This quote perfectly sums up why Oracle should be terrified of Amazon

Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison has always liked to talk smack about his rivals and lately the rival getting the brunt of his attention is Amazon.

Every chance he gets, Ellison will claim running a database on Amazon's cloud is much slower than running one on Oracle's cloud. And don't even get him started on the performance of Amazon's own homegrown databases versus Oracle's pride-and-joy database.

But here's the rub. Manty corporate IT folks say they know that Oracle's database outshines Amazon's, but that alone isn't enough to win the day. One consultant summed up the situation perfectly. He was talking to Wall Street analyst Pat Walravens from JMP Securities at the AWS Summit in San Francisco this week. Walverens reported the conversation in a research note. (Walravens has been a critic of Oracle over the years. He currently rates Oracle's stock a "market perform.")

The consultant said that the Oracle database "is a great product, but it can't compete on cost or ease of use... It's like a Formula 1 race car - you need a great driver and a team to look after it."

So Oracle is racing to move its own customers into its own cloud where at least some of the management headaches will be mitigated, even as AWS CEO Andy Jassy crowed this week that Amazon's home grown database, Aurora, is "the fastest growing service in the history of AWS."

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