Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 471 posts

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

#111

Post by Quarrelsome »

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…

on the similar MS stack of SQL Server it breaks down hard when you start trying to max its throughput. You have to start tearing down all the features, turning off indexes, foreign keys, etc. Otherwise what could take hours will take days or even weeks.

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

#112

Post by Mountain_Skies »

drawkbox wrote: post #59
tootie wrote: 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 pu…

Oracle's new licensing requirement for Java is a bit threat to that platform. My company for technical reasons can't switch to OpenJVM so we're going to pay Oracle their new licensing money but we're not doing any greenfield Java development and are going to work towards moving our Java applications to another platform. That's an n=1 example but wouldn't be surprised if others end up migrating away, causing longterm harm to Java.

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

#113

Post by nikanj »

mumblemumble wrote: post #47
bilbo0s wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

MS licensing is somewhat expensive, but easy to understand and relatively benign. Oracle licensing chokes you like the Drakh keepers from Babylon 5.

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

#114

Post by zzzcpan »

darksaints wrote: post #103

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…

> 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.

Isn't that how everyone uses Oracle? I've seen exactly the same complains from developers at banks. Although building software around big featureful RDBMSs in general encourages poor architectures and messy software.

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

#115

Post by hinkley »

zippergz wrote: post #27
godson_drafty wrote: post #8

The developer carrying it out still using 2015 MBP

My company has tried to get me to replace my 2015, and I am resisting until they release a better keyboard design.

The latest revision is not bad. But it’s not great either. Kinda mushy.

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

#116

Post by Slippery_John »

brixon wrote: post #91
vkaku wrote: post #83

Obviously, enough Amazon bots are giving me bad karma, but my point stands: No, Amazon is not a special snowflake because it did this. This was an expensive exercise in spite, took a long time and a lot of people - and everyone knows it. They could have done this far efficiently already if they wanted to scale out, but that company has too many conflicting internal priorities that they took a heck of a long time to m…

They did move to vendor built software. They moved to one that they could get better prices for, AWS. Everyone else will not likely get the deal that they received.

> Everyone else will not likely get the deal that they received.

True, but similarly few people would be able to swing the kind of discount they got at Oracle. I'd be really interested in seeing what those discounts worked out to overall.

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

#117

Post by encoderer »

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.…

Somebody can build a consulting business from this HN comment.

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

#118

Post by tootie »

drawkbox wrote: post #59
tootie wrote: 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 pu…

ATG Dynamo. Brings back some memories. It was actually a really smart platform that was killed by the vastly inferior J2EE. Spring is basically the same premise as Dynamo and is still going strong.

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

#119

Post by nikanj »

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?

Oracle licenses are priced with a relatively equation, taking two inputs:

1) How much money do you have 2) How much would it cost you to switch to something else

Your annual license cost is the smaller of the two inputs, minus a 10% discount.

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

#120

Post by GetOutOfBed »

bluejekyll wrote: post #49
tootie wrote: 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.

> Postgres

Yes, maybe there will be built in automatic fail over in a few years so you don't have to hack it together using a bunch of scripts.

Of course there's overlap in functionality and most companies should probably chose PG over Oracle. But PG is a joke in some areas like the above mentioned.

Post reply on HN