Amazon employees celebrate after switching off their last Oracle database

Amazon employees celebrate as a lead engineer in the company's fulfilment team hits the switch-off button on Oracle database

Amazon has almost reached its goal of migrating away entirely from Oracle database software.

Staff working in Amazon's fulfilment teams, who handle inventory and shipping at the online retail giant, have been celebrating after switching off their final Oracle database.

Last Friday, Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels took to Twitter to praise the switch-off. "Congrats to the @Amazon Fulfillment teams for completing the migration off Oracle to 100% #AWS. #databasefreedom," he wrote in a tweet.

Vogels shared a video of senior principal engineer John Darrow clicking the switch-off button and other employees enjoying a party to celebrate.

The moment sparked plenty of discussion on Twitter, with techies weighing in on the move by Amazon. A data engineer said: "Congratulations @jdarrow. So proud of Amazon. This is not a small feat." Another person was impressed by the news, tweeting: "Huge milestone!"

While many people were pleased with the news, some users saw a funny side. Someone tweeted in response to the video: "Making the world a better place."

One user pointed out how an Amazon employee was wearing a homemade Oracle piñata on his head, saying "love this". Economist Corey Quinn replied to the funny clip: "At Oracle the piñatas are made to resemble their customers."

Some people were curious about why Amazon decided to abandon Oracle and the steps it took. "Congrats! How about publishing a technical post summarizing the process, including the challenges and the lessons learned?," questioned a user.

In November, the company turned off its largest Oracle data warehouse and migrated to Redshift, which Vogels described as his "best day" of 2018.

As Business Insider reported at the time, he said: "This was the moment when we switched off one of the world's largest, if not the largest, Oracle data warehouse and moved it over to Redshift."

At around the same time, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said 88 per cent of Amazon's Oracle databases would be migrated by the end of the year.

He tweeted: "In the latest episode of ‘uh huh, keep talkin' Larry,' Amazon's Consumer business turned off its Oracle data warehouse Nov 1 and moved to Redshift.

"By end of 2018, they'll have 88 per cent of their Oracle DBs (and 97% of critical system DBs) moved to Aurora and DynamoDB."

But Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison has previously thrown shade at Amazon's decision to move from Oracle, questioning the capabilities of its database technology.

"It's kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle but they want you to use Aurora and Redshift. They've had 10 years to get off Oracle, and they're still on Oracle."

Have you migrated your organisation from Oracle? Tell Computing, on the record or in confidence, either in the comments below or email the editor Stuart Sumner directly.

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