I guess Oracle's desperate attempts (to the point of suing the government) to ensure a cash cow for the next decade despite clear tech inferiority were not successful in the end
Oracle made a complaint to the Government Accountability Office last year that was essentially "it is unfair to award ALL $10B to just one company." The GAO disagreed with the following reasoning:
> the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows
So now Oracle is suing the US Government with exactly the same complaint.
Oracle Senior Vice President Ken Glueck is a statement claimed that they're worried the DoD is going to be "locked into" another cloud vendor and that a single vendor "is out of sync with industry’s multi-cloud strategy" Make of that as you will.
On that note, what's your take on $ORCL's "autonomous database" that they've been marketing over the last couple of years? I saw the Ellison presentation on it when it was first announced and it seems plausible you could tune databases on-the-fly and maybe optimize indices "automatically", given your comment I was curious what you think about this specific offering.
Is it really anything new? Informix was self tuning in the 80s.
I suppose you could automatically identify slow queries and identify what indexes would be useful, sort of how a JIT identifies hotspots in code and optimises them.
Personally it sounds like a play to keep lucrative enterprise customers on side by allowing them to cut the DBA role that is a necessity for a decent sized Oracle install.
Both AWS and Azure support Oracle Databases. This is the selection of a cloud provider, not specific software that would run on that provider. They may very well run Oracle Databases in the future.
That may be the case but as my employer is learning it takes a ton of engineering effort to actually run a complicated, large scale oracle DB on the cloud. At every turn you either have to compromise on design or expend a ton of effort getting over the hurdle. Even at large scale running it bare metal and then distributing that around the world is easier (that's what we've been doing). Time will tell if the effort is worth it.
I’m a cloud True Believer but even I wouldn’t suggest it is the right choice to run any large third party proprietary database like SQL Server or Oracle on AWS.
At least with AWS’s custom Aurora/MySQL and Aurora/Postgres offering they are able to rewrite parts of it to take advantage of their other technologies, but when you look at their RDS offerings, it doesn’t really buy you as much if you need to run third party commercial databases at scale.
We built software for data analysis for the government and had to integrate with their data storage systems. I wasn't exaggerating when I said they loved Oracle. In my experience, they seemed to think Oracle databases were superior in almost every way.
Oracle made a complaint to the Government Accountability Office last year that was essentially "it is unfair to award ALL $10B to just one company." The GAO disagreed with the following reasoning:
> the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows
So now Oracle is suing the US Government with exactly the same complaint.
Oracle Senior Vice President Ken Glueck is a statement claimed that they're worried the DoD is going to be "locked into" another cloud vendor and that a single vendor "is out of sync with industry’s multi-cloud strategy" Make of that as you will.