Live data from Hacker News

Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

aws.amazon.com

41–50 of 471 posts

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#41
post #37

I wonder if anyone here has seen any net new adoption of Oracle DBs in the last few years? It was an absolute juggernaut 10-15 years ago and has rapidly tanked their reputation and spread their business across software, services and cloud with mixed results. Is it actually still growing or just milking their stodgy enterprise customers for more money?

I think that not very many existing customers of Oracle migrate off, but I have to think that they are no longer the default for new and growing businesses to move into. AWS seems to have become that, with Oracle not even the second-most likely option (that would probably be Google or Microsoft).

Having said that, Oracle is probably the COBOL of databases, in that it will still be around (collecting good $$) from its existing customers for a long, long time.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#42

Migrating everything to the same externally-available cloud infrastructure is exactly the thing that Google needs to do, but has been failing at for going on a decade now. Yes, I'm bitter about it.

Is it not the case that it is actually the opposite? That GCP is running on the internally-available cloud infrastructure at Google?

How would they turn that inside out? What would GCP actually run on if they ran GCP on GCP? Or do you mean run search/gmail/youtube on GCP? Isn't their internal infra basically kubernetes in all but name?

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#43
post #21
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, MySQL is technically , an Oracle database (after Sun got bought out). Now they should write some migrations to turn all of that off. sarcasm intensifies

MariaDB - https://mariadb.org/about/

There was also MaxDB, and a few other that Monty built. There's also Percona, WebscaleSQL and a few other forks.

Amazon have been using MySQL even before all these forks happened. And not only that, if Oracle decided to pursue a lawsuit, or if MariaDB, Percona, Elasticsearch or EnterpriseDB did, Amazon will have to cough up.

This is not really a thing that Amazon should be bragging about, because it makes no real sense! They still run a lot of software they did not write.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#44

In my mind the true "hard part" would be in migrating business logic that lives in Oracle stored procedures (PL-SQL). Are there any tools that do a decent job in translating procs to non-Oracle dialects?

Yep, we built SQL Tran to do exactly that. https://www.spectralcore.com/sqltran. Finishing the rewrite right now which allows us to make changes much faster.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#45

In my mind the true "hard part" would be in migrating business logic that lives in Oracle stored procedures (PL-SQL). Are there any tools that do a decent job in translating procs to non-Oracle dialects?

> Are there any tools that do a decent job in translating procs to non-Oracle dialects?

One of the main selling points of EnterpriseDB (built on top of and supporting development of Postgres) is a significant degree of Oracle compatibility, including PL/SQL, client interfaces, etc., so if you go that route you might not need much translation.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#46
post #37

I wonder if anyone here has seen any net new adoption of Oracle DBs in the last few years? It was an absolute juggernaut 10-15 years ago and has rapidly tanked their reputation and spread their business across software, services and cloud with mixed results. Is it actually still growing or just milking their stodgy enterprise customers for more money?

I believe the business model is that it is near impossible to leave the ecosystem (this is also how SAP can still thrive). It takes a lot of money and expertise to make the migration happen. Few companies have scaling problems as pronounced as Amazon and as much of a vested interest in migrating to their own custom solutions.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#47
post #35
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most places likely aren't using Oracle at Amazon's scale, either. I suspect that one of MySQL, Postgres or Microsoft SQL Server can fill in for Oracle if you have access to the source code and can make changes yourself. (If you've bought software that is Oracle-only, then it's not an option -- but it wasn't an option for Amazon, either). I suspect that in a lot of cases, this will pay for itself, but it might take 10…

> Microsoft SQL Server Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

MSSQL's really not too bad. Yes, it's a commercial offering, but there's nothing inherently evil about charging money for software, and you do get what you pay for.

I've worked in both MSSQL shops and PostgreSQL shops, and, while I wasn't in charge of the budget, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that, once you factor paying your programmers and DBAs for their time into the equation, the MSSQL shop ended up having lower overall costs associated with its choice of DBMS.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#48
post #39

> The migration gave each internal team the freedom to choose the purpose-built AWS database service that best fit their needs, and also gave them better control over their budget and their cost model. Anyone know of a comprehensive resource that we could use to figure out which DB to use?

Here’s an algorithm which I believe to be 95% accurate: If only a single user/device needs to access the data: use SQLite. In all other cases: use PostgreSQL.

At Amazon level you start needing specialized databases. For most other people Postgres is fine.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#49
post #37

I wonder if anyone here has seen any net new adoption of Oracle DBs in the last few years? It was an absolute juggernaut 10-15 years ago and has rapidly tanked their reputation and spread their business across software, services and cloud with mixed results. Is it actually still growing or just milking their stodgy enterprise customers for more money?

When they threaten you with lawsuits for using their software, and make their pricing completely opaque so you don’t really know what you owe (Comcast style), why would you knowingly choose that? Postgres is pretty darn good these days.

I still love Java, but I won’t be surprised if that language becomes a business risk because of Oracle’s behavior in other spaces.

Re: Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

#50
post #33

The very fact that they are dogfooding DynamoDB (with core features of their business) makes me want to take it more seriously and use it more. I also love that they didn't just replace Oracle with but instead thoughtfully pieced together a strategy based on what the data was going to be used for. Well done!

Have used DynamoDB a couple times, most recently for data processing. It is extremely expensive, for data storage and performance. Queries are limited and cumbersome to write. If you are looking at it, put a reasonable amount of test data in and play with it too see what costs look like compared to the performance you need from it.

Expensive compared to what? DynamoDB has the cheapest 4ms writes I can find...

But yes, absolutely prototype and measure costs with real workloads

Post reply on HN