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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

#311

Post by WorldMaker »

snuxoll wrote: post #294
WorldMaker wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I won't argue that debugging MERGE statements is easy, and that there aren't pitfalls, but it's a very declarative relational model reduce pattern so calling it "less functional" doesn't seem accurate to me, if you mean functional as in functional programming. (If you mean functional as in the raw number of features supported, I also heavily disagree because I know from past experience there are reductions you can do with MERGE that you cannot do easily if at all with other "upsert" patterns.) Again, I might be biased because in that past life I was doing some wild "big data" (of a sort, of a sort) map/reduce type stuff with MERGE (in T-SQL on Microsoft SQL Server, if that matters for painting a picture).

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

#312

Post by czep »

Ensorceled wrote: post #231
JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #224

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.

> Why did you think everyone was saying the "Oracle database is predatory", that makes no sense.

A case could be made that the database itself is predatory, insofar as Oracle encourages use of non-standard functions that make migration to an alternative very difficult.

10 years ago (at Amazon in fact) was the last time I used Oracle and I've never felt any desire to use it again. I wasted far too much of my working life fixing queries that used the silly outer join operator (+) or debugging proprietary functions that already had a perfectly good ANSI alternative.

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

#313

Post by fuzzieozzie »

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.…

If you have a DB migration challenge then take a look at www.compilerworks.com

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

#314

Post by scarface74 »

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…

Unless your company is going to spend years and millions of dollars to create their own OLAP database product for their own internal use knowing that they can then charge customer $4.80 an hour for a usable system, Amazon isn’t a useful model for any other IT organization.

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

#315

Post by beachy »

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?

We started a new SaaS company last year. We use Java + Oracle from the get go.

Last company was very reliant on Oracle, we ran the entire business on a single Oracle instance for a couple of decades.

We had our share of adventures, but over the years never lost a minute's worth of data despite server, hard drive and other issues. We've also had a few scary performance problems, but have always been able to tune the DB to get past them. And once or twice, we've been in a dark place where you are googling for cryptic error codes, and we've always come through. That's a lot of business and millions of dollars earned through having a very reliable database underneath.

For us, the cost equation is whether it's worth learning a new DB. It's not. If you can run your business on a single instance, then on AWS, it's cheaper to stick with what you know than to try and move to a new DB for a few K of saved licence fees.

What's more, using Oracle is a good answer when the PHBs at our customers ask about our stack. No one ever got fired for using Oracle.

So yes, it certainly makes sense to use Oracle for new projects if you are already Oracle experts.

Java is somewhat the same equation as well ;)

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

#316

Post by sokoloff »

senderista wrote: post #280
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…

Great for the customer? Not so much these days. I would happily trade my 2-day shipping for a no-counterfeit/safety guarantee.

I have gotten two counterfeit items from Amazon (that I know of, of course). In both cases, A2Z took care of the problem without fuss on my end. (One with a full refund-don't even send it back; the other with "send it back on us or keep it at half price".)

Would I prefer a genuine article assurance? In general, yes. Would I prefer that over a wide selection of products and range of delivery services? Probably not.

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

#317

Post by scarface74 »

bdcravens wrote: post #271
golergka wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't AWS much less prone to customer lock-in? May be I don't have experience with tweaking AWS under heavy high load, but 98% of code I write for backend that I host on Amazon isn't specific to AWS or it's services in any way.

You can architect an agnostic solution there, but AWS messaging is firmly aimed at lock-in.

And when you do “architect an agnostic solution” you now have the worse of both worlds. You’re spending more on hardware than bare metal and you’re spending just as much on management and development time”.

Just because AWS spent years both creating an alternative to Oracle and millions migrating, doesn’t mean that your company is.

No matter how often some bushy tailed developer tells the CTO that they used the “repository pattern and standard sql”, they aren’t going to move away from their six figure+ Oracle installation. The risk of regressions are too high and the benefits are usually not worth it.

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

#318

Post by scarface74 »

czep wrote: post #312
Ensorceled wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why did you think everyone was saying the "Oracle database is predatory", that makes no sense. A case could be made that the database itself is predatory, insofar as Oracle encourages use of non-standard functions that make migration to an alternative very difficult. 10 years ago (at Amazon in fact) was the last time I used Oracle and I've never felt any desire to use it again. I wasted far too much of my working l…

Every database has non standard functions, syntax, and behaviors.

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

#319

Post by adwf »

stock_toaster wrote: post #245
JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, it's surprising how much performance you can get when you're not paying Oracle millions for licensing.

A lot of people who think Oracle is amazingly fast, think so because who puts a million dollar DB on thousand dollar hardware? Put any major DB on equivalent hardware and you'll get some pretty damn good performance.

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

#320

Post by CydeWeys »

mattlondon wrote: post #42
CydeWeys wrote: post #18

Migrating everything to the same externally-available cloud infrastructure is exactly the thing that Google needs to do, but has been failing at for going on a decade now. Yes, I'm bitter about it.

Is it not the case that it is actually the opposite? That GCP is running on the internally-available cloud infrastructure at Google? How would they turn that inside out? What would GCP actually run on if they ran GCP on GCP? Or do you mean run search/gmail/youtube on GCP? Isn't their internal infra basically kubernetes in all but name?

Amazon Cloud itself is not externally available, and runs on parts of its infrastructure that are non-public. It's like GCP in that regard, except that most of the rest of Amazon's products are then built on top of this cloud, whereas with Google that's not the case; there's a parallel internal-only infrastructure that every Google product you've ever heard of (Search/Gmail/YouTube/etc) runs on.
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