They don't even bother trying to make this sound believable.
You claim it's 1.5x-2x faster? Sure I might believe that despite your prohibition against benchmarks.
10x faster? You better show how your engineers pulled out that miracle.
1000x? You've either picked out a very weird edge case, used something in a way it's not meant to be used, or just made that up. Anyone who's done any serious benchmarking in a competitive space will instantly recognize that as a 'that cant be right' result.
It's MySQL Heatwave. Pretty sure this is referring to analytics usage.
Clickhouse has a similar claim.
If you look at https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/ and pick Clickhouse and Aurora for MySQL you get something in that ballpark. Heatwave claims to be faster than both Snowflake and Clickhouse.
In that case the fairer comparison should have been to Redshift, though I will concede that Amazon walked into this one themselves by overhyping Aurora's OLAP capabilities.
OLTP != OLAP, and the sooner database vendors learn to stay in their lane and focus on one use case, the better.
It is similar to how frequently someone says "lock-free" to highlight imaginary performance advantages. If someone says a database engine is fast because it is in-memory and lock-free, it smells wrong.
It seems like he was comparing an in-memory columnar datastore to a disk-based row-oriented database for OLAP workloads. So it certainly falls in the "used something in a way it's not meant to be used" bucket, and maybe also in the "very weird edge case" bucket if the implication is that a big company is going to keep a material chunk of its analytics data in RAM.
Python vs C/C++/Rust/Zig has even more startling performance differences.
If you’re looking for benchmarks of the same classes of software, among techempower benchmarks, the fastest on the charts are often well over 1000x faster.
Being 1000x slower than shit needs to be is, very literally, the default state of the vast majority of software today. I don’t even blink at 1000x claims cause that’s just the standard gains you get over popular software.
Perhaps, but Python vs C is hardly an apples-for-apples comparison. I could get 1000x differences benchmarking Aurora vs Redis for example. That's what I meant by "used in a way not meant to be used".
Broadly speaking, there's plenty of public benchmarks indicating that a properly-configured Aurora is within the same order magnitude as a properly-configured RDS Postgres which is in the same ballpark as MySQL. That's an indication to me that Aurora isn't fundamentally broken in some way, making a 1000x claim quite extraordinary.
The claim that “1000x is extraordinary” is demonstrably wrong.
You can browse virtually any modern website today and see time to full load of 15+ seconds, followed by time to link load of 7+ seconds.
Back in the days of single core pentiums, 1 second loads were considered severely broken.
Modern software on modern hardware takes tens of seconds to start, whereas software with more features in the pentium days loaded instantly.
1000x is not only not “extraordinary”, it’s actually the demonstrable norm today. You think it’s extraordinary as a result of simply not knowing what computers are capable of.
The load time of the oft-considered-bloated reddit.com for me is ~5s. Let's use that as a benchmark. If you told me you got reddit.com to load 1000x faster (5ms), then yes that is extraordinary.
You're also missing the point of my 'apples-to-apples' caveat. A modern webpage might load slowly, but it also does a lot more than a static html one-pager. Sure you might not consider that to be useful, but those features (tracking, A/B testing, ads, redundancy, CDN, etc.) are useful to someone.
And that’s why I also discussed the several web api benchmarks where you’ll see 10,000x differences from bottom ranking to top.
But you didn’t like that, so felt compelled to ignore it.
1,000x is literally nothing when discussing modern development practices.
I’m not saying that oracle is definitely 1000x faster, just that writing off claims of 1000x cause you dislike the number is not proper in software when you can immediately find 10,000x benchmarks of two directly competing software packages.
Show me a serious (i.e. used in production) web framework that is 10,000x faster or slower than React or Vue or Spring when measured on a real-life workload (i.e. not testing a single function in a hot loop).
All I'm saying is that if you're approaching a benchmark between serious competitors providing similar functionality used in the intended way, you almost never see 1000x+ performance differences.
Maybe if you compare the fastest to the slowest. But if actually compare the fastest options in each language, you rarely see things past a 10-20x slowdown.
> Python vs C/C++/Rust/Zig has even more startling performance differences.
There's no way you're seeing a >1000x speed difference in Python/Ruby/JS and C/C++/Rust/Zig/D without building some heavily contrived comparisons. That is not a normal differential.
The "high-level" languages are slower, certainly, but usually only on a single order of magnitude.
> 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.
So instead of giving actual metrics, just say "very fast", "super-fast" and "much faster". Even for wall street that seems a bit shallow.
That's a very misleading set of partial quotes to assemble in that order...
Ellison wasn't confused about any of the technical topics around cloud computing. He was complaining about the marketing trend at the time of slapping the "cloud computing" buzzword on all kinds of things that already existed.
This is a thing that happens in the tech world a lot, and it is pretty annoying. A more modern example is the over-use of "serverless" buzzword.
No, he’s not complaining about the marketing. He’s basically saying cloud computing is nothing, just a redefinition of existing computing. He’s not complaining about the marketing. He’s saying that cloud computing is only marketing. Clearly he was wrong.
Was he clearly wrong though? I listened through the whole clip and it seems like he was spot on to me. Steve Jobs made similar comments about cloud in the 90s - it’s really just mainframe 2.0.
No, cloud at root is dynamic on-demand provisioning. A lot of times SaaS built on top of cloud was (and is) marketed as cloud, without meaningfully offering dynamic on-demand provisioning to the customer, which blurs it a bit, but cloud had a distinct definition that was neither just SaaS or “mainframe 2.0” in any sense where using the term dismissively makes any sense.
He's the CEO, not the CTO. I don't recall Bezos ever giving a deep-dive talk about the metrics of AWS's networking stack. He left that to his tech folks.
I have absolutely no love for Ellison as you can see in my post history, but it's a bit silly to expect detailed tech specs from the CEO of a company on an earnings call with a bunch of investors that would have no idea what he was talking about if he did.
*I did in fact forget he changed his title when he gave co-CEO to Safra Catz and Hurd to rescue Hurd and not lose Catz in what was another of a long list of ethically questionable moves. It doesn't change the fact that he's completely removed from the technical details of their products and has been for 20+ years.
It really is amazing. From Oracle's Service Agreement:
4.2 You may not, or cause or permit others to:
perform or disclose any benchmark or performance tests of the Services, including the Oracle Programs, without Oracle’s prior written consent;
It certainly says something about your faith in your own product when you try to contractually prevent your customers from publishing performance information about their experience.
Title is a bit misleading, since Oracle is the brand and well as the a specific database product, he is claiming that Oracles cloud hosted version of mysql is faster than AWS Aurora, not claiming that Oracle DB is faster than mysql.
That is _probably_ what he means, but there is nothing in the quotes in the article to confirm that is _actually_ the case.
Also, the comment at the end of the article "... RDMA and other key drivers behind Oracle’s ascent to being the world’s hottest major cloud vendor" demonstrates that the person who wrote the article is not interested in asking hard questions. Oracle Cloud is quite a way from being the "hottest cloud vendor" by any meaningful metric, right now.
Its mentioned in the article a few times, and in a quote from Larry.
> "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."
It would be unsurprising to find that Oracle's MySQL cloud service is 1000x faster than AWS Aurora for some specific things, or maybe even entire classes of problems.
It would be equally unsurprising if Aurora is 1000x faster for other classes of problems.
Also from a quick google search it doesn't seem HeatWave supports Serializable isolation so not all customers will be able to migrate from Aurora. It's not a 1:1 replacement in terms of functionality.
This sounds more like an attack on the AWS hardware (Nitro?) . Does Nitro not have RDMA? I'm very curious if someone can discuss this. (Currently studying for AWS Solutions architect exam)
Was a couple of years since I was in the backend industry, but then I heard plenty of people settle for less rather than "dealing with Oracles licensing bull**".
You claim it's 1.5x-2x faster? Sure I might believe that despite your prohibition against benchmarks.
10x faster? You better show how your engineers pulled out that miracle.
1000x? You've either picked out a very weird edge case, used something in a way it's not meant to be used, or just made that up. Anyone who's done any serious benchmarking in a competitive space will instantly recognize that as a 'that cant be right' result.