Oracle isn’t normally one to expose its fetishes, but the company’s fixation on Amazon Web Services has become glaringly, disturbingly obvious. Whether at OpenWorld, in analyst briefings, or on Twitter, Oracle can’t seem to talk about anything else. Two years ago Oracle peddled the myth that “AWS is 20 years behind Oracle,” even as AWS boasts 80 times more IaaS revenue and 10 times more PaaS revenue than Oracle, according to Gartner data. More recently, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, in a “pot calling the kettle black” moment, dissed Amazon Redshift as “inflexible and expensive.”
Even more recently, Oracle’s database chief, Andy Mendelsohn, pilloried AWS databases as underpowered for enterprise workloads. If your only ambition is to run “small, departmental databases with decent performance,” Mendelsohn crowed, AWS is adequate.
