back to article What now, Larry? AWS boss insists Amazon will have dumped Oracle database by end of 2019

AWS boss Andy Jassy has doubled down on claims Amazon will "be done" with Oracle databases by 2019, and used his Re:Invent keynote to throw shade at Big Red. Speaking at Amazon's main tech conference in Las Vegas this week, Jassy said that the world of "old guard commercial-grade databases" has been "miserable" for enterprises …

  1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

    To be fair, there's plenty of open source options.

    Although that said, the ones Oracle owns it has invested far less effort in wiping the open source / community / free versions off the face of the earth than I anticipated...

    1. David Harper 1

      That's just not true

      Everyone expected Oracle to kill off MySQL when it bought out Sun Microsystems ten years ago. I'm no fan of Oracle, but I will give them credit for this - they have invested money and people in keeping MySQL alive and improving it. They cleaned a lot of the cruft out of the source code they inherited ten years ago, then added a string of new features, which they gave away for free in the community edition. They are still adding neat new features. MySQL 8 is a huge step forward from MySQL 5.7.

      The two main forks of MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server, are both based on the Oracle source code, so even MySQL veterans like Monty Widenius and the folks at Percona recognise that Oracle has added value to MySQL.

      And if you want to complain that Oracle keeps the super-useful features for the paid-for enterprise version of MySQL, I'd just point out that Percona and MariaDB do the same thing.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: That's just not true

        "The two main forks of MySQL, MariaDB and Percona Server, are both based on the Oracle source code,"

        This is bullshit. All three are based on open source software Widenius et al. wrote. None of that is owned by Oracle and never has been.

        " MySQL veterans like Monty Widenius and the folks at Percona recognise that Oracle has added value to MySQL."

        Only to keep it alive as otherwise MariaDB would have killed it out of the market in a second.

  2. Stevie

    Bah!

    Well, to judge by the various obvious database glitches suffered by Amazon over the last few months I wouldn't be crowing quite so loudly.

    Heads of multibillion-dollar corporations doing self-marketing junkets. Gotta love 'em.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Amazon's search facilities have always been very crude compared to the very well thought out Ebay searches. Both use Oracle so I suspect it's the quality of the staff, not the underlying database engine.

  4. Mike 16

    But X still uses Y!

    Brings to mind the days when DEC PDP-10s were considered mainframes, and someone gleefully pointed out that a certain growing non-aerospace Seattle company used one for its business infrastructure, rather than "dogfooding".

    The response was a (slightly later) statement from said company that it did not own or operate any such systems. Not mentioned: These functions were now carried out by independent contractors (coincidentally former employees) in leased office space (coincidentally) formerly occupied by the same people and equipment. But _technically_...

    (IIRC. Anecdotal, this may not have happened, Don't believe everything you read. Where did I put that lawyer's card?)

    1. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

      Re: But X still uses Y!

      Yeah, there was a very similar story about AS/400.

  5. StuntMisanthrope

    Silly boss talk.

    When you get up to tens of millions of profiles. Technology is a consideration. Sleeping at night is another. Think on this. If your operation spans the globe, how many shifts do you require. #base180

  6. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "You get in, drive it... and you die"

    You go, Larry.

    Because Oracle dying is obviously something that can never happen.

    Oh, by the way, when are you promising 13 nines on your cloud infrastructure ?

    Oh wait, silly me, you don't have a cloud infrastructure. Well, nothing worth noticing . .

  7. astounded1

    In Ten Years Oracle Will Be Wanged...

    As in a runaway market leader to Wang Terminaled...as in Finito Mussolini...ripped apart by its own business model. They will simply have no more customers left to audit.

    Brutal how many jobs AWS is going to cost the IT world in the next ten years. Larry always can go sailing. So why should he care?

    1. a_yank_lurker

      Re: In Ten Years Oracle Will Be Wanged...

      I do not know if AWS will on balance cost any IT jobs overall but they could put a serious hurt on outfits like Slurp and Leisure Larry and his Minions. Too many IT companies are not used to being in mature businesses like retail and Amazon is basically a retailer. Retail is a more brutal business as the margins are thinner, cost control is much more critical, and customer loyalty is vastly more important. IT by comparison is a stroll in the park by comparison. One key difference is in retail you need many smallish sales to repeat customers everyday to stay in business and generally you customers have multiple options readily available. And you customers are somewhat price sensitive.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: In Ten Years Oracle Will Be Wanged...

      "Brutal how many jobs AWS is going to cost the IT world in the next ten years."

      Have you actually done any serious work with AWS at the grass root level? It requires you to be incredibly diverse, the classic jack-of-all-trades from networks to sysadmin, DBA work and of course coding in a couple of languages. What we will see from AWS skills is that those who have stuck to their guns and run their careers on one skill will be slowly put out to pasture. To quote a colleague of mine, "Devs? Ops? No, not anymore. With cloud stuff everyone will need to be a devop in IT from now on no matter how they started in IT.".

      Something else you will see is a lot more cowboys knocking crappy cloud projects together, that's when serious IT will clean up. Contractors will step in, suck air through teeth in the classic builder style and say, "Cor blimey guv, who you 'ad on this job then? Bloody 'ell! Bunch of cowboys put this web stack together didn't they? Look at that single threaded DB connector at the base there. Christ on a bike, you're lucky the whole lot ain't coming down around you! I'll put in some in multi-threaded code, we'll rip out that RDBMS, put in a nosql layer, then simplify that top level app stack with a common API layer. Gonna cost you though guv!"

      1. David Harper 1

        Re: In Ten Years Oracle Will Be Wanged...

        "we'll rip out that RDBMS, put in a nosql layer"

        Because everyone knows that MongoDB is webscale.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

        1. Korev Silver badge
          Pint

          Re: In Ten Years Oracle Will Be Wanged...

          I was going to post that too -->

        2. Ken Shabby

          Re: In Ten Years Oracle Will Be Wanged...

          At least my Wang never went down, I presume it was because Wang cared.

  8. Morten Bjoernsvik

    Oracle has very goog technology for large corporations

    I do not support they arrogant treatment of customers and out of this world pricey licensing, but for large customers like Amazon. Oracle might be the sweetspot:

    I once knew a DBA that single-handedly managed 425 oracle databases on 2 exadatas, with full redundancy and rollback, rollforward and multitiered backup in seconds on mirrored raid. I've never been given so good support. And we had to support oracle instead of mysql beacause to the cost of having a mysql dba and percona support was higher than using a better SLA with exadata.

    1. Rockets

      Re: Oracle has very goog technology for large corporations

      My old boss did a tour of the Oracle data centre when he was in the US a number of years back. I think it was a co-location facility or hosted services, before Oracle launched their Cloud offering. At that time Oracle were trying to sell us a Exadata for our E-Business Suite environment. When he asked where any Exadata's were in the facility so he could see one he was told - "We don't have any of our own, they're too expensive. We have a few customer owned ones but we can't show them to you." Says it all about Oracle.

    2. FuzzyWuzzys

      Re: Oracle has very goog technology for large corporations

      As a veteran DBA one thing I can tell you about good DBAs, they were doing DevOps long, long, a very long time before DevOps become a trendy job. When you have to manage more then 4 Oracle databases, in fact any quality RDBMS for that matter, you learn to script every damn thing in the place so you spend an hour a day max doing your checks and maint. The rest of the day you spend learning and improving things. A good DBA has to have good comms skills, networking, basic dev skills in multiple languages, sysadmin knowledge, project planning, etc. Sounds an awful lot like a devops job spec to me!

  9. Vulture@C64

    AWS are only doing what everybody else either is doing or wants to do . . . who would choose Orable these days ?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    But I thought

    AWS boss insists Amazon will have dumped Oracle database by end of 2019

    But I already thought Oracle DB was a dump... (of which kind I'll leave it to you to guess)

  11. IGnatius T Foobar !

    Amazon is too big

    Amazon is the new Microsoft. Eating up market share and destroying everyone who is not them. This is not a good trajectory for the industry to be on.

    Everyone should work very hard to select non-Amazon cloud platforms.

    Oracle, on the other hand ... they're just a big old monolith and they need to adapt or die.

  12. sum_of_squares

    The best thing about Oracle is that they provide work for about half of the lawyers in the US:

    - Oracle vs. Rimini Street has just ended (2010-2018),

    - Oracle vs. Google just made it to the supreme court (since 2010),

    - Oracle vs. the US Department of Labor just started (a complaint about Blacks/Asians being underpaid),

    - Oracle vs. the DoD (and recently AWS) has just started,

    - Oracle vs. Ecplise (Java EE / Jakarta) might be next..

    Tough luck, Oracle.

    To make it worse: MySQL is far behind PostgreSQL and others. Many companies consider moving away from Java after the new pricing policy. Many companies don't like Oracles Java anyway because licensing issues. And SQL Server's functionality is getting closer to Oracle's overpriced DB every year.

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