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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.
Redshift has been a great data warehouse for a long time, an MPP variant of Postgresql (fored from ParAccel) unlike the monolithic Oracle. What locks folks to Oracle is the tech debt and the migration effort. What Andy Jassy is saying is the they finally got rid of the tech debt.
Monday morning I'll be telling my boss that even AMAZON doesn't need Oracle
Ah, but they do. It says so right in TFS. By the end of 2018 they will keep using 12% of their Oracle databases including 3% of its mission-critical databases.
So Amazon can replace most of its database use, but for mission-critical stuff, they still need Oracle. Score another point for Larry.
True. I wrote a couple reviews warning consumers against items which were obviously fraudulent; Amazon's response was to delete my reviews and send me an emailing warning that "repeated abuse will result in you no longer being able to post reviews". Apparently telling people that a "4k" camera isn't really 4k, and that a "2,000 watt power converter" won't handle more than 200 watts are both considered "abusive".
And many businesses, including banks. And lots of other places beyond that.
Your main choices are basically Oracle, MySQL (Oracle), Microsoft (and Windows costs), IBM, or open source and working out some sort of support:risk tradeoff, if you want something directly relational. It puts Oracle in a pretty good position.
Sometimes when a corporation gets too big, they start to feel entitled to their income and stop trying to earn it via persuasion. Oracle is one such company. They have been sued multiple times for defrauding the US government and have no problem threatening their own customers if it means making more money this quarter.
If you're talking about the relational database product, MS SQL is way more appealing than Oracle. We have both and are migrating away from Oracle.
MS SQL is a solid RDBMS. Oracle has the edge in certain features that are rarely used, and a a tiny performance edge. But the ease-of-use and licensing cost of MS SQL just blows Oracle's RDBMS out of the water. SSMS is so much more modern than SQL Developer, and gets better all the time.