Oracle’s CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison announced the launch of the company’s latest autonomous database service around transaction processing (ATP) last night – but a recent report around claims by Amazon also caught his eye.
At an event in California, Ellison responded to a story, originally broken by CNBC, which claimed that Amazon was planning to move completely away from Oracle’s databases by 2020.
Responding to an analyst question around customers moving off Oracle on the company’s Q218 earnings call back in December, Ellison said: “Let me tell you who’s not moving off of Oracle – a company you’ve heard of that gave us another $50 million this quarter. That company is Amazon. Our competitors, who have no reason to like us very much, continue to invest in and run their entire business on Oracle.”
Ellison reiterated the $50m price and told attendees of his doubt that Amazon would reach its reported target. “They don’t like being our best reference,” he said. “They think of themselves as a competitor, so it’s kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle, but they want you to use Aurora and Redshift.”
Aurora and Redshift, of course, are Amazon’s primary database products around relational database and data warehousing respectively. Ellison also took the opportunity to tout Oracle’s greater performance when compared to its rival (below) – 12 times faster than Aurora for its autonomous transaction processing database for pure transaction processing, and more than 100 times faster for a mixed workload.
Oracle’s press materials accompanying the ATP release described it as ‘a major milestone in the company’s autonomous strategy’, and Ellison did not hold back in his praise of a technology he described as ‘revolutionary’ at last year’s OpenWorld.
“This machine learning-based technology not only can optimise itself for queries, for data warehouses and data marts, but it also optimises itself for transactions,” said Ellison. “It can run batch programs, reporting, Internet of Things, simple transactions, complex transactions, and mixed workloads. Between these two systems [for data warehousing and transaction processing], the Oracle autonomous database now handles all of your workloads.”
Another barb at Amazon – and it’s worth noting that Andy Jassy is not averse to firing shots back during his keynote speeches – came when Ellison described Oracle’s autonomous database as ‘truly elastic’. It was truly pay as you go, with automatic provisioning and scaling, adding and deleting servers while running, and being serverless when not running.
“Amazon’s databases can’t do that,” he told the audience. “They can’t dynamically add a server when the system is running, they can’t dynamically add network capacity, they can’t dynamically take a server away when there is not demand and it’s not serverless when it’s idle. [Oracle] is a truly elastic system – you only pay for the infrastructure that you use.”
Ellison added that full autonomy – ‘nothing to learn, nothing to do’ became something of a mantra during the presentation – meant Oracle was “as simple to use as the simplest databases on the planet.”
CloudTech has reached out to AWS for comment and will update this piece accordingly.