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CNBC reports Amazon Plans to Move Completely off Oracle Software by Early 2020:
Amazon's emergence as a major provider of data center technology has turned many of its longtime suppliers, including Oracle, into heated rivals.
Now Amazon is dealing yet another blow to Oracle. The e-commerce giant, having already moved much of its infrastructure internally to Amazon Web Services, plans to be completely off Oracle's proprietary database software by the first quarter of 2020, according to people familiar with the matter.
The shift is another sign of Amazon's rapid ascent in enterprise computing and further shows how much Oracle is struggling to keep pace as businesses move workloads to the cloud and away from traditional data centers. Propelled in part by expansion at AWS, which reported 49 percent revenue growth for the second quarter, Amazon passed Alphabet earlier this year to become the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
Meanwhile, Oracle is about the same size it was four years ago and the stock is just above where it was trading at the end of 2014. Oracle shares dropped by about 1 percent after the initial report Wednesday.
[...] The primary issue Amazon has faced on Oracle is the inability for the database technology to scale to meet Amazon's performance needs, a person familiar with the matter said. Another person, who said the move could be completed by mid-2019, added that there hasn't been any development of new technology relying on Oracle databases for quite a while.
Amazon's infrastructure is certainly not foolproof. The company's constant need for capacity upgrades turned into a near crisis during Amazon's Prime Day shopping extravaganza last month, when the company's systems proved incapable of handling a sudden traffic surge.
[...] The two companies have been in a heated war of words. Last year Oracle executives boasted about the cost advantages of using its database software. AWS CEO Andy Jassy fired back a few weeks later in an interview with CNBC, saying that Oracle is "a long way away in the cloud."
I have some Oracle experience from many years ago. Even then it was known for being very expensive, but it DID have all kinds of "knobs" you could adjust to tweak out extra performance that other databases just could not [easily] match. How well does Oracle compete today? Would you say they were worth the expense?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 03 2018, @03:03PM (2 children)
I moved off Oracle in 1961.
Not funny? Okay - whatever you all say.
The ONLY thing that Oracle has worthy of my time, is Virtualbox. And, they didn't create it, they didn't market it, and I'm not sure that they've improved it since they bought it. I'd be a lot happier if they got rid of VBox. Sell it to someone who loves it, and can do something with it, and I'll be very happy.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday August 03 2018, @03:12PM
I was using Virtual Box a few years ago, and as I recall it got regular updates. Sometimes too frequent for my taste.
Now I'm stuck on Hyper-V at work. It's great for Windows guests. And I can create and activate(!) as many Windows guests as I like.
Other than that, Hyper-V sucks for Linux guests. Virtual Box had a great "guest additions" that you could install into both Windows guests and Linux guests. Then your guest OS desktop would resize very nicely as you resized the remote connection window.
Another very nice thing about Virtual Box -- it's emulated video card allows you to VNC into the video card. This works even if the guest OS doesn't know anything about RDP / VNC, or even about networking! Such as if you're running Windows 3.2 or something. (I've only tried Windows 98 SE on Virtual Box. It was fun but a bit painful to get working. Mostly because you have to get an unusual Win 98 video driver from somewhere if you want anything bigger than 640x480.)
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday August 03 2018, @07:32PM
Well, as their kernel module is unsuitable for acceptance upstream in the opinion of upstream (whose name is "Linus") and they keep it separate, they have to "improve" it nearly every time there's a new kernel and their driver breaks and they have to fiddle with it to get it to compile again on the new kernel.
They've also got headless start now built into the GUI management tool (not just the CLI tools).
Me too. It's unfortunate that Oracle has ended up with so many major free software projects.
Of course, that someone who loves it is free to fork it, call their fork "Virtual Carton" or whatever, rename all the tools from VBox to VCart, write something to go in place of the nonfree "extensions", and leave Oracle in the dust. Hasn't happened, so it's possible (not for sure) that Oracle is doing a not-terrible job. I am still not joining their fan club.