Amazon taunts Oracle over database switch

Amazon’s consumer division has completed the switch of its databases from Oracle to AWS, which took to opportunity to publicly gloat.

In a blog post Chief Evangelist for AWS Jeff Barr did his job and banged on about how great AWS is. The pretext was the completion of the lengthy process of migrating the databases of Amazon’s massive consumer division from Oracle to AWS. According to Barr it has resulted in a 60% reduction in the costs of running Amazon’s databases. He also said other customers have reported a 90% saving, which makes you wonder what Amazon is doing wrong.

“Over the years we realized that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases,” evangelised Barr. “Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted. This included time spent dealing with complex & inefficient hardware provisioning, license management, and many other issues that are now best handled by modern, managed database services.”

What a nightmare eh? Thankfully the migration of 75 petabytes of data went without a hitch, according to Barr, which must be true because he definitely would have evangelised about the problems if there had been any. In case there was any remaining doubt about how rubbish Oracle is compared to AWS he provided this handy graphic.

While we wouldn’t suggest for one second that an Amazon evangelist might in any way favour Amazon, it’s hard to gauge the significance of this moment. Under normal circumstances the loss of one of the biggest companies in the world would have been fairly disastrous news for Oracle. But since Amazon got into the database game it was just a matter of time, so Oracle’s probably not too bothered.