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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

#231

Post by Ensorceled »

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #224
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.

It's not about Oracle the db product, it's about Oracle the company. Why did you think everyone was saying the "Oracle database is predatory", that makes no sense.

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

#232

Post by twic »

victor106 wrote: post #17

> The migration gave each internal team the freedom to choose the purpose-built AWS database service that best fit their needs, and also gave them better control over their budget and their cost model. Anyone know of a comprehensive resource that we could use to figure out which DB to use?

http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/

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

#233

Post by mumblemumble »

kirbypineapple wrote: post #215
mumblemumble wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure I follow this logic. Wouldn't both databases require the same amount of care and feeding? Are you suggesting that you need less DBA's per MSSQL database than for a PostgreSQL or Maria database?

Yep. Because the tooling is stronger. The developer ergonomics are better. The performance is better, meaning you'll be able to do more with fewer servers. MSSQL has a boatload of useful features that PostgreSQL lacks. (Clustered indexes and table-valued parameters are the ones I like to fixate on.) And so on. I can only personally speak to the developer story, but my experience has been that the productivity difference is huge. There's a night and day difference in the information you can get out of an EXPLAIN on each of them, for example, and I would get detailed emails warning me if a MSSQL query plan unexpectedly changed in production. With PostgreSQL you're more likely to need to build your own tooling for that sort of stuff, or just wait for a user to complain. On the DBA side, I'm hazier on the details, but I've seen PostgreSQL DBA's sinking hours' or sometimes even days' worth of effort into grinding through tasks tasks that an MSSQL DBA can bang out by spending a couple minutes clicking through a wizard dialog.

If you're a tiny startup, the differences won't amount to all that much, and it will be hard to justify MSSQL's price tag, which is fine, because, yeah, you can't afford it, anyway. If you're an enterprise or otherwise have large database needs, the differences can very quickly become apparent, and easily worth the money.

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

#234

Post by generatorguy »

IronWolve wrote: post #168

Oracle goes after customers with 3rd party companies, if you use oracle expect calls for audits and more licenses. You download virtualbox extension at work? Thats a fee per user. Use an Oracle VM in a vmware cluster? They want paid for all cores in your environment now. Seriously, Oracle goes after their customers like criminals. I refuse their calls at work, they really are just looking for something to make you pa…

I tried to license virtualbox extensions and they told me to call back when I wanted at least 500 licenses.

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

#235

Post by philjohn »

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…

Also, kudos to them for not just cutting loose the DBAs who have a lot of institutional knowledge and training them to be consultants on AWS data storage services both internally and externally.

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

#236

Post by NikolaNovak »

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #224
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.

I believe the "HN hate" is more on the accounting/contract side, rather than strict technology side.

It's the canonical enterprise vendor on the database side (DB2 has far smaller market share, and SQL Server market play is slightly different), so it's the poster child for anything from no two customers paying the same price for same metrics, to opaqueness and perceived unfairness of the contracts, to seemingly predatory fees, to ambiguous and frequently awful licensing on virtual CPUs, to the various shakedowns and so on.

I'm not saying others in the same market are markedly different; but just like IBM is the HN poster child for a "no longer relevant tech dinosaur", Oracle is the HN poster child for "predatory licensing & fees".

(* Note/disclosure, I have the distinct privilege of being happily employed by one to reasonably happily work on the products of the other :-D )

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

#237

Post by philjohn »

Justsignedup wrote: post #223
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.

I wonder if their latency and performance claims in this blog post fall foul of Oracle's "No publishing benchmark results against our competitors".

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

#238

Post by twic »

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #230
WorldMaker wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

IIRC there was a discussion about adding the full ANSI MERGE statement, but in the end they added INSERT ... ON CONFLICT and left it at that:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/sql-insert.html#SQL-ON-CO...

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

#239

Post by mlashcorp »

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…

I'm currently working on a mssql shop, and on aws it's more than twice the price vs postgres or aurora. I don't see how you can justify the price difference

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

#240

Post by privateSFacct »

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #224
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.

They constantly sue their own customers - why in the world would you want to do business with someone who will then sue you?
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