Larry Ellison says there's 'no way' anyone would move from Oracle to an Amazon database (ORCL, AMZN)

Larry Ellison

At its earnings call on Monday, Oracle cofounder, chief technology officer, and executive chairman Larry Ellison said there's "no way" anyone would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database.
Amazon is trying to move off of Oracle databases, making some key progress this year when it switched off its largest Oracle data warehouse.
Still, for a company so focused on moving off of Oracle's database, it's taking a long time, Ellison said.

After Oracle reported its earnings Monday, Oracle founder Larry Ellison said on a call with analysts that he has no doubt that Oracle will stay dominant in the database market — and that Amazon Web Services, its foremost rival, is just "making all the noise."

"There's no way anyone would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database," Ellison said during the earnings call. "It's too expensive."

Amazon itself is having trouble doing this, Ellison said. CNBC previously reported that Amazon has plans to completely move off Oracle's databases by 2020.

Earlier this year, Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy tweeted that Amazon's consumer business will have 88% of its work on Oracle databases moved to Amazon's. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels also said in November that his best day at Amazon this year was when the retailer switched off its largest Oracle data warehouse and moved over to its own.

To that, Ellison said, nice try.

"[Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos gave the command, 'I want to get off the Oracle database,'" Ellison said. "They've been working on this for a few years. It's taken Amazon, who's dedicated to doing that several years, and they're not there yet."

What's more, Ellison said, Amazon makes it a habit to take free, open-source databases it didn't create itself and just sell the software on its cloud.

Amazon's popular Aurora database is based on MySQL, an open-source database that anyone can download and use themselves. Indeed, some startups have taken issue with Amazon's habit of taking open-source software and packaging it as a paid service, and gone on the offensive.

Bashing each other in public is something of a recent tradition between Amazon and Oracle. In October, Ellison said onstage that Oracle's database is "infinitely" better than Amazon's at Oracle's annual conference and that the retailer is "about 10, 20 years behind in database technology."

Oracle reported an EPS of $0.80 on revenues of $9.56 billion, beating Wall Street estimates.

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