As Oracle and Amazon Web Services use very different approaches to gain cloud-database market share, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison has thrown down a pretty blunt challenge by claiming his MySQL HeatWave database is 1,000x faster than AWS Aurora, the comparable brand from its archrival.
While Oracle favors “converged” databases that can handle all types of data and a vast range of functions, AWS offers more than 15 purpose-built databases, one of which is Aurora.
But on the critical question of speed, Ellison recently claimed that Oracle MySQL HeatWave absolutely crushes Aurora.
On Oracle’s recent fiscal Q4 earnings call, Ellison said, “We’ve announced a new database — a new version of MySQL with a fast query processor called HeatWave — and we have customers moving from Amazon Aurora where they’re experiencing a 1,000x speedup versus Aurora.
“So we’re a thousand times faster in query processing than Amazon’s version of MySQL.”
Ellison surfaced that stunning comparison in a broader discussion centered on how and why Oracle’s cloud growth of 54% for the quarter ended May 31 is 2x, and in some cases, 3x higher than the other world-class vendors on the Cloud Wars Top 10.
For many customers, Ellison said, a decisive factor is Oracle’s superior performance across the entire cloud stack — infrastructure, databases, applications, analytics, and more. And in the data-powered digital economy, Ellison contended, speed is the ultimate differentiator.
“We run twice as fast, and we cost half as much,” he said of Oracle’s broad cloud portfolio.
“But sometimes we run a lot more than twice as fast, and we cost a lot less than half as much,” Ellison said before making the comparison to AWS Aurora.
At the heart of that high-speed capability, he said, is s blazingly fast network.
“We can build GPUs that other people can’t build because we have a fast network,” Ellison said.
“We use this very fast RDMA network, and we start with that. And in our Gen2 Cloud, our entire network is a super-fast network, which means that most of the applications you run in the Oracle Cloud are going to be much faster than our competitors’ clouds because they don’t use that kind of network. So we have huge cost advantages.”
Final Thought
Seems almost overly simplistic, doesn’t it? Oracle’s cloud revenue is booming while other cloud vendors are seeing their revenue growth moderating — and Larry Ellison chalks it up to a faster network. Sounds to me like there’s going to be a run on RDMA networks!
And for much more detail on RDMA and other key drivers behind Oracle’s ascent to being the world’s hottest major cloud vendor, please check out The Larry Ellison Effect: 5 Reasons for Oracle’s Extraordinary Growth Surge.
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