Oracle’s Co-Founder and CTO Larry Ellison on Monday derided those mulling a move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database, describing Amazon as “making all the noise” but “ridiculously distant” in terms of database technology.
Speaking to analysts on a conference call following Oracle’s fiscal 2019 Q2 earnings report yesterday (the company reported revenues of $9.6 billion) Ellison described Amazon’s Aurora and Redshift data warehouses as “very old systems”.
“Amazon took Open Source databases and gave them an Amazon name and put them on the Amazon Cloud” he said.
He cited a recent Gartner report that ranked Oracle first in all four use cases in “Critical Capabilities for Operational Database Management Systems”
Oracle vs AWS Database Battle Continues
The comments came after Amazon ditched Oracle databases for its own services last month, with Amazon’s consumer business predicted to have 97 percent of critical system databases off Oracle and onto Aurora and DynamoDB by the end of 2018.
Both companies cite lower cost, greater capabilities, etc.
See also: “This is What Happens Larry”: Amazon Finally Dumps Oracle Data Warehouse
“In terms of technology, there is no way that someone can move — a normal person would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database. It’s just incredibly expensive and complicated and you’ve got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance to go ahead and do it,” he claimed.
Computer Business Review contacted AWS for a response to the claims but had yet to hear back as we published.
Oracle’s earnings [pdf] showed both hardware (which accounts for just 4 percent of Oracle revenue) and services revenue (8 percent) falling quarter-on-quarter, down from $350 million to $332 million and from $717 million to $713 million respectively.
Net income was up 5.37 percent to $3.33 billion.
The company has been moving away from promoting its on-premises tin to cloud services and heavily promoting its autonomous databases. The company said that its latest NoSQL database, for example, uses machine learning and automation capabilities to deliver a NoSQL database with 99.995 percent availability: it claims this can be delivered at up to 70 percent lower cost than rival Amazon’s DynamoDB.
See also: New NoSQL Service Joins Oracle Autonomous Database Portfolio
Oracle’s new autonomous database options grew about 4 percent in the quarter, Ellison told analysts.
“We’ve never had a quarter that I know of where the database business has not grown, the database license business has not grown. The issue has been when will we get our cloud infrastructure solid enough to host our database? And the answer is, we did that several months ago… The generation two of our infrastructure is now there.”
He added: “Customers can migrate from on-premise to the autonomous database very, very quickly. It is not — it’s not a technology upgrade, it’s just an update, just move your data, drop a few indexes and you’re there, you can do it very quickly. So we expect that the uptake next fiscal year we’re going to get enough business for the Oracle database and the Oracle public cloud to move the needle.”
