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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

#411

Post by hef19898 »

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…

While I won't go as far as calling it a scam (as one comment did below), I can to a certain degree confirm what you said. Also, is it bad? Yes. Worse than other places? No, simply more open and direct about it. Personally, I prefer the openess about it. And from a company perspective, it works out pretty well, doesn't it? All that is for the office workers and managers. Warehouse workers are different.

At least for Germany I know that Amazon is paying above average salaries for them (compared to DHL and others). And generally speaking warehouse workers, and all other rank and file logistics workers, are treated like drones. Again, nothing special about Amazon. But that doesn't mean the situation should be accepted.

All that being said, Amazon is a great place to learn and gain a shit load of experience. On all levels, even if there is a hard ceiling for blue collar workers to get promoted to white collar positions these promotions do happen regularly. The blue collar worker still has to suck up to a manager, so. In other places I know these promotions do never happen. The most important thing to have in mind when working for Amazon is, IMHO, to work on a feasible exit strategy from day one. Because long careers are the exception to the rule there. Oh, and be aware that it is a tough place to work at. Of you are om with that, go for it. Otherwise, stay away.

One last comment, one I learned the hard way. If you are not really comfortable with the way Amazon can treat people, even if you do what you can to make a difference there, you will be part of the problem simply by pushing forward and going a good job delivering high quality results. The one cannot be had without the other. Personally, I am not sure how I see Amazon, pretty peculiar place.

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

#412

Post by hef19898 »

senderista wrote: post #287
the_reformation wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely incorrect. I worked there for 3 years, saw one person fired, and everybody who joined with me ended up vesting their shares. Most got promoted too.

Shortly after I joined my team, everyone above SDE2 left and were replaced by college hires. There was literally no one around who knew anything about the original project.

Could be related to the stock development. My personal theory is that everyone who was hired around 2014 turned out to incredibly expensive, Amazon seemed to be surprised by the stock going about almost tenfold in the next 4 years. That alone made it really hard for that generation of hire to stick around, of the people I know who joined with me at that time I only know of two who were still there (out of a dozen) in early 2018. That ratio is a lot higher for those who joined before or after 2015. Not that I would complain so, including RSUs my last pay turned out to more almost three times what other companies in the same region pay.

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

#413

Post by mulander »

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.…

> replace rownum rownum is a pseudocolumn numbering entries, sorting the results will give you records in non increment rownum. On such queries rownum LIMIT will give you the first record after sorting.

So rownum != LIMIT and if you really want to implement the same logic you would need to use select row_number() over () as rownum in the ported query, put that into a subquery and filter with where rownum Example:

select * from (select row_number() over () as rownum, * from pg_class order by relname) as x where x.rownum select * from pg_class order by relname LIMIT 5;

Will give two very different results.

The first one maps to oracle:

select * from pg_class where rownum The second one doesn't.

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

#415

Post by growlist »

jeffbarr wrote: post #261
growlist wrote: post #64

The video strikes me as an epic troll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4&feature=youtu.be

That was the actual shutdown. I was there, it was not rehearsed, and there were no retakes.

Sorry I wasn't saying I thought it was faked or something like that, in case that wasn't clear. I was saying that posting a video celebrating removing a vendor's software from your organisation could be seen as taunting them. Which - given that it's Oracle we are talking about - is pretty funny.

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

#416

Post by growlist »

jansan wrote: post #106
growlist wrote: post #64

The video strikes me as an epic troll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4&feature=youtu.be

I am pretty sure the emotions are real in this video.

Sorry I wasn't saying it was faked and I'm talking about the act of posting of the video, which I don't think it would be unreasonable to view as being deliberately provocative.

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

#417

Post by jrockway »

nostrebored wrote: post #338
jrockway wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are not using generic services on AWS, preferring the Amazon-proprietary things like CloudFormation to open source things like Kubernetes.

This is a strange comparison. Cloud provider IaC offerings like Cloud Formation are obviously going to be specific to their service. AWS also has EKS for Kubernetes. Things listed as lock in with AWS usually have easy migration paths. E.g. DynamoDB integrates with Database migration service and Lambda functions are easy enough to expose by shifting code to dedicated servers.

I don't think it's a strange comparison. Cloud providers offer a combination of services that do lock you in and don't lock you in. If you are using EC2 and SSH in to screw around with Linux, you are going to be fine if you get a better deal from GCP. If all of your deployments are managed by a CloudFormation stack and custom scripts that speak the AWS API, you are never going to be able to move. (This is not unique to AWS, of course! Everyone has their value-adds.)

A lot of the lock-in is historical. Before there was Kubernetes, there was ECS. I am sure a lot of people embraced containerization and not managing individual machines early, and are now stuck on Amazon's proprietary platform.

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

#418

Post by xchaotic »

epiphanitus wrote: post #400
hiram112 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Impractical thought experiment: Leaving the capital expenditures for the data centers aside, what would it take to build an OS clone of AWS?

That doesn’t make sense a lot of what AWS provides is services such as cloud front at scale. You’d still need to test at scale so infrastructure and experience at scale is part of what makes AWS successful and profitable

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

#419

Post by xchaotic »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #258
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.

We hate Oracle because they're a deeply unethical rent-seeking company.

As opposed to which Silicon Valley company? Rent seeking is the holy grail of every SaaS company and even the large faangs and Uber and WeWork etc.

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

#420

Post by fullstop »

kondro wrote: post #327
e12e wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Oracle Enterprise (RRP) is $47,500 per unit. Software updates are $10,500 per unit per year. An Intel core is 0.5 units. Running Oracle on single, 4 core CPU (or VM, because you can't partially license cores and you'd be lucky to find a 4 core server CPU) is $40,000 per year in licensing alone (amortised over 5 years)… for a single machine. Want an active/passive replication set… double that cost.

That's why we switched years ago. Going from single CPU to multiple ballooned the costs so much that it was economically viable to do the work to port everything to Postgres.
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