Mastering the art of data: the skills that will get you noticed

It’s almost a decade since a much-shared Harvard Business Review article declared data scientist the sexiest job of the 21st century. But is working with data still as novel or as exciting as it was then?

The rise of digital currencies in the emerging world

As of September 7, 2021, El Salvador will officially recognise Bitcoin as legal currency. This is a remarkable move, and one that will likely stimulate a huge amount of economic growth as Salvadoreans leapfrog from a largely cash-based society straight to a system characterised by the frictionless, finger-snap efficiency of digital currency.

Trump’s plans to ban Chinese app WeChat blocked

A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to ban WeChat over concerns the ban would threaten users’ first amendment rights

Oracle returns to growth

The software maker’s quarterly revenue exceeded analysts’ expectations, as remote working drove greater demand for its cloud-computing services

Amazon ditches Oracle in favour of its own cloud service

In a crushing blow to Oracle, Amazon has migrated the last of its databases to Amazon Web Services as part of an effort to reduce costs and improve performance

In total, more than 100 consumer services were involved in the migration from Oracle to Amazon Web Services, including Amazon Prime, Alexa and Kindle

Amazon has migrated 75 petabytes of internal data – previously stored on nearly 7,500 Oracle databases – back to its own servers. On October 15, the tech giant announced that it will no longer use Oracle to store its databases and will instead use its in-house cloud-computing service, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

In an official company blog post, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr revealed that the database migration had been completed after several years of work: “I am happy to report that this database migration effort is now complete. Amazon’s consumer business just turned off its final Oracle database.”

Cost, performance and a reduction in administrative overheads were cited as the main motivations behind Amazon’s database migration

In total, more than 100 consumer services were involved in the migration effort, including Amazon Prime, Alexa and Kindle. Cost, performance and a reduction in administrative overheads were cited as the main motivations behind the move. Some third-party applications will remain connected to Oracle.

“Over the years, we realised that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases,” Barr wrote. “Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted.”

Each team at the company was tasked with moving an Oracle database to an AWS alternative, such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon Redshift. The company added that each team was given “the freedom to choose the purpose-built AWS database service that best fit their needs”.

Amazon’s move away from Oracle will come as a crushing blow to the cloud-computing firm. Amazon was a huge client for Oracle, and there are fears that its exit could lead to further departures elsewhere in the business.