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Comment by mjw1007 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's leadership famously pushed hard in the early 2000s for all its systems to share data only via service interfaces ( https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 ).

I wonder how much of the reason for that was actually a wish to avoid getting further locked in to Oracle (changing or removing a database that backs a single service is very much easier than changing a database that also acts as an integration point).

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If the goal of SOA was to reduce Oracle lock in then it utterly failed. After SOA practically every team had an Oracle db, so now they have to convince tens of thousands of engineers to migrate thousands of databases.

Imagine what Oracle is going to try and charge Amazon per month for every remaining DB given how publicly hostile Amazon has been.

I think you missed the point slightly. If the interfaces between these services are now Oracle agnostic, it makes migrating off Oracle (by mandate, if necessary) more feasible. More pointedly, I struggle to imagine a scenario where using Oracle of e.g. Postgres would be meaningful in any sense outside of the specifics of Oracle's out of the box integrations. If they aren't being used, why would anyone use Oracle at all?

Amazon has enough money to not care. The marketing from this announcement will make them enough money to not care even less.

The contracts almost certainly have pre-negotiated rate increases. You don’t put the vendor in a position to double your rates after you’ve adopted software.

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