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Oracle's CTO: No Way a 'Normal' Person Would Move To AWS (zdnet.com) 253

Posted by msmash from the cloud-war dept.
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."
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Oracle's CTO: No Way a 'Normal' Person Would Move To AWS More

Oracle's CTO: No Way a 'Normal' Person Would Move To AWS

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  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:09PM (#57825588)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Got it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @03:24PM (#57826148)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        This is Oracle, though. Callous disregard for or showing a lack of understanding of their customers or their needs is Larry's Company moto.

        Oracle is the IBM of legacy databases. Nobody got fired for choosing Oracle. Anything Java with Enterprise in the name gets tied to Oracle for storage quickly. And every certified Oracle DBA on your payroll with remind you of those facts.

        Meanwhile Payroll is quietly weeping at the zeros on those Oracle DBA paychecks. But you can't hear them because Purchasing is yell

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Established businesses get desperate to retain customers. Remember when the mainframe companies said there were a market for a dozen microcomputers. Remember when IBM ran ads trying paint people who bought elsewhere as crazy kids.

      Or even when old people try to make us feel guilty or nostalgic for the bankruptcy or such loser retail firms such as Sears or ToysRus.. They just want everything to stay the same, for us to keep buying the same junk so they can make a profit without ever doing anything new.

  • Wow is Larry ever tired of being wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:10PM (#57825594)

    > 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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Dan667 ( 564390 )
      so true. When was oracle good? Last time I used an oracle database was 20 years ago and I could not replace it fast enough. Terrible unintuitive bloated slow. I have yet to hear anyone say it was better since then.

    • Re: Wow is Larry ever tired of being wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:21PM (#57825690)

      I heard a story where a company was audited for license compliance. Some very minor issue was found (one thing misinstalled on one client PC, that was not being used). Oracle wanted the company to commit long term to their cloud platform or stop using Oracle all together in 30 days. They did not know this client already had a project to migrate off Oracle that was basically ready (they would cancel Oracle within 6-12 months). They went with it and took the 30 days option, putting extra effort in finishing the last bits. The face the saleswoman made was awesome. Turned out well also, migration was a success.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by k2r ( 255754 )

        > I heard a story where a company was audited for license compliance.

        I was tangentially involved in an Oracle license audit at a telco a few years ago. Everybody hated Oracle afterwards for their slimy business practices, even if we personally didn't have to pay for it.

      • Re: Wow is Larry ever tired of being wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by petergriffinismyhero ( 803004 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @03:57PM (#57826352)
        This happened at my work. It was either commit to a seven figure fine or commit to a multi year Oracle Cloud contract we never ever ever would use for 1/3 the cost. Any consideration given to our being a 20 year Oracle customer or that the infraction was ambiguously interpreted? No, because Oracles license Nazi's are just that: Nazis. Of course we are an Oracle Cloud customer now (and have never even logged into the cloud portal), and just as soon as we can get off this POS company's platform in a few months, we will never have to deal with them again. Fuck you Larry.

    • Re:Wow is Larry ever tired of being wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Major Blud ( 789630 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:29PM (#57825762) Homepage

      Ditto. It sounds like Larry is taking the same line as his Oracle sales staff, as in if the potential customer doesn't like what they have to offer, insult them and threaten them into buying it or renewing it. I've actually heard them tell people that their "career would go nowhere unless they purchased Oracle".

    • Depends on the product and aspect. Oracle DB is fine for what it does. The licensing is onerous and is what causes most customers to revolt. Their other products like ERP can be down right shitty.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by k2r ( 255754 )

      I have seen many ancient or old applications in financial business and telcos that still use oracle databases somewhere but the proposed big updates that are planned decidedly don't anymore.
      Everything Oracle is legacy software that is often deeply ingrained into the companys infrastructure and part of the expensive bugs that will be fixed "real soon now".
      I think Oracle can still survive on this like a tick in a companys side, but most plans for the future that have been made are getting rid of Oracle.
      Nobody

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bigbutt ( 65939 )

      Seriously. The place I work at several years ago made the decision to dump Oracle where it could. After they bought Sun, the company bailed on Sun gear as well going with "white box" x86 boxes, VMs, and Red Hat. We still have a few Oracle clusters but most of the rest of the databases are ms-sql, a few mysql, informix, and postgresql. Personally I don't think they should have such a broad swath of DBs but it seems to be working for the company.

      [John]

    • Re:Wow is Larry ever tired of being wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mdhoover ( 856288 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @04:46PM (#57826642) Homepage Journal

      Every oracle customer I've dealt with has "getting rid of this fucking goddamn shit" as a #1 priority.

      We aren't getting rid of Oracle DB because of the product (it is solid, reliable and consistent), we are dumping it because dealing with Oracle the company is a f*cking nightmare and they treat you like shit.

  • Interesting (Score:5, Funny)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:12PM (#57825608)
    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.

    • 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.

      To be fair, he wasn't comparing Oracle to "the cloud" but to AWS in particular. Even if that is still an unfavorable comparison, it is not a question of cloud vs on-prem.

  • er... (Score:4, Funny)

    by vittico ( 1086555 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:14PM (#57825620)
    can we laugh?

  • Not dealing with Oracle = big win (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:17PM (#57825638)

    "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.

    • PostgreSQL is superior to Oracle. MySQL is garbage, Microsoft SQL Server can't scale to what Oracle or Postgre can do, and MongoDB is a different type of indexing system entirely.

      Oracle has many other business products built around their platform which may be superior to anything else out there, at least anything else gathered all in one place. Oracle's business, as you've noticed, is garbage, and their products are terrible; they simply don't have any competition I can immediately identify.

      • I work with all of the databases that you've mentioned, and I'd wager that MS SQL has closed the gap with Oracle in recent years, especially at a certain price points. I rather like MySQL for certain projects, but unfortunately Oracle owns that now too.

  • Meh.... Two giants bickering (Score:5, Insightful)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:18PM (#57825650) Journal

    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.

    • ... to bickering toddlers in a sandpit.

    • Re:Meh.... Two giants bickering (Score:5, Interesting)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:53PM (#57825952)

      The last time I worked within an Oracle-based warehouse was 2012. Since then, I've been exposed to any number of others, including taking over a on-prem SQL Server warehouse and moving to BigQuery and, currently, deciding how to handle the Redshift warehouse provided to us by a DBaaS vendor.

      BigQuery is Petabyte scale, no infrastructure to manage, lightning fast, incredibly inexpensive compared to on-prem SQL Server, and is supported by a ton of toolsets. Redshift is basically the same, with the added negative bonus of having to support it with instances.

      While 6 years is an eternity in the analytics space, we're talking about hours-long queries being reduced to single seconds. I'd love to see Oracle be able to keep up with these cloud-DB technologies.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    "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. "

    • Oracle hasn't gassed any of it's customers... yet.

      • Re:Oracle = the Nazis (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:39PM (#57825830)

        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?"

      • They've started charging for the JDK.

        I don't know about other people, but they seem to be fond of gassing themselves.

  • No sane person would've bought Oracle software in the first place, yet here we are...

  • Translation (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • Don't worry, all of our customers are sufficiently locked in.

      so very true - I only have worked, in more than 10 years of DBA professional experience, with ORACLE DB on legacy software: make something new with ORACLE DB seems something insane to me...

    • Flypaperware. Once you install it, you're stuck, BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!

  • Nobody in their right mind would pay for Oracle!

  • Lying like an oracle sales rep proper (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:28PM (#57825750)

    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)!

    • ...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.

  • AWS customers don't hate AWS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:28PM (#57825758)

    Oracle customers hate Oracle though. I hear more complaints about dealing with Oracle's business organization than complaints about Oracle's technology.

  • - No way a normal person will buy an iPhone

    - 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.

    • That quote is pretty stupid. I mean, sometimes they laugh at you, then they keep laughing while you keep doing stupid shit. Or they fight you and win.

      I mean, compare it to:

      First you're born
      Then you get drunk and gamble in Vegas
      Then you hit the multimillion dollar slots jackpot.

      I mean, sure, it's a chain of events, and each step seems to precede the next, but there's no reason to assume each next step will occur.

    • "But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
  • 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.

  • Oracle cloud? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by twebb72 ( 903169 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @02:41PM (#57825858)
    I was just quoted 120k... for an Oracle cloud solution... for a test environment

    No thanks.

  • 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 tha

  • 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.

  • 50% (Score:2)

    by darkain ( 749283 )

    "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

  • Normal people want to give me all of their money, and let me control their enterprise to boot.

  • So... (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak@yahoGINSBERGo.com minus poet> on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @03:27PM (#57826178) Homepage Journal

    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?

  • 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 adopter

  • No true Scotsman would use AWS. If you uses AWS, then you are not a true Scotsman. Q.E.D.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • I'd never move to AWS. Not in my right mind. From Oracle I'd always move to Maria DB or Postgres.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday December 18, 2018 @05:13PM (#57826822)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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