Ellison slams AWS at Oracle Open World 2016

Larry Ellison used his second keynote at the 2016 Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco to deepen a critique of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a cloud environment for databases.

The supplier’s CTO was building on a claim to leadership in the area of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which he asserted during his first conference day keynote.

“Not only is Amazon not optimised for the Oracle database, it is not optimised for its own,” he said.

Ellison presented Oracle’s history as showing a pattern of helping customers preserve the value of their existing database investments while migrating them to the next technology generation.

As with the move from the client-server model to internet computing, so it would be from on-premise to the cloud, he said.

But disdain for AWS was the hallmark of his second Oracle OpenWorld keynote.

According to Ellison, Amazon’s own databases – RedShift, for data warehousing; Aurora, compatible with MySQL; and Dynamo, a NoSQL database known to be highly scalable – are “20 years behind the times”,  and the AWS infrastructure is “more closed than an IBM mainframe. Once you are in, you can’t move out.”

He poured scorn on AWS’s own databases: “At my age, even I can remember how many places Redshift, Aurora and Dynamo run on: simply one [Amazon].”

He continued that while Amazon used to be low cost and a technological leader in cloud computing, “it is not any more”.

“With our second generation of IaaS, we are leapfrogging Amazon in terms of cost and performance, and in terms of reliability and security.”

Ellison argued that Oracle’s database as a service (DBaaS) is up to 105 times faster for analytics workloads, 35 times faster for OLTP, and 1,000 plus times faster for mixed workloads than Amazon DBaaS.

Ellison said the Oracle Cloud is optimised for running Oracle database while AWS is not. An Oracle database running on the Oracle Cloud is up to 24 times faster than an Oracle database running on AWS, he added.

“Amazon is decades behind in every database area that matters, and their systems are more closed than mainframe computers,” he said.

Ellison also announced the availability of Oracle Database 12c Release 2 in the Oracle Cloud with the launch of the Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service.

According to news site ZDNet, Amazon had not, at the time of writing, offered a response to Ellison’s blistering presentation. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...