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.

Comments

Amazon's name is worth way more than their fees

[raymorris]

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".

Re:Amazon's name is worth way more than their fees

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so fast there, hotshot! Just because Amazon can replace Oracle with Redshift doesn't mean you can. Amazon not only has the engineers who creating the thing, they also have an effectively unlimited budget.

That means they can easily fix their own bugs and know how to tune it. If it's going to slow they can always get a bigger computer or build another datacenter.

When you run into a problem with Oracle you have a veritable army of high-priced consultants who have probably seen your problem before and can help you fix it. When you run into a problem with Redshift you can turn to an Internet forum. If you need more performance you can't just build a new datacenter.

When considering whether you can use it to replace Oracle because Amazon did, you have to also take into account the fact that you don't have their expertise or budget, and maybe the reason it works for Amazon is that they can bring to bear resources that you can't.

dom

Re:Amazon's name is worth way more than their fees

[Voyager529]

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.

That’s only a part of the story. Amazon has an unfathomable amount of resources at their disposal. They can afford to say “we are ditching Oracle”, and write checks and hire developers until those Oracle instances are gone. They don’t need support because they can develop in house until it works.

Most businesses don’t have that. What they do have, are upstream vendors, and what that vendor wants, that vendor gets. Even if Postgres provided true drop-in support, the upstream vendor demands Oracle and getting support is a losing battle on anything else.

Given Amazon’s deep pockets, that’s all but an expectation that they would roll their own. Not everyone can do that.

Re:Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in Amazon's defense, every single business on earth wants to attain a monopoly and then raise prices while cutting quality. That is THE prize on which they all have their sights set.

There are no exceptions.

Re:Hurrah

[Shikaku]

Government contracts, and anyone still vendor locked into their service(s) still (possibly past tense for Amazon now), and royalties for Android using Java. The proliferation of MySQL and its royalties is quite high as well.

Good for some stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to draw a line between good and bad and think that everyone on the good side likes each other and everyone on the bad side likes each other. It doesn't work that way. The fact that Amazon and Oracle both suck doesn't imply that Oracle must be good for Amazon. They suck for Amazon too.

When you stop drawing the mentioned line you can learn to accept that a friend of a friend isn't necessarily your friend, a friend's enemy isn't necessarily your enemy, and an enemy's enemy isn't necessarly your friend. And also that a bad person or company probably isn't bad in every respect, just like a good person or company probably isn't good in every respect. A terrorist, once caught, may be perfectly honest about his motives because he doesn't lie out of principle. A bad company like Amazon may have the same issues with another bad company like Oracle as anyone else has. Reality isn't binary, it's complex.