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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.
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".
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...
#DeleteChrome
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!
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".
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.