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

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

#461

Post by dastbe » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #320

mattlondon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(I work at AWS)

One of the more interesting things I've observed over the past few years is the incremental effort to get AWS teams "lower in the stack" onto native AWS offerings. This makes sense: the less parallel or underlying infrastructure you have to maintain to scale and support the public cloud, the more time and attention you can devote to public services. Many (most?) new AWS services are fully native AWS (including the one I work on :)), and design and operational readiness reviews require justification for not using native AWS rather than the opposite.

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

#462

Post by golergka » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #317

bdcravens wrote: post #271

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…

Can you please explain how exactly am I having worse of both worlds here? Not trying to prove you wrong, genuinely curious: if I have a generic NodeJS app with PotgreSQL hosted in RDS and, say, use AWS-specific services like S3 and Cloudwatch, am I doing something wrong?

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

#463

Post by rhinoceraptor » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:18 PM UTC

xchaotic wrote: post #419

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those other companies at least serve some other nominal, societally engaged goal, besides making money.

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

#464

Post by throwaway981211 » Wed, Oct 16, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #458

throwaway981211 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn’t answer my question and deflected, only responding with personal attacks. Nice. I still think that your notion of intentional vendor lock in is misinformed at best and poor design and architecting from your side (at worst). I do happen to work at Amazon but my post history will show you how critical I am of the company. But nothing you’re saying is valid, and I don’t see any parallel here with the migration…

That was a personal attack? Um, no. DynamoDB is not directly portable, Cassandra is closest, and it's a bear to roll your own. Are you an Amazon employee outright telling people to not use the fundamental datastore of AWS? S3 also is fairly proprietary, are you, an Amazon employee, outright telling people to not use the fundamental file storage of AWS? I could go on, obviously.

You just wrote that I’m abusing customers and then say it’s not an attack.

S3 is blob storage. Dynamo is a key value store with support for additional indexes. Neither technologies are particularly novel today or provide specific features that would lock you in. You could use comparable technologies on Azure or Google Cloud. Like I said before, you can’t blame Amazon or any cloud provider for poor design/architecting on your end.

Your questions are written as sarcastic personal attacks, which you write instead of posting something of more substance. It seems like you’re just trying to incite a response from me aka trolling. I won’t engage with you anymore. Good luck.

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

#465

Post by irrational » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 2:12 AM UTC

hamilyon2 wrote: post #429

irrational wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean. Triggers are developed and debugged in Postgres the same as in Oracle.

I am curious, what tools do you use? No secret, that with oracle you have few full-blown IDEs where you can literally step by step execute triggers, write unit tests for them etc.

Oh, well, honestly none. I just write them by hand. I've written hundreds that way. It probably would be faster to investigate tools, but it seems like there is always something with higher priority to work on.

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

#466

Post by scarface74 » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #462

scarface74 wrote: post #317

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…

Can you please explain how exactly am I having worse of both worlds here? Not trying to prove you wrong, genuinely curious: if I have a generic NodeJS app with PotgreSQL hosted in RDS and, say, use AWS-specific services like S3 and Cloudwatch, am I doing something wrong?

No. I’m saying just the opposite.

You see patterns like this from “architects” who want to avoid “lockin”:

- A DBFactory that creates an instance of an OracleRepository that they access through an IGenericRepository interface just in case later on they decide to use a different database and then they don’t take advantage of any Oracle specific features for fear of “lock in”.

- A StorageManagerFactory that you call to create a S3StorageManager that implements an IStorageManager just in case later they decide to move from S3 they can “migrate easily”

You’ll find people who will spin up a bunch of EC2 instances and host their own logging, queueing, messaging servers to avoid using AWS specific services. Now they are spending more for hosting than just going to a colo and spending just as many man hours babysitting infrastructure.

I’m saying that once you choose your foundational infrastructure pieces, no matter what they are, it usually makes sense to go all in instead of creating layers of abstraction.

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

#467

Post by truth_seeker » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:27 AM UTC

Price is the only main reason I see which drive this migration.

About Oracle Database (not Oracle company), I am very much in agreement that (PL)SQL can be used as one language to take care of Relational Algebra, Row oriented, Column oriented, Document oriented and also Blockchain oriented disk persistent tables with local node partitioning and distributed sharding, Graph traversals queries using recursive CTEs, auto tuning of indexes, streaming materialized views, distributed topic/queues.

Oh by the way with little effort you can accomplish almost all what Oracle does with PostgreSQL and its community extensions.

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

#468

Post by johnthescott » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:47 PM UTC

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #230

WorldMaker wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> replace merge into with INSERT ... ON CONFLICT… DO UPDATE/NOTHING PostgreSQL supports MERGE statements [1], and a cursory glance doesn't seem to show that Oracle deviates that much from the SQL standard. Is there a particular reason you are avoiding the merge statement or is it simply a readability preference for the non-standard "upsert" ON CONFLICT extension? (I'm curious because I was a big fan of MERGE statemen…

PostgreSQL does not support the MERGE statement (at least not yet).

not really true. postgres supports "insert .. on conflict" which is functionally a subset of sql merge. the feature was introduced years ago and i would not be surprised if eventually sql merge is glommed into pg core.

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

#469

Post by johnthescott » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 11:52 PM UTC

JacKTrocinskI wrote: post #226

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.…

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 tried both? the oracle eula prevents disclosing performance stats. pg allows user defined indexes to be added to kernel and integrated with optimizer, creating some pretty sophisticated optimization techniques. we have the text search index easily handling 20mil+ pdfs with the rum index from postgrespro http://github.com/postgrespro/rum.

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

#470

Post by dbrater » Sun, Oct 20, 2019, 4:37 AM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #59

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?

In 2001/2003, I led a small team at an agency that converted Kraftfoods and 50+ brands from 25+ ATG Dynamo web/app CMS servers + 20+ Oracle servers to .NET 1.0 CMS on 3 web servers, 3 app servers and 3 Microsoft SQL Servers. Even then Oracle tools were horrible for developers and still are. The only reason they had that many databases was Oracle's business is licensing, massive, expensive licenses, and their sales pu…

While I know Oracle thrives off unearned reputation, (and that Ms SQL is a seriously underrated product outside of enterprises)- I refuse to believe that 3 ms-sql servers were equivalent to 20 oracle's. You must have lost something .