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Oracle Businesses Cloud Databases Software

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.
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Amazon Plans To Move Completely Off Oracle Software By Early 2020

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  • Good (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @07:50PM (#57053354)

    Oracle can keep circling the drain.

    • Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @08:10PM (#57053460)

      Oracle can keep circling the drain.

      Oracle's profits are at record highs. Never underestimate the power of the dark side.

      • Oracle's profits are at record highs.

        And Oracle's P/E of 53 is breathtaking, not in a good way.

      • Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)

        by sjames ( 1099 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @09:56PM (#57053914) Homepage Journal

        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.

        • by youngone ( 975102 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @10:06PM (#57053952)

          ...they turned the screws tighter on their existing customers...

          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.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            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)

          by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @10:12PM (#57053986) Homepage

          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...

    • Totally agree. They're not going anywhere soon, but it's nice to see them get a little slap here and there. Oracle pretty much eliminated the competition through their practices so it's fun to see it happen to them.
    • 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.

    • Spock, is that you?

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • by erp_consultant ( 2614861 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @08:18PM (#57053498)

    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!

    • 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.'

    • by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      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!

      • 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.

        • by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

          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.

  • Oracle more or less resells GPL & MIT licensed software (with the occasional patent here and there to make it hard to just re-implement everything they do). If you're as big as Amazon why pay the crazy fees. Just go to the source and hire your own engineers.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Oracle more or less resells GPL & MIT licensed software

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @08:26PM (#57053530)

    > 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.

  • What are they moving TO? The article doesn’t seem to say.

    • DynamoDB? SQL isn't "web scale"
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        SQL isn't "web scale"

        SQL is a language. That's like saying that English isn't "web scale"...whatever that means.

    • 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.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @10:51PM (#57054152)

      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.

      • S3 and Dynamo are just KV storage. This is certainly not what they intend to replace Oracle with you big dummy.
      • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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].

      • by Carcass666 ( 539381 ) on Thursday August 02, 2018 @08:39AM (#57056046)

        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.

        • 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.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        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)

      • by Anonymous Coward

        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

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @09:22PM (#57053738)

    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.

  • by CharlesAKAChuck ( 1157011 ) on Wednesday August 01, 2018 @09:44PM (#57053844)

    "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...

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Thursday August 02, 2018 @01:38AM (#57054660)

    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.

    • 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.

  • How is Larry gonna buy 10 more yachts now?
  • good lord (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sad_ ( 7868 ) on Thursday August 02, 2018 @05:55AM (#57055370) Homepage

    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)

      by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Thursday August 02, 2018 @07:01AM (#57055584)

      ...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.

    • ...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)

  • by countach ( 534280 ) on Thursday August 02, 2018 @06:13AM (#57055422)

    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?

  • The wonder is that anyone is still on it.
  • by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Thursday August 02, 2018 @07:44AM (#57055752)
    From the CNBC article ( https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/0... [cnbc.com] )... "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. "

    .
    That's going to leave a mark...

  • Here on Slashdot, we all know how evil Microsoft is but we don't spend a lot of time speaking of the horrors of Oracle. Unlike Microsoft, Oracle actually creates some solid technology (at least their database and supporting technologies), but they constantly invent new ways to screw over their customers. Everyone knows Oracle is expensive and so you won't be surprised when their initial estimate comes in pretty high. What you don't realize is that they will often come back later and evaluate your use of
  • One Rich A**hole Called Larry Ellison

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