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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

#351

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.

Not exactly. If you stick to EC2 or containers with general Linux for your servers, and RDS Postgres and Mysql for DBs, and similarly for other services, you supposedly would be able to move to another cloud without issue. We thought we'd be okay. But when AWS started getting too expensive and we began looking to migrate, we discovered that there was a lot of 'glue' in our stack using bits and pieces of AWS-specific…

THere needs to be a broad abstraction toolset to enable hybrid cloud.

The ones that should be 100% motivated to develop these tools (the Apache ones are ... meh, and terraform/ansible/config management always gets hard-wired to your cloud) are obviously Google and others that are also-rans.

Google might not be doing it to keep Amazon out of their roadhouse.

There's still meta-tooling for admin and management that are hard to abstract, but come on. K8s is the opportunity to do this, and also serverless to a lesser degree.

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

#352

The video feels like a big middle finger to Oracle. "stop oracle", and the URL https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/freedom . Not that I'm complaining, Oracle deserves all the hate they get for their business practices. But associating AWS with "breaking free" is extremely ironic. It's just as much of a source for vendor lock in as Oracle. If you are not extremely careful/dedicated with your system design, you a…

This is kind of reply to Larry Ellison's comments [1] about how Amazon can't run their business on their own databases. [1] https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ?t=50

"They have been unable to migrate to AWS because it's not good enough." No, Larry, it's because database migration is hard and risky.

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

#353

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'm sorry your comment has been blasted to oblivion. There really is that level of Oracle hate out there. There's no way my top level comment should be 100+ upvotes, it's a pretty vanilla opinion. But man people hate oracle...

In reality, your experience as a dev might not be that bad from within the ecosystem.

But take the hate for what it is: learn portable tooling, be aware of the proprietary bindings, and architect to be more database agnostic.

It may save your job if the budget cuts are between ludicrous oracle licensing and auditing costs, or your salary.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “repo…

I was responding to the parent comment, which said nothing about Oracle or any specific implementation.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 “repo…

I was responding to the parent comment, which said nothing about Oracle or any specific implementation.

I’m more responding to the sentiment of “avoiding lock in”, at a certain scale, you’re always “locked into” to your architectural choices where it doesn’t make sense to spend the time or effort to try to avoid it.

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

#357

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?

Have you seen the pricing for Exadata racks? I ran the numbers a few months back and over 5 years, Oracle was 4x as expensive for my workloads. It's also easier to find AWS people than Oracle people.

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody can build a consulting business from this HN comment.

This is the first time I have wished Hacker News showed upvotes. They have got to be over 100 with that right?

The comment currently tops the "best comments" list:

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

Archived:

http://web.archive.org/web/20191016003251/https://news.ycomb...

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

#359
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It might be the magic "support" word - random openjdk builds don't bring any commercial guarantees. This said, the likes of RedHat, Amazon and Azul are pretty happy to offer those guarantees, and I bet their prices are lower than Big Red O.

It's why we are paying for Java.

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

#360
post #282
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…

> Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors... the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy... The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-m…

> However, there is a severe disconnect between the median Amazon employee's experience, and public perception.

Not to get into whether Amazon employees have it good or bad, but using the software engineers to explain the median Amazon employee's experience seems a bit odd. Given that Amazon is widely reported to have well over half a million employees now, and I doubt the software engineers are anywhere near the majority, using them as an example to support the claim that the median employee is not what the public expects doesn't make a lot of sense.

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