Slashdot Mirror
Oracle's CTO: No Way a 'Normal' Person Would Move To AWS (zdnet.com)
Amazon may have turned off its Oracle data warehouse in favor of Amazon Web Services database technology, but no one else in their right mind would, Oracle's outspoken co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison says. From a report: "We have a huge technology leadership in database over Amazon," Ellison said on a conference call following the release of Oracle's second quarter financial results. "In terms of technology, there is no way that... any normal person would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database." During last month's AWS re:Invent conference, AWS CTO Werner Vogels gave an in-the-weeds talk explaining why Amazon turned off its Oracle data warehouse. In a clear jab at Oracle, Vogels wrote off the "90's technology" behind most relational databases. Cloud native databases, he said, are the basis of innovation.
The remarks may have gotten under Ellison's skin. Moving from Oracle databases to AWS "is just incredibly expensive and complicated," he said Monday. "And you've got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance... Nobody, save maybe Jeff Bezos, gave the command, 'I want to get off the Oracle database." Ellison said that Oracle will not only hold onto its 50 percent relational database market share but will expand it, thanks to the combination of Oracle's new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure and its autonomoius database technology. "You will see rapid migration of Oracle from on-premise to the Oracle public cloud," he said. "Nobody else is going to go through that forced march to go on to the Amazon database."
The remarks may have gotten under Ellison's skin. Moving from Oracle databases to AWS "is just incredibly expensive and complicated," he said Monday. "And you've got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance... Nobody, save maybe Jeff Bezos, gave the command, 'I want to get off the Oracle database." Ellison said that Oracle will not only hold onto its 50 percent relational database market share but will expand it, thanks to the combination of Oracle's new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure and its autonomoius database technology. "You will see rapid migration of Oracle from on-premise to the Oracle public cloud," he said. "Nobody else is going to go through that forced march to go on to the Amazon database."
So in their minds, "normal" and "foolish" are equivalent? I can buy that...
> Nobody, save maybe Jeff Bezos, gave the command, 'I want to get off the Oracle database."
I've never heard anybody use Oracle who wasn't saying that. Every oracle customer I've dealt with has "getting rid of this fucking goddamn shit" as a #1 priority.
He says no one is willing to give up security and move to the cloud, then talks about how everyone is going to migrate to the Oracle cloud.
can we laugh?
"We have a huge technology leadership in database over Amazon," Ellison said on a conference call following the release of Oracle's second quarter financial results. "In terms of technology, there is no way that... any normal person would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database."
I'm not qualified to evaluate the relative technical merits of the products but I can say without reservation that a HUGE win of going with Amazon is not having to deal with Oracle as a business. I've had that experience and Oracle can suck it as far as I'm concerned.
Why would normal people willingly get into a (by definition) abusive relationship with oracle?
We know most CEOs and other CxOs aren't entirely mentally healthy, if not outright psychopaths. But "normal" people?
Alright, many "normal" people run windows, which doesn't say anything good about their mental state either. But still.
Honestly, it's been years since I worked with a place that used Oracle as a database. Clearly, it's deployed in a lot of large scale operations out there. But my hunch is, many of them will keep using it as long as it remains a supported option - simply because you don't want to risk your business changing something established, that works.
It doesn't really matter if databases hosted via AWS are as good or better? What you have going on out there is a lot of people choosing AWS hosting for NEW projects that get deployed. If they're going to do something new and "cloudified", AWS is a primary candidate for the job.
Oracle's database is becoming a legacy product, much like a lot of IBM's offerings in the minicomputer days. When you're the size of an operation like eBay or a major airline and everything runs on Oracle databases, you're not going to be quick to tear that all out and try to reconstruct it on a different platform. So they have a nearly guaranteed revenue stream from it for years to come. But yeah, it's "90's tech" at this point and people aren't clamoring to roll out brand new projects that are powered by Oracle databases on the back end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"If you had to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of WWII but was an Oracle customer, there's a very good chance that you'd end up using an Oracle allegory. "
No sane person would've bought Oracle software in the first place, yet here we are...
But not the way he means it.
There's no way a normal person would move to Oracle public cloud, Amazon AWS, or Microsoft Azure. You have to be 100% on board with the cloud kool-aid.
Err 'kikes'? Really? Do you know what that word means?
I can tell you one thing, this CEO has no idea who a "normal" person is, he hasn't even talked to or associated with a "normal" person for decades. Just like everyone else running in those circles, they are completely out of touch with reality.
No "normal" person has even heard of Oracle or even knows what they do, but nearly all "normal" people can make a guess what Amazon Web Services might be. Oracle is in their death spiral.
Don't worry, all of our customers are sufficiently locked in. No matter how much they hate us, and no matter how shitty our product is, they will never pay the enormous cost of transitioning to something else.
"In terms of technology, there is no way that... any normal person would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database."
That's sort of a strange statement. That's because it's written in Eillison-ease. I happen to speak Ellison-ease. Here's the translation to English:
"We got you just where we want you, and there's NO ESCAPE from Oracle!" These Amazon people are shifty rats that managed to steal my magic gauntlets that let them escape from my invincible trap. But your "normal" companies out there will never get out! I'll get you my little pretties! And you're little open source software too!"
Ellison then turned into a bat, and flew off into his private lair.
Nobody in their right mind would pay for Oracle!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I've personally architected and implemented a move from two large exadata boxes (abut 1PB, 120GB per day EDW) to a mix of aurora, redshift and gcp's bigquery. It is indeed possible and we were not alone. Just join any AWS ReInvent event and talk with the people you meet there.
The thing that makes moving difficult is Exadata made it extremely easy to write well-performing bad sql, usually powering some OLAP-based BI. Forklifting that crap is not an option.
Thing is, you don't just get databases in the cloud, you get managed ETL, efficient queues, cloud functions, you get well thought IAM (at least in AWS, GCP's is still-but-not-for-long lagging behind), and all of that allows you to rearchitect significantly. We got rid of, for instance, Oracle OBIEE which generates hideously inefficient SQL queries, and replaced it with a mix of google data studio (yeah, that basic) and microstrategy for the analysts that need it.
The migration cost us around 3m eur, and paid for itself the very next year. We had zero infra-related incidents and performance is well above what Oracle offered, cost is about 10x less, and we havent even begun optimizing it.
Last but not least, It was actually pleasant to work with and we had near-zero regrettable attrition among developers during the project. I'd never ever consider working in an Oracle shop ever again, for anything less than enough-to-retire-in-two-years kind of money.
Two other thing to note. AWS has very good support, none of that 'it works as designed, ticket closed' shit. You get greybeards responding to your tickets directly. GCP has somewhat good support but they Really want the enterprise market so once you cut through google's internal bureaucracy and get their attention - it is a breeze. The only notable exception is Amazon. We found that a lot of what's in the documentation is not fully accurate, and scalability beyond proof-of-concept sized applications is nearly always a problem, and some of the problems are wicked. We have since decided to not do any Azure and rely purely on GCP and AWS.
I am a CTO of a 25bn company. I've previously spent 10 years as owner of Oracle-based BI team at a 100bn company with money to burn. I would not exactly call myself a not-normal-person :-)
...all the way to his own private Hawaiian island (Lanai)!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Oracle customers hate Oracle though. I hear more complaints about dealing with Oracle's business organization than complaints about Oracle's technology.
I had a very brief experience with Oracle, at which point I immediately left.
I would rather roll my own than deal with their shitastic interfaces. Genuinely the worst thing I have used from such a supposed professional company.
I remember even in college when I was doing their shitty online exam for certification, and an internet disconnection lead to the whole exam reset and a count against my (and others) three tries. This happened about 7 times that day. (some IP in China was DDoSing the whole campus and various campuses around the country)
Who the fuck uses sessions like that? That's extremely dumb. The worst is the connection drops were at most a minute or three between them. They are looking at that (if they even are) as if it is someone trying to cheat by "pausing" the test. (which could easily be beaten by opening another fucking tab, again, 90s company)
I've even seen it on some stupid government surveys that timed out WAY too quickly. If you sat there thinking for any more than 10 minutes you ran out of time. Timed sessions on a damn survey? WHY?
Oracle absolutely are a 90s company - very ass backwards indeed.
Using timed sessions like that is from the retarded era of internet services. That crap died out donkeys years ago.
The funniest thing is it doesn't even provide any significant security, only severe annoyance!
Worst RDBMS ever.
Their software sucks and they act like they are Microsoft back in 1996.
Your company sucks Larry and you will soon be broke.
Corporatism != Free Market
Capitalist 1%er pigs!
- No way a normal person will buy a Tesla
History keeps repeating itself
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
... to bickering toddlers in a sandpit.
Oracle charges ridiculous amount of money for their database. A company among most successful in the World like Amazon can do whatever they want and they won't ask permissions from Oracle. Mr. Ellison has been arrogant but this tops any "reasonable" arrogance scale LOL!!!
That's what all the normies are doing these days.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I was just quoted 120k... for an Oracle cloud solution... for a test environment
No thanks.
Every week. No we don't use your software. No we aren't going to use your software.
Their marketdroids didn't like hearing things like that.
Corporatism != Free Market
Creimer cloud? I walked through one of those once by accident. Doctors say I might be able to walk again someday.
AWS is incredibly hard to get off once you start, and can get quite expensive. It's the worst solution out there. Except for hosting the server yourself and needing to maintain it. Or using Oracle. Or...
But the lock-in is pretty scary from a business point of view. I mean, if AWS raises prices by 20%, how are you going to move it to another provider? How are you going to move your data? Are you going to have to switch DB engines? Are you using the Lambda service, cause where are you going to run that code? Or with the various other services?
Your ad here. Ask me how!
If you are using Oracle, then you most likely need an enterprise style database. In that case, which wolf db vendor do you choose from. None is better then the others when it comes to their licensing or support costs.
You basically are walking around with the soap tied to your foot so that you have to bend over and be fucked by who ever.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Clearly we've arrived at the fight phase of ignore, laugh, fight, win. Oracle's RDBMS technology is not special; it's subject to the same commoditization cycle as everything else.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
"50 percent relational database market share" And by this, they primarily mean MySQL (the thing they bought, and is free), not Oracle Database (the thing they made, and sell). And in the MySQL world, all the major players already have or are in the process of migrating away from MySQL to MariaDB. This is even more FUD and scare tactics by Oracle. They're losing their grip, and they know it all too well internally. This is especially true in emerging markets like China, just look at the MariaDB changelog to see how many of the largest companies in China are contributing huge feature sets to MariaDB (instant column add is one of my favs)
for the young generation, creimer left /. after 20 years and posted 100+ videos in the past year.
Normal people want to give me all of their money, and let me control their enterprise to boot.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
What a nightmare it was trying to learn and deploy Oracle technology. From the moment I dived into it, I was cursing myself and wishing to get out. Oracle is even worse than Microsoft when it comes to not divulging bugs and vulnerabilities.
For the older generations, creimer is a pest that thinks he creates value by being a pest...
CAPTCHA: infects /no joke
Either the summary is wrong or Oracle can't English. I don't know which is less likely.
If Oracle wasn't impressed with MySQL, why did it buy it?
PostgreSQL is a do-over of Ingres, which is almost as old as Oracle. Only, PostgreSQL has evolved and Oracle hasn't.
PostgreSQL and MySQL have better licensing terms and superior performance.
Oracle have caused severe damage to MySQL and OpenOffice, and to Java for that matter, raising concerns about the competency of staff.
Why trust a company that can't cope and does so expensively?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
AWS RDS is just a wrapper for mysql / mssql, it's a server abstraction... it could wrap oracle just as easily. Now... why wouldn't Amazon drink from their own cup in favor of enhancing it.
No normal person would move to cloud based service - Oracle
next sentence
We will be working on a cloud based service - Oracle
Everyone knows that switching DB vendors can be a real pain, even if you are just moving between mainstream, similar systems. A company I once worked for spent a couple years (and lots of money) to move from MS SQL Server to PostgreSQL because of licensing costs. Cost savings are certainly one consideration, but there are others as well so I would like to know what has made you switch.
I am building a whole new kind of data management system that also does some relational DB functions. Getting early adopters can really be a challenge so I want to focus on things that are the most painful for people today. Our system can handle some pretty big tables (tested to 300 Million rows with 50 columns), and most queries have been faster than other systems (benchmarked against SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres). We don't need to index our tables to get really fast queries either! In short, it is an entirely new kind of system that uses a completely different architecture than other systems. It is a columnar store with a flexible schema so we can add or delete entire columns on big tables without needing to reload data. It can do both transactional operations and analytics very quickly. See a 4 minute demo video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... if you want to see it in action.
There is no other reason to stick with Oracle than needing scott/tiger to still work.
Derp, only a company like Oracle would force its customers hand.
No true Scotsman would use AWS. If you uses AWS, then you are not a true Scotsman. Q.E.D.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Everything is a wrapper for something else. A SATA harddrive is a wrapper for a bunch of motor controls and sensors. You can flip the magnets on a platter yourself if you want to.
Also doesn't Oracle control MySQL these days?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think he does, and used it intentionally.
Is there a proper matrix (not the Neo sort) that shows how databases compare for features, plus geaphs showing how they compare under different loads?
A proper... Oh, let's call it a review.
I mean, products like Dezign for Databases support a very large number of engines, and there are many others now obsolete and hard to obtain that may still have value in certain niches.
Yes, PostgreSQL won't match Oracle on everything, but it doesn't have to. It only has to be better for one market. Another system, perhaps commercial, might be better in another.
As long as every use case has a better solution, it doesn't matter if Oracle outperforms the competitor in features that don't apply to that case.
I'd like to see Oracle survive and thrive, in areas it actually is strong in. But it won't, if it has a 'tude, competes by killing rivals rather than focussing on strengths, and has licensing costs and conditions Hell would baulk at.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Oracle's CTO: No Way a 'Normal' Person [JUST LIKE ME] Would Move To AWS
Birds of a feather flock together. Everyone around him is normal; the weird ones are those who DON'T work for or use Oracle. QED.
It's just like a lot of things we had at my old job. Some were crap-ish, some were good, and a few were great. There was ONE that was great, but just failed the bang-for-the-buck test. We bought it anyway, but IMO it was a misteak.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
I'd never move to AWS. Not in my right mind. From Oracle I'd always move to Maria DB or Postgres.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Sorry, I have a great hate on for.. our company uses Netsuite, which is owned by Oracle. It's a steaming mess, and even though we pay over $3k a month for the service, when I need support I get told, "sorry, that's not a defect, check the online documentation".. which is complete shit.
Oracle is still in business?
"Nobody, save maybe Jeff Bezos, gave the command, 'I want to get off the Oracle database.' "
I doubt that statement is correct, but either way, everybody else said "No way am I getting _on_ the Oracle database".
I certainly don't know for whom their products are the right choice. (Since it's Oracle we're talking about, yes, that includes java :) ).
For our startup my partners and I settled on Postgres right from the start. The idea that even for large, high volume / high transaction rate processing we would use Oracle is laughable. Most of us are quite proficient in C and if anything we would rather spend what we would spend on Oracle to improve Postgres for everyone.
Oracle is a pretty darn good database. But the licensing is painful and there are things in Oracle showing their age that can be big pain points. Oracle has little incentive to fix this since their consulting services bring in almost as much (if not more) as their hideous licensing. If you're a large corporation on Oracle then it's likely cheaper (in the short term) to continue paying Oracle.
I can't imagine any new projects that are SQL based using Oracle out of the box when such good open source alternatives exist (Firebase, Postgres, etc).
By "normal", I assume he means any person with an 9+ figure salary.
-Bob-
He said no one in their right mind would move from oracle to aws. He is wrong, anyone who has seen how much Oracle costs would move the db to any other platform.
Salesforce is also leaving Oracle. I love the name of their database!
Salesforce is developing an internal database — code-named "Sayonara" — for its customer management and marketing automation software. Salesforce plans to end its reliance on Oracle by 2023.
Oracle is shit, AWS is shit, Azure is shit; but AWS stinks slightly more than the others.
Riiiight. That's why Amazon is building massive data centers in Virginia to feed the appetite of the Federal government, and YOU'RE NOT.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Oracle is not much if any faster than Postgresql. And Hsqldb is much, much faster than both of them. For small to medium applications either Postgresql or the free version of Oracle is fine.
But big enterprise stuff is tricky to get right. I'm not saying that Oracle is better, but it is a lot more than just that database you use for testing, nor the one that your 10 person company stores its data on. And Oracle has some fancy stuff, like being able to find out the results of a query if it had been run yesterday.
One thing that is true about Oracle is that you need to employ a full time, competent and expensive Oracle DBA that has been working with it non-stop for years. The manuals are awful, the config is complex and arcane. It used to take an expert a week just to install a basic system, they fixed that but the moment you do anything tricky it becomes very difficult. And for enterprise, you want to know that your backups are really working properly. A Bank, for example, cannot afford to loose any transactions at all.
I once tried to get simple master/slave replication working on Oracle. Docs were worthless, but fortunately a non-Oracle person had written a cheat sheet. Got it going, but I certainly would not bet my pension it having been set up 100% reliably.
As to moving to AWS, that would be a Courageous decision.
I'm really just picking on IBM because they're so predictably known for either A) giving up on good, solid technologies they sold, or B) supporting legacy products past the length of time they make logical sense to keep using. (Again, a lot of places are going to do that because change is hard and brings uncertainty and a need to re-train people. But still -- when you look at situations like government offices suffering along with ancient systems? You think IBM, because they're one of the few companies who still supports that stuff.)
As long as I've really been into computing, IBM has been known for generating loads of patents and coming up with great ideas. It's just their follow-through that I often question. As a big OS/2 user, back in the day, that was an excellent example. All the OS/2 users LOVED the product *despite* the constant sense that IBM never did. IBM would sell new PCs that came pre-loaded with Windows NT but weren't even OS/2 compatible if you WANTED to run that on one instead!
One could also say that's where things went with Lotus Notes and the rest of the "SmartSuite" of theirs. Great, iconic applications there -- yet constantly relegated to "also ran" status, only because IBM management never seemed committed to continually refreshing the software and staying innovative with it. I used to love using the AMI Pro word processor. Just a better overall UI and feel than Microsoft Word. But they let it die on the vine ....
And what about the (also iconic) IBM Thinkpad line of notebooks? They just decided they didn't want to sell that kind of hardware anymore and sold it all off to Lenovo. Well -- to date, it sure looks to me like Lenovo can still turn a profit making them. And that was truly the only IBM product line of PCs used by consumers that still had real respect. (Nobody I know was ever that excited by the IBM desktop PC lineups out there. But MANY still rave about all the design choices and durability of the Thinkpad line.)
Not even a true Scotsman?!?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
So I worked for a startup in 2002. Oracle sales wanted $50k per CPU to go beyond one CPU for their damn database, in a job where each extra developer cost that. It was insanity. We left Oracle.
I worked for a large bank in 2008. Oracle had us over the damn barrel, because execs before us had said "no one ever got fired for choosing Oracle". We fired those execs, and went with MySQL, which worked as fast, as reliably, and at 1/10th the TCO.
No one sane should be paying Oracle for what they do.
Are the bunches of cheap computers. And google or shmoogle had nothing to do with it, everything got invented by HPC engineers, that is, the former mainframe users.
Larry can only blame himself for the demise of Oracle. Oracle and Sun were a pair that just worked great together and were great partners. That is until Larry started pushing Oracle on Linux to its Sun consumers resulting in Sun losing customers and making it cheaper for him to purchase Sun.
Having Oracle on Linux was probably the biggest win for Linux. Larry touted how Linux commoditized the OS; well, fast forward and PostgreSQL is not commoditizing the database.
They're both full of shit.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Oracle's CTO: No Way a 'Normal' Person Would Move To AWS
This reminds of that Motorola exec (what's his face?) that claimed Apple could not make a phone back in 2006-2007, or how RIM missed the boat.
According to the 1960s British motorcycle industry, which was almost completely annihilated by Japan's motorcycle industry.