Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by jve » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 5:58 AM UTC

e12e wrote: post #307

LrnByTeach wrote: post #189

Here is the meat of the Report: >We migrated 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services including Amazon DynamoDB,Aurora, RDS, and Redshift. >We kept careful track of the costs and the performance, and realized the following results: >Cost Reduction – We reduced our database costs by over 60% on top of the heavily discounted rate we negotiated based on our…

> Cost Reduction – We reduced our database costs by over 60% on top of the heavily discounted rate we negotiated based on our scale. Customers regularly report cost savings of 90% by switching from Oracle to AWS. So Amazon saves 60%, when switching to paying "cost" for Amazon services - and they still claim customers paying cost+markup save 90%? I'm sure there's probably savings - but that math sounds optimistic. Or…

Another thing - They reduced administrative overhead 70% and cost 60%. If I was a parser, I could say that the result is more expensive. However I think they just didn't account salary savings. That is, their admins can do other stuff now.

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

#402

Post by gaucheph » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:03 AM UTC

anticensor wrote: post #290

nikanj wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle licenses are priced with a relatively equation, taking two inputs: 1) How much money do you have 2) How much would it cost you to switch to something else Your annual license cost is the smaller of the two inputs, minus a 10% discount.

Your formula yields zero in some cases.

It's also satire.

Wondering what you think of the following quote:

> Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.

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

#403

Post by philliphaydon » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

jnaina wrote: post #363

Here's the key difference between Oracle and AWS: - Oracle will schedule periodic audits on their customers and legally threaten them for inadvertent licensing oversights - AWS makes it a mandatory policy that all their sales folks periodically sit with their customers to help optimise and reduce their ongoing AWS Cloud costs If you are making a case that Oracle == AWS, you don't know what you are talking about. Yes,…

> AWS makes it a mandatory policy that all their sales folks periodically sit with their customers to help optimise and reduce their ongoing AWS Cloud costs

Their KPIs are to reduce costs for customers but also to increase usage of AWS services to make more money. The KPIs seem to contradict each other.

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

#404

Post by philliphaydon » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:19 AM UTC

fanf2 wrote: post #295

mumblemumble wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah. And you don’t need to create a custom type to handle it as a parameter. So it’s easier.

The only thing SQLServer has over PostgreSQL is multiply resultsets. That’s it. I really wish that existed in PostgreSQL to prevent round trips.

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

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Post by bartread » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:33 AM UTC

wolco wrote: post #330

sokoloff wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That you know of.

This is salient: there are some items where I'm confident I could distinguish real from fake, but there are many more where I'm not. And returns/refunds or not, it's a hassle I can live without.

For anything outside of books/music/movies/video games I nowadays mostly use other retailers, and generally those that specialise in that kind of item.

I recently bought some shelves from Amazon that aren't as described and getting a return and refund has turned into a complete shitshow. Totally fed up of Amazon.

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

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Post by wp381640 » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 6:51 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #399

scarface74 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, should we not count how badly Foxconn workers who manufacturer Apple’s phones have it? While technically they aren’t Apple employees, that’s a distinction without a moral difference. Would the same people who are criticizing how Amazon treats “its” employees change, if Amazon contracted out all of its warehouse workers? Somewhere in every tech company’s supply chain there are some blue collar workers th…

> In that case, should we not count how badly Foxconn workers who manufacturer Apple’s phones have it? First, we do. There's been plenty of stories and Apple has gotten a lot of flak about Foxconn. Rightly so. Second, I really have no idea why you're bringing outsourced companies into this. Amazon is actually employing massive amounts of people. According to a recent NYT article[1], "Amazon had 653,300 employees arou…

Would you prefer Amazon outsource their warehouse operation staffing or hire them direct and pay them $15 an hour?

Seems people would gripe either way

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

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Post by ilaksh » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:06 AM UTC

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.…

Wow.. someone could start an Oracle -> Postgres migration consulting business just from your comment.

I hope they name it SADL Consulting.

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

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Post by a_imho » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:38 AM UTC

whack wrote: post #282

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…

> 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…

I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-million in yearly income

What do these people do?

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

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Post by kbenson » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 7:53 AM UTC

wp381640 wrote: post #406

kbenson wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In that case, should we not count how badly Foxconn workers who manufacturer Apple’s phones have it? First, we do. There's been plenty of stories and Apple has gotten a lot of flak about Foxconn. Rightly so. Second, I really have no idea why you're bringing outsourced companies into this. Amazon is actually employing massive amounts of people. According to a recent NYT article[1], "Amazon had 653,300 employees arou…

Would you prefer Amazon outsource their warehouse operation staffing or hire them direct and pay them $15 an hour? Seems people would gripe either way

> Would you prefer Amazon outsource their warehouse operation staffing or hire them direct and pay them $15 an hour?

Nothing I said had anything to do with that... I specifically started my comment with "Not to get into whether Amazon employees have it good or bad" to avoid that conversation, since I don't think I have enough facts to weigh in usefully. My comment was about statistics.

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

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Post by quicksilver03 » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 8:00 AM UTC

twic wrote: post #228

tootie wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATG Dynamo. Brings back some memories. It was actually a really smart platform that was killed by the vastly inferior J2EE. Spring is basically the same premise as Dynamo and is still going strong.

"Memories" is an interesting way of spelling "nightmares". The Dynamo part of it, the pure application server part, had a few genuinely decent features. I've never seen a dependency injection framework like Nucleus, despite the fact that it makes an awful lot of sense. And you got /dyn/admin! The whole publishing thing - derive a versioned dual of your database schema, edit data in it using a reflective CMS, then aut…

I kind of agree on the pipelines, it's a serious case of over-engineering for very little benefit and many frustrating sessions of debugging kilometers of stack traces under which the actual error was hiding.

However, publishing has always been a dumpster fire for me, from the very first time I've used it (around 2004-2005 IIRC) to 2015 when I stopped working with ATG. Deploying changes never worked reliably, full deployments could take days, if not weeks, and relying on RMI made for a very fragile system anywhere multiple network interfaces were involved.

Nucleus and /dyn/admin are incredible features, not only for development but for having near total control of your application in production. I can't count how many production incidents I've solved with curl and /dyn/admin alone.