Amazon's cloud isn't real – Oracle

computerworld.com

13 points·neofrommatrix··5 comments

You have to remember he's coming from the perspective of holding customers hostage. In his world, his customers CAN'T leave Oracle, which means Oracle can dictate when and where their software is hosted. If Amazon starts getting traction with Oracle in AWS, Oracle will simply double the licensing costs of AWS vs. their own cloud. It's worked for them countless times before, it'll work again. Because unfortunately, there are way too many really REALLY big companies that are so tied to Oracle they aren't willing to switch, regardless of cost.

So AWS will help Oracle customers move to Postgresql then?

Are there any features Postgresql is missing that Oracle has? That couldn't be developed in the Postgresql code base?

Long-time Oracle user here. Yes, there are features missing. I expect that everything you can do in Oracle you can do in Postgres, but it would take considerable effort to port your logic. One fairly small, fairly clean schema here has about 5500 lines of PL/SQL in package bodies. Postgresql does not have packages, though to be sure the packages I mention don't make much use of package state and so one could easily enough break out the individual functions and procedures.

If you are an Oracle customer, and your applications make use of stored programs, moving to Postgres will require a fair bit of effort.

And which CIO is going to bet his job on making that move successfully? When the ROI is 10+ years for a transition like that, you'll be laughed out of the room proposing it. If the executives can't show a net positive in less than 3 years, it's NOT HAPPENING. Migrating most large companies from Oracle to X would take more than 3 years of planning alone.

Laughable. Poor Oracle.

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