
Amazon’s consumer business has turned off its Oracle data warehouse - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-09/-keep-talkin-larry-amazon-is-close-to-tossing-oracle-software?srnd=premium
======
twblalock
When non-traditional databases became popular, I thought it was primarily
driven by people short-sightedly prioritizing development time over all of the
good relational database features.

Now I see things differently -- the non-traditional databases are just better
at scaling horizontally, eventual consistency, and running in cloud
environments than the traditional databases. They are easier to set up and
use. Some of them now have pretty good relational features and schemas.

During the past decade the Oracles of the world have continued to think
dismissively of new non-traditional databases, as I did at first. The non-
traditional databases got better and better while Oracle kept doing a lot of
the same stuff. Oracle just didn't take the competition seriously, and that's
fair enough because the competition didn't deserve to be taken seriously at
first -- but now it does, and it's becoming a threat to Oracle's business.

It's obvious that Amazon would want to use their own database products -- but
the impressive thing is that those products, which are not very old, are
already good enough to replace Oracle for a lot of use cases at very high
scale.

~~~
Derek_MK
There are places where relational DBs are inherently better than noSQL (namely
when you need fully up-to-date information on every query, no matter what) -
But those situations are becoming more rare compared to situations where
potentially stale data is an okay tradeoff for performance gains.

Honestly, IMO the biggest issue holding noSQL databases back is lack of good
documentation/support a lot of the time. Technically, though, they're going to
become the standard for most use cases soon.

~~~
lykr0n
The problem with noSQL is that there are too many players out there making
duplicated efforts. You have MySQL & MariaDB and PostgreSQL as the two main
SQL platforms, but you have too may to list in the noSQL field- most of them
providing the same amount of functionality.

~~~
hodgesrm
> You have MySQL & MariaDB and PostgreSQL as the two main SQL platforms

Based on license revenue it's actually Oracle and MS SQL server by miles. They
are currently #1 and #3 on DB-Engines.com. ([https://db-
engines.com/en/ranking](https://db-engines.com/en/ranking)) MySQL is #2.
PostgreSQL is #4, though it's pretty far back from the first three.

~~~
marcolussetti
Maybe I'm confused, but ranking databases on license revenue will inevitably
show that the databases that charge licenses are higher.

I mean PostgreSQL is open source, and required no license fee. I'm not sure
that license revenue is a good comparison metric.

~~~
hodgesrm
DBMS Engines uses a set of metrics that does not include revenue. See
[https://db-engines.com/en/ranking_definition](https://db-
engines.com/en/ranking_definition) for more. Oracle and MS SQL Server have
consistently ranked highly there for many years.

------
dstroot
The only thing that this "article written about a tweet" made me think was why
has it taken Amazon so long?

Oracle sued my company a few years back for license compliance issues - I
vowed never to run their stuff again and rip it out wherever I find it.

~~~
Dunedan
> why has it taken Amazon so long?

I imagine at the scale of Amazon replacing some of the core data stores with
all their existing data is a quite complex task. Just think about the amount
of data you need to migrate and keep in sync during the migration and all the
third party tools using such data. So while it takes long, I don't think
Amazon is particularly slow doing it.

~~~
rakoo
Amuzingly AWS started as an effort to restructure their own internal
infrastructure, and when they saw how useful it was they decided it could be
sold to other people as well. Replacing Oracle is almost the exact opposite
direction.

------
czardoz
I have no clue why Larry Ellison thinks it's a good idea to take potshots at
one of his own large customers, instead of talking about the benefits of
Oracle's products. Very weird, and kind of childish.

~~~
snuxoll
Because Oracle doesn't give a crap, they know they have a captive market and
are the definition of a rent-seeking company. They don't sell their products
based on their merits, they do it because companies have either have no choice
or are already held hostage by them.

------
thisisit
This is not surprising at all. For the past couple of years, Oracle's behavior
has been egregious at best.

You can pick up any of their product and find that MYSQL, MS-SQL etc are
supported but 2001/03 release because of "incompatibility issues". If that is
not enough Oracle's support is clueless about what are these "incompatibility
issues". And given the precarious security environment we are in, everyone
needs a DB which has been patched sufficiently and allows newer features like
TLS 3.0 etc, you are left with no choice but to go for the only supported DB
is Oracle DB. I have sat in many meetings where the CIO/CTO have seen this as
an arm twisting tactic by Oracle.

I am no market expert but if Oracle keeps going down this path they will cease
to exist in next 10-15 years.

~~~
narrator
They just keep buying niche enterprise applications that have entrenched non-
technical users and then raise prices, drop interoperability with non Oracle
and start milking.

------
Nerada
I'm not heavily involved with databases from a development point of view, is
someone able to explain why Oracle is as successful as it is? What sets them
apart from what seems like a plethora of other DB systems?

~~~
jacques_chester
Putting aside business practices, Oracle database has features that don't show
up in opensource systems, often for years.

The one I miss most is resource constraints on queries. It's nice to be able
to guarantee that some queries will get more resources than others.

On the other hand, Oracle's SQL dialect is (or was, I stopped using it about 5
years ago) full of frustrating backwardness. No boolean type, so you get a mix
of CHAR(1)s or INTs, depending on the prevailing DBA's opinion. And there's no
serial or autoincrementing type, so for every table you wind up copying and
pasting the same code over and over (create index, create sequence, insert
trigger, update trigger).

The most head-scratching part is that you can find apologists for these flaws.

~~~
aaaaaaaaaab
Oracle has auto increment:
[https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/DRDAA/migr_tools_feat.h...](https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/DRDAA/migr_tools_feat.htm#DRDAA109)

~~~
jacques_chester
Ah, at last, after only 40 years. So there should be a boolean type by 2058 or
so.

------
saosebastiao
That brings back an old memory of the data warehouse being extremely
overburdened during peak. Capacity constraints and over utilization kept
bringing down clusters. As a last ditch effort, the data warehouse team
started randomly disabling queries en masse, under the assumption that if they
were actually mission critical, the user would just re-enable them again.

I knew some engineers that worked on a centralized data engineering team that
served 100+ software teams, and they managed several thousand scheduled
queries. I felt so bad for the guy that had pager duty that first night. He
said he got a sev-2 every 12 minutes on average for 24 hours straight.

I certainly hope Amazon has fixed their data warehouse issues since then.

~~~
newguyatamazon
I've only been here for a few months (BI engineer), but overall uptime for all
data platforms has been good and things run smooth pretty much 24/7\.
Extremely impressive to me especially considering the breadth and depth of
some of these datasets. I do have my gripes about how things are laid out here
(layers upon layers of abstraction + codewords for everything + some big
tooling changes not being documented or still tribal knowledge), but all in
all it's a well-oiled machine here

------
sixdimensional
This is as much or more about moving away from a specific product stack -
Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), which is an aging and expensive ERP titan. The
news and people who aren't dealing with Oracle don't necessarily see that
clearly.

I'd bet that their Oracle Data Warehouse being referred to here isn't just
about the Oracle RDBMS database technology itself, they are talking about a
specific COTS Oracle Data Warehouse model that you can buy prebuilt and works
as a destination for all other Oracle ERP etc. subsytems.

I say this knowing it first hand coming from a company trapped in that
particular Oracle stack. It's expensive, limiting and very locked in, and has
a huge footprint and requires specialists to run (as do many ERPs).

I see actually a mad scramble by the big tech vendors (Microsoft, SAP and
others) trying to push their ERP solutions as cloud enablement has opened up a
window of opportunity to shift and escape some of the pains of the old ways
(while creating an entirely new set of problems).

I'd be more interested if Amazon sees this same opening and is trying to enter
the ERP game itself by building something in house that they turn around and
offer as a service via AWS. They certainly have the scale to look pull off
such a thing, and they already own all the enabling technologies to build an
ERP system, data warehouse and rest of the stack.

That's my pet theory at least!

------
btown
Lest we think this is a nail in a coffin, Oracle’s stock is barely down after
market close (7:50p ET) off a price close to a 5 year high.

[https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/orcl/after-hours-
chart](https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/orcl/after-hours-chart)

The “lawnmower” keeps on mowing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18323166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18323166)

~~~
adrr
Oracle bread and butter is back-office systems like ERP/Accounting/Hr. They
own Netsuite, Peoplesoft, and other similar products.

------
paul94133
Wanted to share some insights on the data warehouse industry here from a co-
founder of intermix.io.

According to db-engines.com, Oracle has declined 9% since July 2016. Amazon
Redshift and Google BigQuery have grown over 50% in the same period, while
Snowflake and PrestoDB (although each are 10x smaller than Redshift and
BigQuery) have grown over 60%.

This is happening because enterprises are shifting to the cloud. When they go
to the cloud they are shifting -away- from on-prem warehouses like Oracle,
Teradata, and Vertica. Enterprises choose Amazon or Google depending on which
cloud platform they adopt.

Companies launched after 2010 were born in the cloud (and thus never used
Oracle since Oracle does not have a cloud) and are more likely to choose
Snowflake due to ease-of-use (even as Snowflake is more expensive than
Redshift).

What does this mean?

Consider that we are still in the early phases of cloud adoption. 32% of
enterprises are in the cloud, rising to 52% by 2022. At the same time, over
half of enterprises said they will use more than one cloud (hybrid cloud)
within the next 10 years.

Amazon Redshift is the warehouse of choice for Enterprises on AWS. Snowflake
is eating up the mid and SMB markets. prestoDB solves awesome problems for
interactive and exploratory analysis for all. BigQuery is used by GCP
customers.

These trends indicate that Oracle will struggle to grow revenues and margins,
as they are relegated to serve the (still large but shrinking) portion of the
market that chooses on-prem, and pursue aggressive rent-seeking of an aging
install base (the Java mess is an unrelated but telling example of this
strategy).

To reverse this trend, Oracle must find a way to serve cloud customers. That
probably means acquisitions.

------
sys_64738
"Nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle."

~~~
mathattack
And many 2018 CIOs regret that their 1998 predecessors said the same thing
about IBM.

------
nojvek
The story goes that Amazon was one of Oracle’s biggest customer, and they have
been for a long time.

When Oracle entered the cloud they started making fun of Amazon, “If their
cloud and database offerings are so great, how come they use us to do the
actual heavy lifting? That’s because our stuff is rock solid and theirs isn’t”

This pissed off Bezos, the sky broke and a voice foretold, NO MORE ORACLE!

------
stanislavb
That's been an expensive lesson to Larry Ellison not to be so arrogant.

~~~
ec109685
If Larry had been nice, you think Amazon would have merrily kept paying Oracle
license fees over moving to their own software?

------
erik_landerholm
This isn’t about nosql vs sql, this is about how oracle is lead by an out of
touch, megalomaniac selling a subpar product, that you can literally get for
free. I hope this gives other companies the kick they need to dump Oracle and
MSSQL too.

------
1024core
Just in time for Black Friday.... yay! What could go wrong?

------
chris_wot
So does this finally signal that Oracle is becoming way less powerful and
relevant than they were before?

How many folks still actually use Oracle? And how many are trying to get rid
of them?

~~~
r00fus
Many Oracle installs used to rely on the apps that ran on them like ERPs and
the like. Oracle bought many of those companies (e.g. Peoplesoft)

With cloud availability and many of the features of high end DBs commoditized,
and the new strain of apps being cloud / SaaS, Oracle's available market has
dried up.

