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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.
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. "
Err 'kikes'? Really? Do you know what that word means?
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.
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 :-)
Oracle customers hate Oracle though. I hear more complaints about dealing with Oracle's business organization than complaints about Oracle's technology.
I was just quoted 120k... for an Oracle cloud solution... for a test environment
No thanks.
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)
...all the way to his own private Hawaiian island (Lanai)!
You know why he bought that island, right? It’s inown for pineapples. He’s able to cut out the middle man and directly source the pineapples to use on/in Oracle customers.
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.
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.)