Global retail giant Amazon experienced problems with its retail website on its Prime Day, the company's made-up holiday in July meant to boost sales, because of problems in migrating from Oracle's database to its own technology.
A report from CNBC, which obtained an internal Amazon report, said the incident showed that Oracle's software was superior to what Amazon had deployed in some respects.
It said the website glitches experienced on Prime Day came at a time when the company was also trying to hose down an issue at one of its bigger warehouses in Ohio. Together, these led to thousands of deliveries being delayed.
The report obtained by CNBC, running to 25 pages, showed that Amazon's technical staff struggled to find out the root cause of the issues on Prime Day.
Last year,
an error by a member of its technical staff caused Amazon Web Services to go down. The company said at the time that the S3 team was attempting to debug an issue that caused a slowdown in its billing system when one of its technical staff ran a command that was intended to remove a few servers from one of the subsystems used by the S3 billing process.
The worker entered one wrong input for the command and ended up removing a much larger number of servers than intended, some of which supported two other S3 subsystems.
CNBC said Amazon also failed to come up with a contingency plan in the event of any error in its replacement database, which is the open-source PostgreSQL software, sold by a company known as Aurora.
One of the questions in the Amazon technical report obtained by CNBC asked the engineers why the database system had not failed during the previous Prime Day when it was running on Oracle. They said that Oracle and Aurora PostgreSQL handled savepoints differently.
An Amazon spokesperson attempted to play down the issue and even claimed there was no outage, even though the report that CNBC obtained said that the "degradation resulted in lags and complete outages".
CNBC said 13 warehouses had moved from Oracle to PostgreSQL before Prime Day. It said the Amazon report cited delayed deliveries for 15,000 packages and about US$90,000 in wasted labour costs.
INTRODUCING ITWIRE TV
iTWire TV offers a unique value to the Tech Sector by providing a range of video interviews, news, views and reviews, and also provides the opportunity for vendors to promote your company and your marketing messages.
We work with you to develop the message and conduct the interview or product review in a safe and collaborative way. Unlike other Tech YouTube channels, we create a story around your message and post that on the homepage of ITWire, linking to your message.
In addition, your interview post message can be displayed in up to 7 different post displays on our the iTWire.com site to drive traffic and readers to your video content and downloads. This can be a significant Lead Generation opportunity for your business.
We also provide 3 videos in one recording/sitting if you require so that you have a series of videos to promote to your customers. Your sales team can add your emails to sales collateral and to the footer of their sales and marketing emails.
See the latest in Tech News, Views, Interviews, Reviews, Product Promos and Events. Plus funny videos from our readers and customers.
SEE WHAT'S ON ITWIRE TV NOW!
