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Amazon consumer biz celebrates ridding itself of last Oracle database with tame staff party... and a Big Red piñata

Fulfilment promise fulfilled

Amazon staffers – one dressed as a Big Red piñata – have taken to Twitter to celebrate shutting down their last Oracle database used in the retail side of the organisation.

The corporate factions have been in various heated battles over the years – from poking fun at the other in conference speeches to scrapping in the courts over a $10bn Pentagon cloud contract.

But the pair have been engaged in a war of words over when Amazon will be able to stop relying on Oracle database wares – something Oracle's founder and CTO Larry Ellison took great pleasure in mentioning at every opportunity.

Last year, AWS boss Andy Jassy said Amazon Retail had switched off its Oracle data warehouse and would be almost entirely rid of the 'Red by Christmas.

Now Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has said that Amazon Fulfilment is completely free of Oracle and is running "100 per cent" on AWS. The team said it was running Aurora Postgres (it could hardly use MySQL, after all) and DynamoDB.

Vogels shared a video posted by a senior principal engineer at Amazon that showed a fairly tame celebratory party at the button-clicking "shutdown abort" of the last Oracle database.

There was, though, a chap who appeared to have come wearing a homemade Oracle-branded piñata on his head – which prompted a cutting response from another Twitter user about the value Oracle puts on its own customers.

Other techies and analysts called on the Amazon group to publish a technical post that explained how it had gone about ditching Oracle.

In August last year, Amazon was rumoured to be aiming to ditch all Oracle software by the first quarter of 2020, to which Oracle countered that Jeff Bezos' monster marketplace-cum-tech-vendor had recently spent another $60m to "acquire still more Oracle database and data analytics software".

Oracle added at the time: "We don't believe that Amazon Web Services has any database technology that comes close to the capabilities of the Oracle database."

But there was no further comment from Oracle today when The Register contacted the enterprise software giant. ®

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