Oracle showcases prowess in cloud database computing

Oracle Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison at Oracle Open World 2016 in San Francisco

Oracle recently showcased its prowess in cloud data base computing claiming it beat Amazon’s web service in head-to-head comparison and reinforced its proposition to market by launching a superior Database as a Service solution. 

At the Oracle Open World 2016 which concluded in San Francisco recently, the Oracle Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison demonstrated that Amazon databases are 20 years behind the latest release of the Oracle Database in the Cloud. 

In his second keynote presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2016 attended by nearly 60,000 participants from over 140 countries, Ellison shared benchmark test results that showed that Oracle Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) performed up to 105X faster for Analytics workloads, 35X faster for online transaction processing (OLTP), and 1000+X faster for mixed workloads compared to Amazon DBaaS. Ellison also showed that the Oracle Cloud is optimised for running Oracle Database while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not. An Oracle Database running on the Oracle Cloud performed up to 24X faster than an Oracle Database running on AWS.

“Oracle’s new technologies will drive the Cloud databases and infrastructure of the future,” said Ellison. “Amazon are decades behind in every database area that matters, and their systems are more closed than mainframe computers.”

Ellison also announced at Open World 2016 the availability of Oracle Database 12c Release 2 in the Oracle Cloud with the launch of the new Oracle Exadata Express Cloud Service. This service provides the full enterprise edition of the Oracle Database running on the database-optimised Exadata infrastructure. Starting at just $ 175 per month, Ellison showed this Cloud service is lower cost than similar offerings from Amazon. 

With the launch of Oracle Database 12c Release 2 in the Cloud first, Oracle has demonstrated that the Oracle Cloud is the most optimised, complete and integrated Cloud for Oracle Database. The latest release provides organisations of all sizes with access to the world’s fastest, most scalable and reliable database technology in a cost-effective and open Cloud environment. In addition, the world’s #1 database includes a series of innovations that add state-of-the-art technology while preserving customer investments and supporting their transition to the Cloud.

Ellison shared detailed analysis during his keynote that showed how the new Oracle DBaaS delivers unparalleled performance for analytics, OLTP and mixed database workloads. 

In a direct comparison between Oracle DBaaS and Amazon databases, Ellison shared the following analysis:

Oracle Cloud Database performed dramatically faster than Amazon Cloud Databases in benchmark tests

Oracle Cloud was up to 105X faster for analytics than Amazon Redshift

Oracle Cloud was up to 35X faster for OLTP than Amazon Aurora

Amazon is 20 years behind Oracle in database technology

Amazon Aurora is missing critical OLTP features that Oracle shipped 20 years ago, including scalable read-write clusters, parallel SQL and the ability to replicate encrypted databases

Amazon Redshift is missing critical analytics features that Oracle shipped 20 years ago, including table partitioning, materialised views, support for rich data types and sophisticated query optimisation

Amazon databases do not support mixed workloads

Oracle ran analytics workloads 1000+ times faster than Amazon Aurora, Amazon’s OLTP database.

Oracle ran OLTP workloads 1000+ times faster than Amazon Redshift, Amazon’s analytics database.

Amazon databases are more closed than IBM Mainframe databases, and are not compatible with on-premise enterprise database applications

Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift and Amazon DynamoDB only run on AWS

With AWS, organisations can’t use dev/test for on-premises, can’t use disaster protection for on-premises, management is incompatible with on-premises

Amazon databases are not compatible with existing enterprise database applications such as Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and Teradata and force organisations to throw away decades of on-premises investments

Ellison also demonstrated that AWS is not optimised for the Oracle Database:

Oracle Database was up to 24X faster for analytics on the Oracle Cloud Platform than on Amazon Web Services

Oracle Database was up to 8X faster for OLTP on the Oracle Cloud Platform than on Amazon Web Services

AWS has limited storage performance: Amazon Elastic Block Storage limited to 48,000 IOPs/nodes, which is 8X slower than Oracle Cloud; Amazon Elastic Block Storage limited to 800 MB/sec/node, which is 19X slower than Oracle Cloud

AWS cannot scale-out Oracle across nodes: AWS provides no support for Oracle Real Application Clusters

Ellison said Oracle is the only vendor with true workload portability across on-premises and Cloud deployments. This helps ensure customers can continue to leverage their existing investment, keep costs down and easily benefit from the efficiency of Cloud. With proven continuous innovations and industry-leading performance across the entire platform from infrastructure to database, including support for mixed workloads, Oracle Data Management Cloud is the leader today and in the future.

 “We are preserving your existing investment and allowing you to move it to the Cloud where you can save money, run faster, more securely, and more reliability than you can in your own datacenter. This is a big deal and a big difference. You simply cannot do this with Amazon. Moving applications and data into Amazon is a lot of work,” Ellison said.

“Amazon Web Services are simply not optimised for the Oracle Database. I’ll go further than that. Amazon Web Services aren’t optimised for their own databases either, as you will see. It doesn’t get better, it gets worse. Amazon, who pioneered infrastructure as a service, is still delivering first-generation infrastructure as a service.”

According to Ellison, Oracle continues to innovate as it moves from Internet computing to Cloud computing. “So if a Cloud database is in your future, and I think it is, which Cloud is best for database? Why do you think I’m asking that question? I have an opinion. The Oracle Database is optimised for Cloud computing,” he added.

“Our whole strategy over the years has been to make your data and workloads portable, so you can migrate. So you have a lot of choices in a current generation of computing. And then, when a new generation of computing comes along, you can migrate to that as well. Customers always have choices,” Oracle Chairman and CTO emphasised. 

“There is no choice with Amazon. You run on Redshift. It only runs on Amazon. There is no choice whatsoever. Once you move in to AWS, you cannot move out. If they raise prices, get out your checkbook,” he added.

He told Oracle Open World that Oracle has develop its own version of Linux, open source thereby contributing back to the developer community.  “We develop MySQL, open source, contribute back to the community. They don’t do that. AWS is more closed than an IBM mainframe,” he added.

 “We run on premise. We run in Amazon. We run in IBM. We run—we run at Microsoft. We run every place. We give you lots of choices. We run on the hardware of your choice. We run on specialised machines like Exadata. We can put our public cloud behind your firewall, or you can use our public cloud, lots and lots and lots of choices,” Ellison reiterated. 

“Amazon has three databases, Aurora for OLTP, Redshift for analytics and DynamoDB, which is it’s NoSQL database. All three run only in AWS, no place else,” he added.

“Why does Oracle Public Cloud run the Oracle Database so much better than the Amazon Public Cloud? Well, on our infrastructure, if you look at this, our storage performance, our I/Os per second, are eight times better than Amazon,” Ellison told the Oracle Open World 2016.

Oracle cloud solutions on display at Oracle Open World 2016 in San Francisco