Submitted via IRC for Bytram
We're free in 3... 2... 1! Amazon unhooks its last Oracle database, nothing breaks and life goes on
Amazon has turned off its final Oracle database, completing a migration effort that has involved "more than 100 teams" in the consumer biz.
Amazon's cloudy unit, AWS, regularly takes a pop at enterprise database vendors while promoting its own Relational Database Service (RDS), which offers Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible), PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB, as well as Oracle and SQL Server.
At the 2018 Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said: "The world of... the old-guard commercial-grade databases has been a miserable world for the last couple of decades for most enterprises... Databases like Oracle and SQL Server are expensive, high lock-in and proprietary."
What he did not say is that one of the victims of what he called "abusive and constraining relationships" with other database vendors was Amazon itself, which used Oracle in its retail operation for services including Alexa, Prime video, Kindle and Amazon Music, as well as for fulfilment, payments, ordering and advertising.
This is (mostly) no longer the case. AWS evangelist Jeff Barr reports that "75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases" were migrated to AWS database services.
Related Stories
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
More than a decade ago, Google re-implemented the Java programming language as part of its new Android mobile operating system. Oracle, the owner of Java, then sued Google for copyright infringement in 2010. Later this month, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this epic copyright case that will have huge implications for the entire software industry—and that could cost Google billions of dollars.
Google says it has done nothing wrong. Copyright law specifically excludes "systems" and "methods of operation" from copyright protection. Google argues that the aspects of Java it copied—function names, argument types, and so forth—fit squarely into these exceptions. Google also argues that copyright's fair use doctrine allows for this kind of copying.
The case is being closely watched by the software industry. Companies like Microsoft and IBM have warned that Oracle's stance could create chaos for the industry. They argue that making this kind of copying illegal would not only create legal headaches for a lot of software companies—it would be bad for customers, too.
Software companies copy software interfaces—known in industry jargon as application programming interfaces (APIs)—of their competitors' products all the time. This allows competing software products to be interoperable so that a customer can take software designed to work on one platform and re-use it on another. That means lower switching costs for customers. It also means lower barriers for entry for software startups, since it's easier to sell a new product if it's compatible with a software product that customers already know and trust.
If anyone should understand the importance of such copying, it's Oracle. After all, Oracle got its start in the 1970s selling a database product based on the then-new structured query language (SQL). SQL was invented by IBM. And Oracle doesn't seem to have gotten a license to use it.
If Oracle wins its legal battle, one ironic result will be to make the software industry less hospitable to future startups like Oracle. Incumbent software companies would have a greater ability to lock customers into their own proprietary standards. Startups wouldn't be allowed to do what Oracle did four decades ago: make its product compatible with an established competitor, then make that interoperability a selling point.
[...]Despite the lack of a licensing deal, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz was enthusiastic when Google ultimately announced that Android would be based on Java.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by loic on Thursday October 17 2019, @09:52AM (3 children)
So, Amazon says all their internally-developed applications are now Oracle-free, but they still run third party applications with Oracle databases. Then journalist says Amazon has no Oracle database anymore.
I call this deception.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2019, @10:14AM
>Implying journalist even understand what they're writing about.
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday October 17 2019, @10:19AM
Call it what you want.
I'm calling it masochism from the side of AWS customers still using Oracle and I'm calling Amazon just a cheap hotel that sells rooms by the hour for those with such kinks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2019, @02:34PM
Is the vendor responsible for the oracle install their application uses? Then I wouldn't care too much.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gtomorrow on Thursday October 17 2019, @10:15AM (2 children)
That's great that Amazon has freed itself of the "shackles" of vendor lock-in, in this case Oracle, thanks to FOSS...
...but then again, it's Amazon we're talking about. Hard to get happy about one virus' freedom from codependency from another.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 17 2019, @10:21AM (1 child)
Yeah, too little too late. Larry already bought his island.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday October 17 2019, @11:07AM
Y'know, that's just the tip of the iceberg really. Now Mackenzie Bezos can buy Larry's island from him...as well as the natives.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday October 17 2019, @10:31AM (3 children)
This happens to correlate with recent release of PostgreSQL 12.0, which I consider to be one of the best open source complex technologies we the people can have for free. A true database, unlike other non-databases imitations. Portable and extensible. Old, mature, full-blown, powerful, advanced. Those who develop it deserve lot of honor at least, for they really helped the humanity (and machines) to evolve.
If Amazon could handle the migration at big scale, what about SoylentNews?
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2019, @01:13PM (2 children)
To get technical here, I agree postgres is one of the greatest open source technologies out there. However, I think their implementation of MVCC is a mistake, looking back. You still have to deal with VACUUM. It's a problem other databases simply don't have.
(Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday October 17 2019, @08:03PM (1 child)
Big read/write concurrency is difficult, by both performance and correctness. Ask MySQL users about correctness part of this.
Every database or wannabe database out there has some form of MVCC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_databases_using_MVCC [wikipedia.org].
And PostgreSQL has autovacuum for very long time https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/runtime-config-autovacuum.html [postgresql.org].
If some other databases don't have a problem about that, they are probably completely wrong.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2019, @09:00PM
There has been discussion among the Postgres devs about possibly rearchitecting their MVCC implementation.
Production of obsolete tuples in Postgres (i.e., tuples that need to be garbage collected because they are outdated) is unacceptably high in Postgres compared to other RDBMSes.
AUTOVACUUM is a bandaid; you still have to worry about the problem. Makes it harder to use Postgres in an OLTP situation than it ought to be.