments that end careers, I'm just an AC. Its the reality of the situation that ends careers.
i.e. 2 fundamental particles, one force, a spin to spin binding, breaks Standard Model.
No mass, and no bent space breaks Relativity.
A photon that's a cloud of dipoles breaks QM.
It's sad, but it is what it is.
Of course I'm going to keep explaining it over and over and over again, till the consequence sinks in.
To me the sensible move is to move the non-critical stuff (but not the sawdust) to allow your team to gain experience and maybe survive (along with your business) a few screw ups. If you proposed moving business critical systems to a new DB without some pilots at reasonable scale on something non critical first I'd look askance at you at the very least, if I was chairing that meeting.
and then all that functionality makes into their aws products (redshift and Aurora) that other businesses can use to get off oracle as well, win win.
Honest question. Can Amazon distance itself from Oracle the company while relying heavily on Java stack? I understand there's openjdk but am led to believe it is also controlled by Oracle.
It can be a huge pain to migrate an existing application from one vendor to another. A company I worked for moved from SQL Server to Postgres (because of licensing issues) and it took 3 years even though they are both 'SQL'. But even if you have a long laundry list of items that make it economically attractive to move from system A to system B; you still must fight the politics of 'not invented here' or 'we have always done it this way'.
I have invented a whole new kind of data management system. It handles unstructured data way better than traditional file systems. It does a bunch of NoSQL functions better than other systems. It is about twice as fast as SQL Server, Postgres, or MySQL at relational databases. But I have a terrible time convincing early adopters to give it a serious look. I had a potential customer who was having a big problem with Cassandra. They had a table with a couple hundred million rows and periodically they had to delete about 10 million rows out of it. (Cassandra is apparently built to ingest data but not to update or delete it very well.) The operation was taking them 2 weeks to complete. We put the same data in my system and it completed in just 17 minutes. Yet their management would not even consider adopting this technology and could not even give one valid reason why they wouldn't.
Oracle is that rare creature, a C-suite virus. Symptoms include inability to make rational decisions, bouts of fear uncertainty and doubt as well as declining profits. In extreme cases, rational alternatives to Oracle can be misconstrued as threats. In its terminal phase, C-suite inhabitants can be convinced that only by buying more Oracle products can they save their business. Death usually follows immediately after acting on the terminal phase.
Organization? You must be joking..
It stays in non production test environment until it's ready. When it's ready it gets turned into a production server. When that happens, you still have the old system running as a fall back just in case.
This isnt new, it isn't hard, and it's been figured out.
Amazon is basically saying it's cheaper for us to throw tons of resources and money at this problem to solve it ourselves, rather then giving oracle another penny.
That speaks volumes.
This comes to mind