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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

#241
"This team moved 40 TB of data with just one hour of downtime, and realized the same or better performance at half the cost, powered by Amazon Aurora."

Would have loved to have read some technical details on how 40 Tbyte was transferred in an hour, even migrated.

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

#242

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?

I used to write PL/SQL long time back. In old days, every business logic was written in stored procedures, which the java code calls. Migrating stored procedures is a hard part since whoever wrote it left the company long time ago.

Whatever talent available in the company that wants to migrate off Oracle, would not want to take the risks of migration failure.

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

#243
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company Amazon and Oracle couldn't be more different in this point of view. Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors, while being mostly great towards the customer. Everything from their warehouse workers with timers, the crying software engineers and all other things I hear a…

>the crying software engineers Just like to point out that that NYT hit piece didn't actually interview any software engineers IIRC.

I walked away from taking a job there after I had a "peer lunch" with the team I would be working and found out it was mostly vacant due to firings and departures for "performance reasons".

Any place that can lay off a significant majority of a team has issues.

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

#244
post #185
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think he complained about licensing fees?

Some support contracts only support if using x JDK Some software checks the exact JDK and only runs using it etc.

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

#245

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?

Think of how much you can spend on beefy hardware though, if you go with PostgreSQL, versus spending that money on Oracle licensing.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is fair, when I enter an HN post I automatically think of HN as hosting technical discussions, not business, and that is why I decided to look at the technical side.

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

#247
post #72

> Financial Ledger – This team moved 120 TB of data, reduced latency by 40%, cut costs by 70%, and cut overhead by the same 70%, all powered by DynamoDB. Does this mean they have a custom set of books running atop DynamoDB or is this specific to aggregate reporting and financial data warehousing?

Would love to know also. My guess given the volume of data is data warehousing.

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

#248
We have a huge database problem at my company (department). There are only 4 databases for 200 developers. I find this extremely cumbersome to develop on. Ideally there would be at least 1 DB per developer plus some shared environments. What do others do?

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

#249
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Its an Open source implementation of the java vm which they don't own.

Why do you think that they don't own OpenJDK? Here's snippet from "OpenJDK: How to contribute" page: > Like many other open-source communities, the OpenJDK Community requires Contributors to jointly assign their copyright on contributed code. If you haven't yet signed the Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA) then please do so, scan it and e-mail the result to oracle-ca_us(at)oracle.com. Please make sure to specify Open…

This ownership of copyright gives them the possibility to release the next version of (not-)OpenJDK under a proprietary license, but does not give them a possibility to kill off the current version of OpenJDK as every single user who has received explicit perpetual irrevocable license to use, change and redistribute the current version - so there's always a possibility for a true open source fork.

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

#250
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company Amazon and Oracle couldn't be more different in this point of view. Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors, while being mostly great towards the customer. Everything from their warehouse workers with timers, the crying software engineers and all other things I hear a…

>the crying software engineers Just like to point out that that NYT hit piece didn't actually interview any software engineers IIRC.

Amazon IT employees are carrot-dangles a rolling set of future stock and other money, but as it stands now almost every new hire won't see that money. Amazon will get what they can out of them, and then mark them underperforming and fire them before it pays out any money.

Some of the best people I know that have gone to work there have been subjected to this.

After cycles of this, the only way to survive is to backstab and move up in management.

Amazon/AWS really shows this in it's core web sites and console, which are really backwards and show no signs of improvement or evolution, because all the people that built it have been fired by now or moved on.

Microsoft originally thrived on this, but eventually the culture collapses into backstabbing and the worst breed of middle management Machiavellis, and any productivity is new bolt-on products.

So IMO Bezos built a fundamentally good infrastructure ten years ago that is fuelling Amazon's continued growth, but if anyone fundamentally improves in some way that Amazon would need to fundamentally change the company it will be impossible.

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