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

Hurrah

[TimMD909]

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...

Re:Hurrah

[ShanghaiBill]

I don't understand Oracle. Everyone who has ever shared their opinion with me hates them. Nobody here has anything good to say about them. They have a reputation for being unethical slime. Their services division has a long record of over budget fiascos.

Yet despite this, they still get $40B a year in revenue. Who are these customers?

Re:Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, both Amazon and Oracle are pretty evil companies.
Amazon provides some useful services and products to its customers though, unlike Oracle.

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.

Re:Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

That is an example of one of the interesting paradoxes that define modern society: The more successful a mega-corporation is, the more widely and passionately hated that corporation is.

Re:Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not true, actually. There are business, including many smaller and larger family businesses, that are focused more on continuity and/or quality than on winning entire markets. In the Netherlands (I'm Dutch) during the crisis earlier this century family businesses did relatively well because they hadn't spent all their reserves on either shareholders or expansion.

Re:Hurrah

[Zontar The Mindless]

Something something projection mutter mutter...

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.

Re: Hurrah

[c6gunner]

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".

Re: Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hurrah

[gmack]

Legacy applications. It wasn't that long ago when MySQL didn't handle load very well at all, IBM's enterprise database and Ingress (doesn't really exist now) weren't being marketed at all, and the other competition didn't even exist. Many customers are also sold on the idea that Oracle DB runs best on Oracle's OS, running on Oracle's virtualization system (actually virtualization on anything else can can cause licensing issues regarding Hyper-threading) running on Oracle's hardware.

It is not easy to switch away from Oracle, I man sure it's all SQL, but all of the databases have different quirks and extensions so it can take many months of conversion and years of testing to know if the conversion went well. Now imagine you are a business with some critical app. When things are good, there is no point in spending all of that money to make the conversion, and when things aren't, well it's just faster to buy more licenses so the needed software.

And of course, Oracle knows this and don't even pretend to be nice about it. Their sales department is well tuned towards bleeding revenue from existing clients even if it pisses them off or they have to threaten a lawsuit. I worked at a place before that ended up on the incoming end of an audit that bled us for more money. After the audit, the order came down: NO new Oracle projects. We also had issues where Oracle wouldn't sell us upgrades to our Blade system without the purchase of a support contract with penalties for the years the hardware wasn't covered. (dumped it all when I pointed out that the blades were 10x the price of a 1u rack mount server with the same specs) After both incidents, Oracle sales were shocked that we weren't going to expand any of our Oracle stuff.

The existing customer base all pretty much hates them, and I suspect that if Oracle hadn't gone one step too far and bragged about Amazon, their legacy stuff would have been left running for years longer.

Re:Hurrah

[gmack]

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.

Re:Hurrah

[drinkypoo]

IBM's enterprise database and Ingress (doesn't really exist now) weren't being marketed at all,

That's not how DB2 was being used by IBM. It was used as another checkbox on their platforms. Oh, you need an RDBMS? Yes, we've got one right here. Actively marketing it to the wider world would have meant having to support it on Windows, which IBM didn't want to have to do. They do/did have a DB2 product for Windows, but I always got the idea that it was a PITA.

Re: Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

Netherlands East India corporation is calling. They want their dutch virtue signalling back.

Re: Hurrah

[reanjr]

When the VOC was operating, America's economy was run on slavery.

Re:Hurrah

[jpaine619]

There are no exceptions.

Bullshit.

There are plenty of people out there running a business they own because they love what they do or they love the results of what they do. Your blanket statement is just as stupid as any other blanket statement.

Go back to your basement, asshole. It's obvious you haven't a clue what happens in the real world.

Re: Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Hurrah

[reanjr]

You mean like ISPs?

Re: Hurrah

[reanjr]

For most businesses, the operational cost of SQL Server is dwarfed by Oracle's. Oracle only begins to make sense once you've already started hiring an army of people to manage your data. Most companies just never get there. And those that do can often do what Amazon did, and hire a team of open source DBAs.

Re: Hurrah

[HornWumpus]

No. Slaves have _always_ been shitty workers.

The parts of the USA that extensively used slaves were the _poor_ parts.

You are thinking of Brazil.

Also note: The English largely ran the Atlantic slave trade, (trading manufactured goods for slaves, slaves for raw materials and raw material for manufactured goods, in a big old triangle).

Re:Hurrah

[HornWumpus]

You are arguing with Marxist dogma! I don't think you'll penetrate the indoctrination.

Re: Hurrah

[HiThere]

He did say "non-government", and most ISPs are licensed and ruled by governments. (I can't think of any current exceptions, though my knowledge isn't extensive, so feel free to doubt this.)

That said, he's still wrong. There are lots of local monopolies in history that have raised prices to their limit. (The limit was "if I raise prices more, too many people will start doing without.) This worked best with monopolies of things like food and water, but it's also been done with less compelling merchandise.

Re: Hurrah

[reanjr]

Or souther poverty is just a myth: https://www.abbevilleinstitute...

Certainly, the agrarian economy of the South wasn't going to keep up with the industrial north, but before the 18th century, farming was still the source of much of America's wealth.

And it may also be true that there were more poor white people per capita in the South, but there were also fantastically wealthy ones. Income inequality was the issue, not poverty, at least not in the context of national economic output.

The North had five times as many free people, yet the South spent just as much on th war. We weren't keeping good GDP numbers at the time, but that's pretty stark.

Re: Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

Your main choices are basically Oracle, MySQL (Oracle), Microsoft (and Windows costs),

Your information is outdated. Microsoft SQL Server runs and is fully supported on Linux. By far the least annoying multi-user RDBMS available at any price in my view.

Re: Hurrah

[WaffleMonster]

Having used both Oracle and MS-SQL: Microsoft thinks their product competes with Oracle. It's not anywhere in the same league

Why? Years ago the answer was lack of MVCC. What is it today?

Re: Hurrah

[gmack]

Lack of scaling? MS-SQL's clustering is nowhere near as good as Oracle's. On top of that, I find that Oracle's product is much more stable under load. Keep in mind this is coming from someone who absolutely hates Oracle

Re: Hurrah

[sfcat]

Or souther poverty is just a myth: https://www.abbevilleinstitute...

Certainly, the agrarian economy of the South wasn't going to keep up with the industrial north, but before the 18th century, farming was still the source of much of America's wealth.

And it may also be true that there were more poor white people per capita in the South, but there were also fantastically wealthy ones. Income inequality was the issue, not poverty, at least not in the context of national economic output.

The North had five times as many free people, yet the South spent just as much on th war. We weren't keeping good GDP numbers at the time, but that's pretty stark.

The North had five times as many free people, yet the South spent just as much on th war. We weren't keeping good GDP numbers at the time, but that's pretty stark.

I was going to mod you insightful until that last line. The North had 10x the people and 10x the estimated GDP (based upon 10x the railroads and exports). And out spent the South on the war by a wide margin.

But the richest state in the country at the time was Mississippi, not New York. Some parts of the south were very poor and that offset the wealth of the cotton growing areas when you look at total GDP. Also, the wealth due to cotton was increasing rapidly in the 1850s just before the war due to rapid increase in demand caused by industrialization of English fabric production.

What you say about income inequality was very much true but that mattered much less in a time when land was cheap and plentiful and the environment was virgin. You could still buy some rural land and feed a large family from it without much dependence upon the outside. Southern poverty is very much a result of Reconstruction and its effects linger 150 years after the Civil War. Couldn't imagine for the life of me why people who live there that wouldn't vote for who you think they should.

As a side note, why do people want to rewrite history so much these days? Its the scariest part of the new left.

Re: Hurrah

[Anonymous Coward]

The new left?

What are you spouting. We have a Republican President that yells fake news anytime he hears something he doesn't like. Yet "the new left" is trying to rewrite history?

Wtf are you smoking. There's a reason poor people vote left. Because the right doesn't give two shits about them. While the left may use them for cotes, at least they throw them a bone. The right looks at the poor like it's some kind of bubonic plague.

Re: Hurrah

[snapsnap]

SQL Server's very annoying proprietary stored proc language is annoyoing as hell, so your "least annoying" comment shows just how annoying other SQL servers are. It's sad.

Re: Hurrah

[kenai_alpenglow]

Another source of loss of wealth was Grant & Co. They didn't only want to conquer the South, but destroy it. They would burn every city they came to in the Vicksburg/Atlanta campaigns. Some of the stories from that time were pretty despicable. I had the opportunity to talk with a very old lady in Port Gibson (supposedly "too pretty to burn"); her grandmother told her of how they had to hide anything that had any worth due to the pillaging and looting of the union army. So by the time the War Between the States (it was never a civil war) was over, the South had lost a good percentage of its infrastructure. And unlike Europe post WW2, there was no "Marshall Plan" equivalent. Instead we got "reconstruction" (i.e., colonialism).

Re:Hurrah

[jpaine619]

Touche, good sir.

I suspect you are 100% correct.

Fuck Oracle

[bobstreo]

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.

Sounds like a new business for Amazon

[Proudrooster]

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?

Re:Sounds like a new business for Amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever used Redshift, its as if they forked PostGreSQL and removed features.

Re:Sounds like a new business for Amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Sounds like a new business for Amazon

[Proudrooster]

Seriously, not ACID complaint? That is bad, bad, bad, when you are cranking millions of transactions per minute. Why not just use MySQL and call it a day? At least you'll be fast and wrong.

Re:Sounds like a new business for Amazon

[MariusBoo]

I have used Redhsift in production for many years. Not my first choice, but great if someone is willing to pay.

It was froked from Redshift by some other company. AWS bought that and enhanced/integrated it with the rest of their products. As usual they did a good job.

It is really good technology, and no you cannot achieve the same with Postgres (as other comments are implying in this thread). As long as you have the money and read the fine manual, it will solve a lot of data problems at scale, with flexibility.

OTOH, An enitre thread could be written about AWS pricing strategy... I guess they don't have to worry about that themsleves.

Don't ridicule your customers

[Tailhook]

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.

Re:Don't ridicule your customers

[93 Escort Wagon]

Seriously - what the heck was he thinking? He should’ve just kept his trap shut and continued to collect the big bucks. And his sales team could’ve quietly used “you know, Amazon relies on our database products for its mission-critical systems” as a major selling point.

But no, go ahead and drive them away, Larry...

Re:Don't ridicule your customers

[petermgreen]

How big is big?

postgresql seems to be the go-to FOSS relational database for those who care about data integrity, it's been around for decades and there seem to be plenty of paid support options if you need them. I am told it doesn't scale as well as Oracle or DB2 though.

Re:Don't ridicule your customers

[DNS-and-BIND]

After you have money, other things become important. Status, especially relative status. The ability to harm others with impunity. Being above the law. Many others. Here I think Larry was just trying to demonstrate his high status. Oracle is so big it doesn't need Amazon. The customer is not always right. A big trend these days is firing your customers when they get out of line, the same as you would an employee.

Re:No cost savings

[c-A-d]

I'm sure that the Amazon endgame is now "zero" oracle products.

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

[dromgodis]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I just can't understand this. Amazon is Oracle's customer, you don't speak to your customers like that in any business If I had an interest in Oracle i'd call for him to be fired over it. Even if they are a competitor as well if they weren't an ass about it took it with some dignity they'd save face and might more of what they have.

Larry Ellison is practically the Donald Trump of the tech world.

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

[munch117]

Except it's the other way around: They're transitioning the mission-critical stuff first. 97% > 88%.

Which makes sense: The big stuff that's in active development, that's what you move first, because that's where you get the most bang for the buck. If you have one particular program running on thousands of servers that each require an Oracle license, then changing that one program could give you huge licensing savings.

On the other hand, all the rubble, the ad-hoc stuff that only runs on that one server in the Timbuktu office and the source code is lost or unreadable? That one you just leave running for now and start looking for ways to make it redundant.

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

[lgw]

I just can't understand this. Amazon is Oracle's customer, you don't speak to your customers like that in any business If I had an interest in Oracle i'd call for him to be fired over it.

The way Oracle usually speaks to it's customers is "nice business you got there, pity if an audit were to happen to it". Then force you to buy some $2M product you don't want or need to avoid an audit that would cost you $3M to comply with. That's the entirety of Oracles cloud business, from the rumors I hear.

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

[swilver]

They don't, that 3% is probably legacy crap that is being phased out. No need to migrate it first.

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

[MouseR]

As an insider, from my chair, I can tell you Oracle is usually not into boasting it's survival / existence based on one high profile client.

We sometime see customers lists in internal memos but these generally dont end up as high-profile web site / PR announcements. Rather, key points get floated about during quarter numbers filing. I'm suspecting many of our higher-profile clients dont need (/want) their infrastructure details out in the open, or that any divulgation remains vague.

In my division, we see governments, pharma, entertainment and aerospace big names as well as smaller clients and collabs with 3rd party. It's the defence clients you usually never hear about.

So, I'd say, Oracle doesn't _need_ to make anything free to any one big client just to please them. It's also not a PR benefit. We already have plenty free or otherwise open offerings (our cloud products are both hosted or On Premise, support federated SSO, have plug-in or SDKs to be extended).

The "Oracle is evil" arguments is kinda funny when, from the inside, you see nothing inherently evil about what we do. How it's perceived by some customers, though, I can understand and it probably the result of bureaucracy, business processes or internal competition that leads to certain views about the company. I suppose this explains why I hate MicroSoft with a passion, yet, rare hear MS employees ever go out in masses, irate about a company they "should" hate, from our point of view.

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

[HornWumpus]

Oracle coders are just worker bees.

Oracle marketing is pure evil. I've seen 'decision makers' pick Oracle, then take a no show job from Oracle at 10x previous pay (for a few years), then retire. SOP for Larry and co.

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

[Kjella]

I think in this case it's about using one straw man to beat another straw man. Many businesses think they need Oracle when they really don't, by showing examples of huge companies that manage without them you may cause management to make the right decisions for the wrong reasons. That your counterexamples are as invalid as their original beliefs may be intellectually dishonest but if they were going to make the wrong decisions for the wrong reasons and dismissed the actual reasons why Oracle is a bad idea, well.... means, ends something something.

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.

Oracle's glory days have passed

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Oracle's glory days have passed

[swilver]

Phones and tablets are hardly terminals, in the way Larry meant it, and certainly no replacement for a PC or Laptop. Let's not pretend that those have disappeared from people's homes.

Oracle DB could have been good, but their refusal to fix trivial issues and provide data types that match with the application layer turns developers sour on their crap. It always felt like working with a 1980's product that had layer and layer of crap bolted on top of it while we just wanted a fucking storage system.

Re:Oracle's glory days have passed

[HiThere]

Oracle's technical glory days had passed before they released Oracle 9i back around 2000.

Re: The model works so physics doesn't

[c6gunner]

Whatever you say Gene.

Re:Google stopped using Oracle years ago

[tepples]

Since when? Even if Google has dropped Oracle Database, it's still using Oracle MySQL and Oracle OpenJDK, and now it has to pay Oracle billions of dollars after losing its fair use defense in Oracle v. Google on grounds that Google impeded interoperability rather than pursuing it.

Vendor lock-in is mindset as much as technical

[DidgetMaster]

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.

Re:Oracle the database, not the company right?

[HornWumpus]

Oracle can only fuck Java so hard before everybody leaves.

It's not like Java has been good for a long time now. The religion is dead, it's now just another language among many. Long live the JVM, but death to Java.

C-suite virus.

[h8sg8s]

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.

Obl Dilbert

[Bandraginus]

This comes to mind