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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

#291

Post by throwaway981211 »

gopalv wrote: post #200
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…

> 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…

I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT.

Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It just happens that many of these folks are assholes.

Is Amazon predatory to its employees? Some organizations are - yeah absolutely. Are we worse than other companies I worked prior to Amazon? No. Does that mean it’s okay? No. I’m just saying there’s a public perception of Amazon being at the deepest level of hell and it’s not true.

We absolutely burn people out. We overwork employees. We don’t promote them when we should. We try to find the tiniest bit pick reasons not to promote. We practice stupidity and call it frugality? You’re an engineer making $200K total comp a year? Your computer doesn’t work and is crashing? Oh too bad - we won’t replace it for you. Yeah I mean that kind of fucking stupidity.

We encourage everyone to automate their role so we can replace those folks with college hires.

Amazon is not a place you can have a long career at. You’ll have to jump teams or orgs every couple years and eventually you’ll get tired enough that you learn to manage upwards yourself and stick with a manager that you can manage.

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

#292

Post by marcosdumay »

umvi wrote: post #268
philjohn wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What? How could that be legal? You can't say "Comparisons with competitors are not allowed" under a free market... right?

Every non-free database management system has this clause.

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

#293

Post by alexis_fr »

umvi wrote: post #268
philjohn wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What? How could that be legal? You can't say "Comparisons with competitors are not allowed" under a free market... right?

Atlassian Jira’s license, section 3.2:

« (h) use the Software for competitive analysis or to build competitive products; (i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Software; or (j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing. »

https://www.atlassian.com/legal/software-license-agreement

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

#294

Post by snuxoll »

WorldMaker wrote: post #267
twic wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Interesting, I can see where some of my confusion comes from if it was discussed but not completed. It's somewhat disappointing as I do think the ANSI MERGE statement is a good tool.

The MERGE statement is less functional and has a LOT of hidden gotchas, I won’t argue that I can be useful but I don’t disagree when them not providing the footgun.

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

#295

Post by fanf2 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #233
kirbypineapple wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differe…

Instead of a table-valued parameter, wouldn’t you use an array of a composite type in PostgreSQL? What are the relative good and bad points?

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

#296

Post by tanilama »

jedieaston wrote: post #2

Is this not a case study that anyone can leave Oracle now, if an Amazon scale install can?

It is. The effort is not really as other comments put out to build a Oracle competitors. Arguably for most companies, the open source alternatives are enough for them to be happy with.

What Amazon shown here is the transition at scale is possible.

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

#297

Post by sk5t »

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 would note that "foo IN (a, b, c)" can often be better done as "foo = ANY(ARRAY[a, b, c])" in Postgres - not least because you can shift to passing in an array of variable size without having to construct a special statement for each.

For sorting on the result of a function, consider using a subselect. "SELECT foo FROM (select fun(z) as foo from blaz) tmp order by 1".

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

#298

Post by trustfundbaby »

throwaway981211 wrote: post #291
gopalv wrote: 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…

I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT. Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It…

> Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It just happens that many of these folks are assholes.

You could probably just replace "Amazon" with "Silicon Valley"

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

#299

Post by marcosdumay »

twic wrote: post #238
JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I think full merge is scheduled for the next release.

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

#300

Post by alexis_fr »

michannne wrote: post #100
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.…

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

My top 1 is this one:

> Oracle: uses IS NULL to check for empty string; in postgres, empty string and null are different

Any programmer who doesn’t distinguish NULL and "" has not passed the 2-year experience. Being generous. How did this make it to production?

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