Amazon Plans To Move Completely Off Oracle Software By Early 2020 (cnbc.com) 138
Amazon plans to be completely off Oracle's proprietary database software by the first quarter of 2020, reports CNBC. The plans come after the company moved most of its infrastructure internally to Amazon Web Services. From the report: Amazon began moving off Oracle about four or five years ago, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the project is confidential. Some parts of Amazon's core shopping business still rely on Oracle, the person said, and the full migration should wrap up in about 14 to 20 months. Another person said that Amazon had been considering a departure from Oracle for years before the transition began but decided at the time that it would require too much engineering work with perhaps too little payoff. The primary issue Amazon has faced on Oracle is the inability for the database technology to scale to meet Amazon's performance needs, a person familiar with the matter said. Another person, who said the move could be completed by mid-2019, added that there hasn't been any development of new technology relying on Oracle databases for quite a while.
Good (Score:5, Informative)
Oracle can keep circling the drain.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle can keep circling the drain.
Oracle's profits are at record highs. Never underestimate the power of the dark side.
Re: Good (Score:5, Interesting)
was annoyed by their suits and thick sparc station laptops.
Indeed. You see someone in Silicon Valley wearing a suit, and there is a good chance he is an Oracle salesman.
Don't ever talk to them. If they get your business card, they will start "going up the chain" by calling the company's receptionist and asking for the name of your manager, then doing the same to get the name of your manager's manager. They keep going until they reach a tech-no-incompetent who is unaware of their reputation, or, even worse, has seen their idiotic ads on the back cover of the Economist magazine.
Pro-tip: If you like hookers and blackjack, then buy a nice tailored suit and convince one of them that YOU are the "decision maker". You will have a great time, but you will never get off their mailing list.
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Oracle salesperson buy you hookers long time.
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Yeah, no.
Use PostgreSQL. It even has a Oracle compat mode.
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Even better, if you hate your employer, sign the Oracle contract and take the no show Oracle job for 10x your previous salary.
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That's funny. When we were on Oracle, "Data Guard" realtime replication would constantly break and we'd have to log ship to restore it. We were constantly filing support issues. We reported so many acknowledged bugs that it felt like we were the only place on earth using it. There's also a laundry list of types that it won't replicate, for some reason. Once we switched to PG, we haven't had one single issue with replication.
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Yah, it's web scale
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You do know that for some organizations, relational databases are the correct answer to the problem? Not everyone accepts that free-form JSON documents are the answer to their problems.
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You do know that for some organizations, relational databases are the correct answer to the problem? Not everyone accepts that free-form JSON documents are the answer to their problems.
^^^ THIS! Happening where I work right now. We're reengineering the internal apps, and some idjit got it in mind that Cosmos DB was the way to go. What a cluster.
What? you want your data to be consistent NOW? You know, you should just wait a little bit after doing that thing so that you can maybe get to see that it dropped out of the queue. Don't worry! It will EVENTUALLY be consistent. No we can't turn on that feature that makes it so that it's consistent now, that would cause us performance issue
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know about since inception but it grew about 8%/year for the last ten years. But today the issue is, P/E above 16 or 20 is supposed to be reserved for growth stocks. But Oracle is 1) not a growth stock and 2) currently sitting at a breathtaking P/E of 53. That is nuts and unsustainable. If Oracle collapses back to what would be reasonable given its lethargic growth, around P/E of 16, then its annual growth with come in at roughly minus 4%. The truth will be somewhere in between but for now I would say, nobody who isn't a professional short should even think about getting into ORCL.
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I'm seeing oracle P/E today at 18.6 -- where are you getting 53?
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Oracle's profits are at record highs.
And Oracle's P/E of 53 is breathtaking, not in a good way.
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Thanks for clarifying. IMHO even 20-25 is a bit rich for ORCL. Where is the growth supposed to come from? And shrink is a clear and present danger.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
They are more profitable now because they turned the screws tighter on their existing customers. They think their customers can never leave, but it fact it just takes time to leave.
There's only so long they can manage that. Every time they turn the screws, their current customers all pay up because they have to, but some percentage of them initiate a plan to migrate away.
Re:Good (Score:4)
I understand that's why the massive multinational corporation I work for is beginning the process of getting rid of Oracle.
Every supplier we have is happy to negotiate price when the time comes, but Oracle raised theirs and refused to even speak to our CEO.
They will regret that one day. It won't be this year, but the time will come.
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A certain Fortune 500 company I work for is also massively reducing the presence of Oracle and MS databases for the same reason. Today I can fill out a simple web form and within minutes have a fully provisioned Postgres database complete with dashboards automated backups, etc... Behind the scenes it's a fully automated service with a restful endpoint so teams can even automate it if they need to. On the other hand if I want an Oracle or MS database I'm going to have some very difficult conversations wit
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
They are more profitable now because they turned the screws tighter on their existing customers. They think their customers can never leave, but it fact it just takes time to leave.
People have been saying that since you joined /. so maybe on a geological timescale. On a human timescale they'll be dancing on our graves, not the other way around...
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I've always said that Oracle has all the monopolistic evil that Microsoft has, but without the smart people.
Fascinating (Score:2)
Fascinating
Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Interesting)
I didn't think Amazon would be using the evil corp products aka Oracle.
Most companies get sucked into the maelstrom by adopting an ERP system that requires Oracle DB as a backend. Then they figure "Hey, we have this DB, so we can use it for everything!" Big mistake.
Whenever I meet someone that uses Oracle ERP, I always ask them if they are happy with it, and would they still make the same decision if they could do it over again. So far, this many people have said yes: 0.
Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I meet someone that uses Oracle ERP, I always ask them if they are happy with it, and would they still make the same decision if they could do it over again. So far, this many people have said yes: 0.
Nobody is happy with their ERP.
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Nobody is happy with their ERP.
In my experience, nobody is happy with Enterprise anything when it comes to software because the customer (i.e., the person making the decision to purchase it) is never the user (the one who has to suffer the pain of using the awful software).
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Just like SAP.
Re:Fascinating (Score:5, Interesting)
You clearly never asked the DBAs and Sysadmin's who have many years of long and frustrating work bashing their heads against Oracle if they're happy with it. They'll tell you no, but then if you ever get the truth out, "I've got a job for life, this shit is so fragile, they can't fire us."
How do I know? I was a BOFH dealing with about a dozen servers for a mid sized company's Oracle ERP system. They were just RHEL boxes, nothing too special. Generally shit just worked. Stupid simple shit for a Unix sysadmin. I pretty much coasted along for a decade at that job, showed up four hours a day, three days a week. Getting paid $150k for it at that. I pretty much did fuck all at that job. Only reason why I'm not at that job anymore? Company went bankrupt, otherwise I would still be slacking at that place.
So, yes, I was happy with that ERP system, just not for the reason people think you'd be happy with it.
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Oracle DBA and dev work is usually one of the first things to get offshored, unless the data is such that us regs prevent that. Oracle is fairly static technology and Indian developers have wrapped their minds around it quite well.
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Blame? No, he adopted Oracle and their business model in their entirety!
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He's a sucker. Only made 150K. Good Oracle dbas pay about that in taxes.
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Can a software project never actually be done?
Software is never finished. At some point the maker merely stops supporting it.
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Highest customer sats in the industry?
So the clients only want to burn the sales weasels alive, not all their descendents? Good to know.
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It's fascinating from the point of view of mouthy Larry's mouth driving away tens of millions of dollars of sales. But that's only .1% of Oracle's annual profit, so meh, maybe the satisfaction was worth it. Or maybe Larry is just an idiot.
A more serious problem is, ORCL has a P/E of 53. Can somebody please explain to me how it got there, and how it hopes to stay there. I don't see any hope for the latter, this doesn't make any sense at all.
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Spock, is that you?
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Spock, is that you?
He's dead, Jim.
Does Oracle support AWS? (Score:2)
It would be kind of funny if Amazon dropped them as a customer but Oracle actually got more money out of AWS anyway so it didn't matter.
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AWS RDS service has Oracle support, but they really try to push their Aurora DB. That database is basically MariaDB with some extra bells and whistles. They also have migration tools for migrating off of Oracle to RDS as well.
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Exactly. AWS is just way of spinning up VMs.
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Don't be obtuse. Pretty much anyone who refers to Oracle without further qualifiers is generally referring to the RDBMS. They are 99.999% not referring to MySQL even if it is owned by Oracle.
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Oracle late to the game... (Score:5, Informative)
Ellison was initially a big critic of cloud computing and famously boasted that it would be a flop. Now that a lot of companies have embraced it, Oracle is left scrambling. Workday, Amazon, Google, Microsoft...they all have a huge head start.
If this keeps up poor old Larry is going to have to sell off one of his Hawaiian islands or a couple of Malibu estates...oh the humanity!
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Means, "Other people's servers"
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Ellison was first a big proponent of thin clients.
His technical vision is: 'Selling the chumps whatever will make me the most money, this week.'
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Cloud will end. Just a matter of when as people realize they're paying a lot more money for someone else's computer. They get to pay for that business, overhead, etc.
Then of course there's when the cloud evaporates! All your data? GONE! Poof!
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Yes I agree with you. Cloud will end. The dirty little secret is that it costs you a lot more money in the long run than on premise. Sooner or later the people reading those CIO magazines will figure it out but until then it's all the rage.
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You're still seeing it? I know agencies that have big contracts with AWS, Azure, etc and all or almost all of their hosts are archived and turned off. Not even the Government can afford it.
Makes sense (Score:1)
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You clearly have no idea what you're talking about here.
The Oracle RDBMS is pretty much a giant pile of proprietary mess. Then there is the whole stack of applications that Oracle sells to run on top of it as well. Also 100% in house stuff. Oracle Linux only exists so that people would stop buying RHEL support contracts and buy Oracle support contract. If you are getting at the Oracle Linux stuff with the MIT/GPL comment, that is very little of
Oh SNAP (Score:4, Insightful)
> The primary issue Amazon has faced on Oracle is the inability for the database technology to scale to meet Amazon's performance needs, a person familiar with the matter said.
This is how big tech companies do a BURN!
And it couldn't have happened to a nicer megacorp.
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Half of the story is missing (Score:2)
What are they moving TO? The article doesn’t seem to say.
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SQL isn't "web scale"
SQL is a language. That's like saying that English isn't "web scale"...whatever that means.
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DynamoDB and S3 can scale. Redshift, their Postgresql-based technology, can be scaled to a cluster of machines (in contrast to a typical relational database), but that cluster can only be so big, and you can only have so many concurrent queries running. DynamoDB and S3 are really the fundamental building blocks for horizontal scaling, because they are limitless (as you're willing to pay for the capacity that you need).
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What are they moving TO? The article doesnâ(TM)t seem to say.
They're moving to PostgreSQL.
Okay, I'm kidding (though I love PostgreSQL for all of my database work, and we've successfully replaced a bunch of Oracle instances with PostgreSQL).
The article implies that Amazon is moving to their own Aurora database, since they have already moved a bunch of their internal services to it.
Re:Half of the story is missing (Score:5, Interesting)
They're moving to non-relational databases, such as S3 and DynamoDB. The problem with relational databases is that they can't scale beyond a single host. This follows from the CAP theorem: Unless you are willing to sacrifice some amount of consistency or availability, you can't have partitions. S3 and DynamoDB support limitless horizontal scaling because they use eventual consistency.
The trade-off with going down the NoSQL route is that you no longer have the concept of transactions, and you have to write your software in a way that will tolerate tables being in an inconsistent state. However, the advantage of this approach is that your service will always scale. Therefore, at Amazon, they encourage you to always use NoSQL, because if you choose a relational database, you're assuming that your software won't have to scale.
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The trade-off with going down the NoSQL route is that you no longer have the concept of transactions
I'm not sure how ditching SQL implies ditching transactions.
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Azure's SQL Data Warehouse can scale horizontally- that's one of its biggest features. So your claim about needing NoSQL to do so is not true.
I can't speak as to what Google and Amazon's similar products are but I expect they have some.
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The problem with relational databases is that they can't scale beyond a single host.
Uh, what? I'm pretty sure Oracle solved this problem decades ago via their RAC technology, not to mention PostgreSQL is almost there with the work being done on BDR [2ndquadrant.com].
Re:Half of the story is missing (Score:5, Informative)
S3 is object storage, not a database. While AWS offers front-ends like Athena to query it, it's still a file system. You can persist lots of data pretty economically, but it's not a database. You do get benefits like automatic replication across regions, archive policies, etc. If you consider S3 a database, I guess you would have to consider NFS one as well.
DynamoDB is indeed a NoSQL database, and, yeah, I would not use it for transactional database operations. Amazon hardly always encourages NoSQL, though, they offer RDS (hosted MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and even Oracle) as well as their own relational solution Aurora, which is a highly scalable MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible database and supports transactions.
If Amazon encourages anything, it's to leverage a combo of RDS/Aurora for transactional work, DynamoDb or Elasticache (Redis) for key-based persistence and then Redshift and EMR (Hadoop/Pig/etc.) for warehousing/lakes/analytics; and then using leveraging things like Lambda and SQS to "glue" things together. Of course, leveraging that entire stack can easily lock one into their ecosystem (which Bezos won't shed any tears over); but along with the other gazillion service offerings they offer, it is pretty comprehensive.
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S3 is object storage, not a database. While AWS offers front-ends like Athena to query it, it's still a file system.
All file systems are a type of database. It may be simplistic, and you don't typically query it with a built-in language, but it's a database just as much as memcached or Berkeley DB/Sleepycat are databases.
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This has nothing to do with Relational or NOSQL ... you can happily have a relational database that uses eventual consistency and scales horizontally. In fact there are several such DBMS available ( keyword NEWSQL)
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Nothing personal, but the parent comment is incorrect and should be downvoted.
1) The CAP theorem says in the presence of (inevitable) partitions, you can only choose availability or consistency (linearizability). It's not a trade-off of 3 things. This also has nothing to do with relational or non-relational databases -- it's true of both.
2) Relational databases can be scaled out. (see CitusDB, Azure SQL elastic database, etc.)
3) NoSQL databases can and do have transactions built-in. (just google it) There a
Oracle screws their customers (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle screws their customers and pulls absolutely nonsensical licensing demands. Example: You have 1 tiny VM with 1 virtual processor runnning oracle... but the VM runs in a cluster with 1000 cores that other VMs are using. Oracle will demand you license 1000 processors of Oracle for that 1 VM. It's the most insane logic you've ever heard in a licensing discussion.
The only good Oracle is the Oracle you don't use.
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And the news in 2040 will be... (Score:5, Funny)
"Oracle still calling Amazon four to six times a day to sell services"
"Amazon has blocked 38,000 individual phone numbers in attempt to avoid Oracle sales calls"
"1 in 4 Amazon employees job description includes 'Telling Oracle to piss off' to help deal with never ending sales calls"
"Oracle buys AT&T in order to get cheaper rates when calling Amazon"
"Oracle ordered by federal judge to stop stalking Amazon"
and so on...
The corporate equivalent of a cult. (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft, Oracle, etc. They all are the corporate equivalent of a cult, very similar to the big abrahamic revelation cults ("religions"). "Here, have some flaky lock-in software. It comes in shiny boxes and with flashy names on it. And I'm wearing a suit and it's really expensive and complicated, so it's very very professional."
You get miniature versions of this in the web world as well. I'm currently maintaining a mid sized brand website that is an utterly unbelievable Hodge-podge of commercial WordPress plugins. A true nightmare. But even thinking about doing the same with some totally fucked up Oracle installment just about creeps me out even further. ... At least I'm dealing with FOSS and can implement my own models without having to buy some extra schema contingent or something.
Re: The corporate equivalent of a cult. (Score:3)
The main thing that keeps people locked into Windows is that nothing else runs their software and there is usually no equivalent on other platforms.
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If Trump uses all available leverage in the international arena to improve the finances of the United States, as Larry Ellison does for Oracle in the corporate arena, he's doing what I voted for. I expect that other countries are run by people who are out to improve the lot of their citizens. The applications for which I'd even consider Oracle are few and far between. I promise you, if I ever license Oracle, it won't be because I like their *brand*. Likewise for a Chinese power plant burning American coal.
He's on a boat (Score:2)
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good lord (Score:4, Insightful)
we'll never be rid of oracle, if a company such as amazon even has a though time migrating away, imagine the chances of a normal sized company to do so.
the best advice would be to never use it. like a hard drug, it is hard to stop once you've started.
Re:good lord (Score:5, Interesting)
...imagine the chances of a normal sized company to do so.
We moved all of our Oracle instances to PostgreSQL. The biggest problem used to be ESRI, but their PostgreSQL support is now really good. And as a bonus, performance has gone up.
All of our in-house software was migrated to PostgreSQL reasonably easily. Of course, I saw the proprietary database trap back in the 90's, and went with PostgreSQL from the start. I didn't so much talk management into using it as I just used it and didn't bother explaining it to anyone unless they asked.
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...the best advice would be to never use it. like a hard drug, it is hard to stop once you've started....
That appears to be sound advice. (emphasis mine)
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Most things a normal sized company needs a database for do not require something that can scale like Oracle does.
well, it doesn't scale for big sized companies either, because that is why Amazon is migrating away from Oracle.
About time (Score:3)
I don't know what Amazon is replacing it with, but I'm surprised that SQL databases got so big and stayed so big for so long. There are nice things about them, there is no doubt. But there are so many horrible things about them. Why hasn't Oracle moved with the times? Why haven't they researched and created something better after all this time with all that money?
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good (Score:2)
Oracle doesn't scale? (Score:3)
.
That's going to leave a mark...
Explanation of Oracle for the Younguns (Score:2)
Oracle is actually an acronym (Score:2)
One Rich A**hole Called Larry Ellison
Re: okay, but what's the alternative? (Score:1)
Commercial support for postures costs on the order of about 2 to 10% (based on company and plan) what Oracle charges, and us actually responsive and competent vs Oracle in our experience.
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