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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

#131

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.…

Using SQL Server exclusively has given me a Never-Oracle mindset. Some of these differences sound insane. and > any functions in the order by clause must be moved to the select statement (e.g. order by lower(column_name)) I'd pull the hair outta my head

But functions in the where clause are an unsargable mess :(

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm curious, what are the technical reasons OpenJVM won't work for you?

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

#133
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…

Have you worked on MSSQL licensing in the age of Virtualization and per-core licensing? It's gotten VERY complex according to some of my friends that still run it.

It seems they have changed their pricing strategy:

    Oracle: What is your IT budget? We'll take it. (all of it)

    Microsoft: Hey, at least we're not as bad as Oracle.

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

#134
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…

"Amazon bots"... sure dude. Because all your opinions are popular by default. Otherwise is just "bots" downvoting you. Why people can't admit that their opinions can be unpopular sometimes. That's not a bad thing. Not all the things you say need to be popular to have meaning to yourself and others. It sucks to be downvoted but that's part of having a healthy discourse in HN.

Okay, all is fair in a really healthy discussion. The reason I write what I write anyway is because I believe in them. Your point is taken and accepted.

I've slammed Google, FB and some other tech companies on certain occasions BTW, and I absolutely never felt bad about it. Thanks!

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe PG even gets kickbacks as a feature. Who knows!

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess you could use the OpenJDK VM for new projects even if legacy projects are reliant on the Oracle VM.

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

#137
post #43
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sen…

Note: Amazon employee, but opinions are mine.

Amazon did not replace Oracle with MySQL. You seems to talk a lot given your knowledge of how Amazon operates internally and how licensing works is... blatantly false.

All of those DB's that could "pursue" a lawsuit are built on open source licenses which Amazon is not violating.

But the most important point here: The idea that you have to write a database to be happy to be off Oracle is insane. Amazon moved to an alternative that doesn't have a deep license designed to financially screw their clients as much as possible. That's a win.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oracle owns Java. Amazon just builds its own version.

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

#139

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.

When is it out of Beta?

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

#140
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?

Often it's the apps, like eBiz Suite, that drive the net-new adoption of the underlying DB.

The large Accounting firms handle 80% of the financial audits of Fortune 500 corporations. They are used to walking up to Oracle DBs and extracting the reports needed for compliance and reporting.

If they have to learn a new ERP or proprietary Accounting system, then the T&M costs can mount.

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