Coming Soon - Oracle Database 11g on Amazon Relational Database Service | Hacker News Reader

Coming Soon - Oracle Database 11g on Amazon Relational Database Service

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28 pointsjeffbarr19 comments

Arrggg... we get Oracle but no PostgreSQL?!?!

Yeah, but PostgreSQL is _so_ easy to get running there. Seriously. And no amount of magic cloud sprinkles is going to fix Amazon's terrible IO latency problems, for any database product.

I've been working with Oracle for the last few months. In some ways it is a fantastic product. In other ways it is mind-bogglingly backwards.

I mean, no boolean type? Really?

Agreed. The thorough support for hierarchical queries is quite tasty, though.

This used to be a strong distinguishing feature, but postgresql has it too as of 8.4, albeit in a somewhat different form (SQL standard "with recursive"; if you want the Oracle "start with ... connect by" syntax, you have to get the EnterpriseDB commercial postgresql fork).

Oracle still has features that I don't know where to find in the mainstream open-source competition: among others, support for encrypted on-disk storage, and multi-master write support (as opposed to write-on-master, read-from-mirrors). But a lot of those require an "Enterprise" license, which costs significantly more than the already high license fees for the "standard" edition.

(Besides which, if you're building a cluster, you probably want enough control over the physical I/O hardware, for performance reasons, that it doesn't make sense to build it on AWS.)

This.

I've done (1) nested sets, (2) recursive CTEs, and (3)the magic Oracle fairy dust of CONNECT BY and STARTS WITH.

(1) and (2) seem to make my coworkers (and bosses) eyes' glaze over. I think they like (3) because they don't have to worry as much about "code that guy in the corner wrote."

CONNECT BY/STARTS WITH can be brain-bending, too, if you are doing anything except the most straightforward use case. I found the "pseudocode" on this page under the "Interpreting connect by statements" header to be very enlightening:

http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/sql/connect_by.html

My understanding is that whatever database AWS supports it will let you scale up as much as required. Assuming this is the case unless you are and oracle guru or moving legacy applications i cant see this being useful for anyone other then large organisations who usually prefer to run their own hardware. Why pay for an oracle license if you dont have to. Especially when there are quite a few good oracle alturnatives these days.

I must be missing something here.

> Assuming this is the case unless you are and oracle guru or moving legacy applications i cant see this being useful for anyone other then large organisations...

I hear this so often, but it's just not the whole story. Believe it or not, Oracle makes a really good product. There are a lot of features in Oracle Database that you can't find elsewhere. I'm not running a huge operation, but I have two good reasons to use Oracle:

1. Aside from providing a really good RDBMS, there are some neat features like VPD, Data Masking, and TDE that are compelling. If you work under SOX, HIPAA, PCI, etc., these things go a long way toward compliance.

2. I sell to huge operations, and they know and use Oracle. Nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle.

I do a ton of work with other systems (particularly Postgres), but when I put my audit or sales hats on, they're embroidered with Oracle logos.

I have a lot of experience with DB2 distributed, a few years of MS SQL Server, and the last 4 or so have been mostly hacking SQL (and PL/SQL) in Oracle-land.

#2 above just feels so true to me. I would modify it to also say, "Nobody ever lost a SQL hacking gig because they came from an Oracle background." I would NOT make the same claim for either DB2 or MS SQL Server.

I think the main reason Amazon chose Oracle over databases like PostgreSQL is that it also makes it easier for a lot of people to convince their boss to move to AWS.

I think the main reason Amazon chose Oracle was a deal between them.

I think parent and GP both have an element of truth, but that the ultimate situation is more nuanced than either suggests. Customer demand is likely the biggest factor, but I'd be surprised if Oracle managed an exclusivity deal on RDS. Of the major RDBMS players, Oracle, for all their weirdness, all their proprietary functionality, all the damn-the-relational-model-here's-your-physical-row-identifiers, is a pretty logical choice as the first commercial offering.

> I must be missing something here.

Perhaps -- you will be able to run Oracle on RDS and pay for it by the hour. I think that's a pretty big deal.

But you will have to pay for the license fee no ?

No. The hourly cost (which is still TBD) gives you access to a licensed copy of Oracle. You will be able to acquire an hour of database use if that's all you need.

bq. My understanding is that whatever database AWS supports it will let you scale up as much as required

If by "as much as required" you mean "to larger single EC2 instances," yes. If you mean backing it with a SAN or transparently partitioning your data across multiple instance, no.

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/#22

And it will cost $2000 an hour!

New term: double vendor lock-in (AWS and Oracle)?

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