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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."
> 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.
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.
If they could do it on their support forums, they would.
They're always hostile and defensive.
They spend all their time trying to deny your issue has anything to do with them and then when you solve it yourself, they try to make it sound like you were lying about it ever being an Oracle issue.
- "That doesn't sound like an Oracle issue to me."
- "The error message is coming from the oracle driver. It starts with ORA-"
- "You still haven't proven to me that it was an Oracle issue."
- "Then why'd the problem resolve when I upgraded the Oracle drivers?"
- "If you had proper Oracle training, you would have installed the right drivers the first time."
- "Why do I need training to install drivers?"
Oh man this 1000 times. The Oracle forums are probably the most hostile that I've ever encountered. You could get more help by posting your issue on 4chan.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Oooo... sprung for the two CPU license, eh?
I think I am getting old, This seems like the Statement a company makes shortly before its collapse. Mostly due to not understanding its customer and their needs.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Two CPU license? I thought that was the 2 core license!
Atlassian are heading in the same direction but in a more passive-aggressive way.
http://michaelsmith.id.au