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Amazon's consumer business says bye bye to Oracle databases, moves to AWS

AWS said that Amazon's consumer business has decommissioned its final Oracle database and migrated 75 petabytes of data in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services.
Written by Larry Dignan, Contributor
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AWS' slide on the Amazon consumer business migration to AWS is titled bye bye Oracle. 

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison has frequently mocked Amazon for not moving off of his company's databases, but now Amazon Web Services is claiming the last laugh.

AWS said that Amazon's consumer business has decommissioned its final Oracle database and migrated 75 petabytes of data in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services.

The move may put to bed what has become a fun volley of trash talking between Oracle and AWS, but the fine print of the migration may keep the arguments going. Ellison has a bit of an obsession with AWS and recently dinged the cloud provider at its Open World conference. AWS still leads the cloud services standings

Consider the following headlines:

In its blog post, AWS outlined its move from Oracle, which will inevitably be used as a case study to pitch customers. AWS also titled its migration slide "bye bye Oracle."

Over the years we realized that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases. Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators (DBAs) 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.

Now Oracle would maintain that its Autonomous Database takes those hours of admin out of the equation. Oracle would also argue that AWS should have moved to its optimized cloud.

But let's get real. AWS will get more marketing returns out of this Amazon consumer migration than ever. More than 100 teams in Amazon's consumer business contributed and the AWS move gives it a purpose built approach to databases. Again, Oracle would argue that leads to database sprawl. It is also worth noting that Amazon still has some Oracle databases. AWS explained: "Some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated."

But generally speaking, Amazon's consumer unit moved most systems to AWS databases such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Redshift. The migration covered 100% of Amazon's proprietary systems.

As for returns, Amazon is claiming that it reduced database costs by more than 60% with latency reductions of 40% and database admin overhead by 70%.

The data moved from Oracle to AWS is sizable. For instance, the buyer fraud team moved 40TB of data and financial ledger moved 120TB of data.

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