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Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

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

#53
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?

Oracle is slashing positions in a lot of their sales divisions. There was a large layoff this spring/summer, and from what I can tell from contacts that were there, anyone who can is jumping ship to AWS or other competitors, and poaching as many of their old customers with them as they can.

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

#55

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?

I've heard that Google is bad at dog fooding their own cloud infrastructure and even that Borg is still dominant over Kubernetes in their internal infra but don't have any insider knowledge. If true this is one thing that Amazon is vastly superior than Google at.

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

#57

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?

At least in azure, the "platform" that azure runs on doesn't have anything like a managed sql database or a distributed queue service. It's strictly a compute platform. I'd imagine GP is suggesting that only the things that absolutely must run on internal-only infra do so and the rest like YouTube or Gmail run purely on top of GCP (which only happens to be on top of internal infra)

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

#58
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.

You must have missed the Amazon Corretto announcement— there’s an Amazon JDK now.

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

#59
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?

In 2001/2003, I led a small team at an agency that converted Kraftfoods and 50+ brands from 25+ ATG Dynamo web/app CMS servers + 20+ Oracle servers to .NET 1.0 CMS on 3 web servers, 3 app servers and 3 Microsoft SQL Servers.

Even then Oracle tools were horrible for developers and still are. The only reason they had that many databases was Oracle's business is licensing, massive, expensive licenses, and their sales pushed them sold through upper management. Those days are almost over, developers choose the tech, the cloud is here. Without Tom [1], Oracle was basically not even a great developer community, all documentation was bad and the Java interfaces on the tools / management studio were horrendous. Oracle is fast but for most things on the web caching comes into play heavily and other databases are good enough. Oracle is good for large datasets/reporting, cursors are extremely fast when Oracle is tuned, the problem is it is like vehicle that needs tuning and optimization all the time or it drives bad. The cost and upkeep make Oracle mostly overkill and too painful.

Ellison laughed at the cloud like Ballmer laughed at the iPhone. That was a major error. But ultimately Ellison is an engineer that forgot to make sure developers like to use the product. That will ultimately be their fatal flaw as now the developers choose the tools not what is sold in above them.

All other platforms are developer centric and cloud first now. Oracle the all seeing one says the end is nigh for Oracle the database. No new projects will be using it without force. Too bad Oracle also owns MySQL, Java etc. I really wish someone else had bought Sun.

[1] https://asktom.oracle.com

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

#60
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.

The DDB query language is one of the largest warts on the face of AWS. “Select From Where” is a solved problem!
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