Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 471 posts

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

#281

Post by Havoc »

iRobbery wrote: post #241

"This team moved 40 TB of data with just one hour of downtime, and realized the same or better performance at half the cost, powered by Amazon Aurora." Would have loved to have read some technical details on how 40 Tbyte was transferred in an hour, even migrated.

>Would have loved to have read some technical details on how 40 Tbyte was transferred in an hour, even migrated.

Perhaps I'm missing something but that doesn't seem hard considering:

1) It's only like 3x high end consumer level 16TB HDDs

2) This is Amazon...they have AWS - really fat pipes and endless horsepower on demand

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

#282

Post by whack »

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…

> 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-million in yearly income, and people working 10-6 M-F. Most of them are very happy with their careers, and I don't know a single person who describes their work-life the way you just did.

I'm not disputing that horror stories exist and that some people are being given bad reviews and are being managed out. However, there is a severe disconnect between the median Amazon employee's experience, and public perception.

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

#284

Post by cabaalis »

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.…

Now do MSSQL.. (Gets pen and notepad)

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

#285

Post by olavgg »

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…

I have worked with both databases over a decade. The biggest difference between SQL Server and Postgresql is neither tooling or performance(both are excellent), but the community and culture.

By far, PostgreSQL has more knowledge sharing and documented edge cases. Not to mention that the official PostgreSQL documentation is probably one of the best documented software systems ever. This makes PostgreSQL a lot easier to learn and use and that also affects the amount of money you need to spend.

SQL Server has some annoying edge cases, licensing is a real pain point these days, but so are the technical issues like lack of schema support in the JDBC driver. Other things are that you cannot pipe the backup. I would love to take backup of an Azure SQL service to my local machine with SSH.

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

#286

Post by senderista »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #250
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the crying software engineers Just like to point out that that NYT hit piece didn't actually interview any software engineers IIRC.

Amazon IT employees are carrot-dangles a rolling set of future stock and other money, but as it stands now almost every new hire won't see that money. Amazon will get what they can out of them, and then mark them underperforming and fire them before it pays out any money. Some of the best people I know that have gone to work there have been subjected to this. After cycles of this, the only way to survive is to backst…

The console sucks because it's done by the individual back-end service teams who have no idea about UX or front-end coding, and don't coordinate with each other or any cross-service owners of the console.

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

#287

Post by senderista »

the_reformation wrote: post #269
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon IT employees are carrot-dangles a rolling set of future stock and other money, but as it stands now almost every new hire won't see that money. Amazon will get what they can out of them, and then mark them underperforming and fire them before it pays out any money. Some of the best people I know that have gone to work there have been subjected to this. After cycles of this, the only way to survive is to backst…

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.

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

#288

Post by carc »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #250
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the crying software engineers Just like to point out that that NYT hit piece didn't actually interview any software engineers IIRC.

Amazon IT employees are carrot-dangles a rolling set of future stock and other money, but as it stands now almost every new hire won't see that money. Amazon will get what they can out of them, and then mark them underperforming and fire them before it pays out any money. Some of the best people I know that have gone to work there have been subjected to this. After cycles of this, the only way to survive is to backst…

Just wanted to say this is completely inconsistent with almost all people I know who work/have worked at Amazon as developers

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

#289

Post by deanCommie »

the_duke wrote: post #144

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 a popular opinion but it simply fails to resonate to me.

"This company's software is so useful you can't help but use it because it saves you so much time, effort, and money" is NOT lock in.

You can absolutely choose to develop on AWS In a way that avoids lock-in (Containers, managed DB engines, other cloud storage providers have s3-compatible apis). People don't because it's more CONVENIENT not to - nobody is forcing the to.

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

#290

Post by anticensor »

nikanj wrote: post #119
sofaofthedamned wrote: post #30

Hate oracle personally. But when Amazon mention cost savings, I assume they're not at list price for normal aws customers like us?

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.
Post reply on HN