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A fortune 100 financial institution I once worked for had an initiative to migrate their extremely large, fairly well normalized DB2 database to schema-less dyn

A fortune 100 financial institution I once worked for had an initiative to migrate their extremely large, fairly well normalized DB2 database to schema-less dynamoDB. All new tables had to go into dynamo, and if your service begins consuming an old DB2 table, it had the job of migrating that data to dynamo. The end result of this was applications that half pointed to DB2, half dynamo, confusing new data with old, and tons of bugs relating to losing entries into dynamo tables under outdated keys, not being able to clearly match up customer data, and myriad problems that were never a consideration using a relational database. Needless to say, I pulled all of my assets out of this institution as soon as I had the chance.

QuinnyPig 6y ago
Oh my god I can only imagine how they provisioned their DynamoDB throughput. Setting a dumpster full of cash on fire would have been more expedient.
- implying 6y ago
  The dynamoDB bill ran over $25,000 a month, just for their dev environment. Granted, they had thousands of developers, but still.
threeseed 6y ago
I've spent decades in enterprise space and unfortunately developers often don't have a clue how actually things work. Companies like IBM specialise in royally screwing companies through their licensing deals and with their legal enforcement teams. They are nothing like dealing with a normal startup vendor or with someone like AWS. They play hard ball. So sure you can complain that they should've just stayed with DB2. But usually that means paying tens of millions which then increase each year since they know you won't migrate. That's why companies take drastic decisions and move to the cloud even if it's technically not the best option.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  But drastic can be going to Postgres/Mysql instead of db2/oracle; Dynamo (by the sounds of the case here) is more on the insane scale than drastic.

QuinnyPig 6y ago

Oh my god I can only imagine how they provisioned their DynamoDB throughput. Setting a dumpster full of cash on fire would have been more expedient.

implying 6y ago
The dynamoDB bill ran over $25,000 a month, just for their dev environment. Granted, they had thousands of developers, but still.

threeseed 6y ago

I've spent decades in enterprise space and unfortunately developers often don't have a clue how actually things work. Companies like IBM specialise in royally screwing companies through their licensing deals and with their legal enforcement teams. They are nothing like dealing with a normal startup vendor or with someone like AWS. They play hard ball. So sure you can complain that they should've just stayed with DB2. But usually that means paying tens of millions which then increase each year since they know you won't migrate. That's why companies take drastic decisions and move to the cloud even if it's technically not the best option.

tluyben2 6y ago
But drastic can be going to Postgres/Mysql instead of db2/oracle; Dynamo (by the sounds of the case here) is more on the insane scale than drastic.