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.