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Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must have missed the Amazon Corretto announcement— there’s an Amazon JDK now.
My guess is that like they did with Google, with time, Oracle will go after all the OpenJDK derivatives. To be clear the licensing appears to be open enough so that this shouldn’t be a real threat, but IANAL.
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…
When they were all cheering, I actually felt bad for Oracle for a nanosecond.
Is this not a case study that anyone can leave Oracle now, if an Amazon scale install can?
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…
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?
But that is not what happens.
First problem is - majority of mature enterprise systems (which tend to use Oracle), are not designed in such a schoolbook way, so that's you first problem. Codebases are ugly and teams loose the knowledge to maintain some parts that are mature and work mostly ok - often the DB layer.
Another concern is regressions in the product that is hard to properly test for. Minor details that are exposed by even small changes in DB behaviour or performance, that won't get caught in testing, but will cause an impact when your next scheduled job happens to fall on the first friday of that one month where the customer has that very special report that is just slightly so different and runs only once every 7 years.
Another major pain point are operational concerns. When dealing with DB technologies, managing, deploying, operating your back end DB servers can be quite a different beast. In theory your teams should be able to handle it, as they are experienced engineers that know how to learn new tech quickly. In practice, you don't have money for those, and your team is lazy and doesn't really want to learn that new cool tech, just let them do their job.
And finally, if it all "just works" at the moment, it is a hard sell to switch such a fundamental part of the system and properly validate the investment versus the risks.
And this is all if you're not a super user of Oracle specific pieces, surrounding tooling or consultants/expertise.
Oracle should have been doing everything to keep them as a customer and push their databases through cloud offerings. They already push their software through resellers, sort of the same thing, just automatic
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-ora...
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.