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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

#221

Post by fdjlasdfjl »

solatic wrote: post #86
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?

I can imagine that there are more than a few Oracle customers whose spend increases year-over-year because: 1) they have significant investment in the human capital side of Oracle, which is to say, Oracle DBAs on staff who are highly capable at keeping the lights on for their Oracle databases, but have little or no familiarity with alternatives 2) enterprise architects are required to get approval from their DBAs for…

#2 is my life. AWS is cheaper overall but that transition takes a ton of cash, because you have to pay the DBAs AND Oracle AND Amazon until you can transition to AWS (or Azure).

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

#222

Post by WorldMaker »

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.…

> replace merge into with INSERT ... ON CONFLICT… DO UPDATE/NOTHING

PostgreSQL supports MERGE statements [1], and a cursory glance doesn't seem to show that Oracle deviates that much from the SQL standard. Is there a particular reason you are avoiding the merge statement or is it simply a readability preference for the non-standard "upsert" ON CONFLICT extension?

(I'm curious because I was a big fan of MERGE statements in a past life. Part of being allowed to use them in that codebase was proving that the standard was pretty well followed across DB vendors [not that we used more than one], as well as that MERGE performance was critical to some very large dataset joins with complex update logic.)

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/attachment/23520/sql-m...

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

#223

Post by Justsignedup »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #172

Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption. Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO/CTO level of "nobody ever got fired for IBM" level of reasoning. Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. G…

Next up: oracle sues Amazon for not using their product.

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

#224

Post by JacKTrocinskI »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #172

Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption. Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO/CTO level of "nobody ever got fired for IBM" level of reasoning. Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. G…

How is Oracle predatory? PostgreSQL is great for web developers and small businesses but in terms of support, security, and enterprise features I think Oracle has PostgreSQL beat. I have been an Oracle database developer for the last five years, they have a great database, not sure what all the hate on HN is about.

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

#225

Post by hyperman1 »

chrisseaton wrote: post #152
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> My company for technical reasons can't switch to OpenJVM The OpenJDK (not 'OpenJVM', that's not a thing) is literally 100% the same build as Oracle JDK now. There can't be any technical reason.

But there is: Some software checks the name and version (major and minor) of the JVM vendor against a whitelist.

Guess which One Rich Asshole company has this practice.

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

#226

Post by JacKTrocinskI »

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.…

I have a hard time believing PostgreSQL performance is better than Oracle, can you give an example? How big is your database and how much did migrating cost you?

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

#227

Post by rasz »

vkaku wrote: post #167
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.…

I wonder: How long before someone adds a patch to PostgreSQL as a 'compat' patch, or extension.

and gets sued by Oracle because APIs :(

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

#228

Post by twic »

tootie wrote: post #118
drawkbox wrote: post #59

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…

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.

"Memories" is an interesting way of spelling "nightmares".

The Dynamo part of it, the pure application server part, had a few genuinely decent features. I've never seen a dependency injection framework like Nucleus, despite the fact that it makes an awful lot of sense. And you got /dyn/admin!

The whole publishing thing - derive a versioned dual of your database schema, edit data in it using a reflective CMS, then automatically publish changes to your production database - is kind of amazing. Source control for databases. I haven't seen anything else like that. Apart from just putting databases in source control, i guess. It occasionally got absolutely screwed up, but the idea was cool!

But a lot of it was absolute garbage. Repositories, where database entities are mapped to these crappy dictionary things that you need to either wrap or go mad trying to customise to actually use. Form handlers, whole classes for what would be a single handler method in a modern framework. The wacky build and packaging stuff.

And then whole commerce layer of it. Pipelines where the majority of the steps are about doing cleanup and normalisation that's only necessary because of how weak ATG's data model is, and the real commerce value could have been a single 20-line function, and adding your own stages becomes and exercise in boilerplate-smithing. Catalogue maintenance, which you have to run sometimes, because apparently it's too hard to just keep the database consistent. Scenarios, the businessperson-usable customisation tool that isn't, in practice, usable by businesspeople!

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

#229

Post by Yeroc »

chrisseaton wrote: post #210
TooCleverByHalf wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess it goes something like, "We have 75 petabytes of data to move over and would like to use your services but are concerned about costs. What kind of prices can you give us?".

But they’ve got no choice - there’s no ‘or else’ until they’re able to move off. What stopped Oracle charging them a billion dollars a CPU for the last few years since they’ve already announced they were moving off?

On the other hand if Oracle started charging more that would allow Amazon to justify spending more on internal investment to speed up the migration.

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

#230

Post by JacKTrocinskI »

WorldMaker wrote: post #222
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.…

> replace merge into with INSERT ... ON CONFLICT… DO UPDATE/NOTHING PostgreSQL supports MERGE statements [1], and a cursory glance doesn't seem to show that Oracle deviates that much from the SQL standard. Is there a particular reason you are avoiding the merge statement or is it simply a readability preference for the non-standard "upsert" ON CONFLICT extension? (I'm curious because I was a big fan of MERGE statemen…

PostgreSQL does not support the MERGE statement (at least not yet).
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