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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

#101

Post by jl6 »

haggy wrote: post #61
jl6 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure how much sarcasm is built into your statement but as a long time user & supporter of Postgres I have to disagree. Postgres is fantastic at many things but there are times when it's not the best choice. An example would be high-scale OLAP. I've tried to use PG for those cases but ingesting thousands+ of events per second into PG and then trying to perform rollups on them in an online capacity (near real-time…

Glib perhaps but no sarcasm intended. I do agree that there are use cases where PG loses out to more specialized tools, but that’s the 5%, and if you are in that zone you probably know you are and are likely to be capable of doing your own more robust evaluation.

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

#102

Post by somethingwitty1 »

sofaofthedamned wrote: post #30

Hate oracle personally. But when Amazon mention cost savings, I assume they're not at list price for normal aws customers like us?

I can't say either way, but they mention the average person saves even more than they do (90% vs the 60% Amazon saw). This was due to their Oracle license being much cheaper than normal Oracle customers. So if you extrapolate, even if they did get some discount being Amazon, the discount they were getting on Oracle probably makes the savings comparable to if they weren't getting large discounts on each side (regular customers of Amazon/Oracle).

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

#103

Post by darksaints »

It should be noted that the email that Steve Yegge made famous was:

1) The birth of the service oriented architecture as a standard at Amazon

2) Took place long before AWS was used by Amazon's commercial business, and most software systems were monolithic, requiring mainframe-like dedicated hardware.

3) Was inspired due to the epic spaghetti monster known as FC Software, whose entire non-architecture revolved around a massive Oracle database.

When Amazon hit the limits of scaling the Oracle databases with beefier hardware, they realized what a clusterfuck they had created. There were literally hundreds of applications, doing different things, but all connected to the oracle database. The oracle database functioned as a database, but also as a high throughput queue, as well as a message passing platform. At high loads, different applications were hitting the same rows so frequently that the transaction errors alone could bring down an entire fulfillment center.

And it should also be noted that it was the same FC Systems (the inspiration for the move towards SOA) that took 12 years to finally get rid of Oracle.

Moral of the story: you need competent software architects, and at the very least, a scalability plan. Also, fuck Oracle.

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

#105

Post by jabl »

cwyers wrote: post #15
mumblemumble wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not. Amazon accomplished the task by building their own Oracle replacement. You have to be approximately as large as Amazon for that to be a realistic option. If you'd like to use the alternatives that Amazon built, you can, of course, migrate to Amazon Web Services. Though, if you dislike the vendor lock-in you're experiencing with Oracle, and are considering Amazon as a good place to flee to, you possibly hav…

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…

Wouldn't surprise me if a large fraction of those installs could be replaced with sqlite..

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

#107

Post by ajkjk »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #69

As someone who has never used or worked with Oracle DBs, can someone explain why migrating to another technology is so difficult? With all the database engines available, is there really not another one that can match Oracle without massive customizations?

Oh man. I used to work at Amazon at a time when this Oracle deprecation was starting up. It's utterly non-trivial.

It's not really "switching relational DBs", it's "rebuilding all of the legacy systems to not use relational DBs". Their scale had long since left the realm where it was reasonable to run everything on massive monolithic DBs, but the technical debt hadn't been paid down -- so they just kept putting more money into bigger and bigger hardware and larger DBA teams to support them. For instance when I last worked the there each warehouse ran on a single massive Oracle DB. That isn't solved by swapping to another database; it was well beyond reasonable.

I suspect that this article seems like a bit of self-promotion but it's actually intended as a giant middle-finger to Oracle.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

wwarner wrote: post #76
CydeWeys wrote: post #18

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.

The claim is that some of the data was migrated to publicly available systems. I'm guessing that quite a bit of it is stored in amazon specific systems, for two reasons. First, availability. If the amazon product catalog depends on Aurora, then when Aurora has an issue, so does Amazon retail. Second, custom solutions that were developed before modern alternatives existed have an insurmountable inertia in a big compan…

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by sidcool »

irrational wrote: post #89

We've been working on migrating from Oracle to Postgres for a few years now. We are about 2 weeks from being finished. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is totally worth it. The documentation is much much better, performance is equivalent or better, the sql dialect is saner, etc. Other than moving the data itself (ora2pg was invaluable for this), rewriting the queries is what has taken the most amount of time.…

Super useful. Thanks.
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