Oracle's Larry Ellison says Amazon’s database is like a semi-autonomous car: ‘You get in, you start driving, you die’ (ORCL, AMZN)

Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison, Oracle's co-founder, executive chairman and chief technology officer, took the stage at the company's OpenWorld keynote and came out swinging against Amazon.
Ellison claimed that Oracle's autonomous database is "infinitely" ahead of Amazon's database.
Ellison also announced the Oracle Generation 2 Cloud, which has more privacy and security built in and is now available for new customers.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer, spent much of his time on stage Monday bashing Amazon, as usual, saying the rival company is “about 10, 20 years behind in database technology.”

Oracle's autonomous database is also still “infinitely” ahead of Amazon's cloud business — Amazon Web Services —the 74-year-old billionaire founder declared at the Oracle OpenWorld keynote. Oracle’s database, which includes includes automatic provisioning, security, backup, and more, is completely autonomous, Ellison said, while Amazon’s is "semi-autonomous."

“A semi-autonomous database is like a semi-autonomous car,” Ellison said. “You get in, you start driving, you die.”

Ellison also announced the Oracle Generation 2 Cloud. The Generation 2 cloud is available now for all new customers, and current customers will have their cloud updated to Generation 2 by next year.

“We use the latest machine learning technology and build autonomous robots to go out and search and destroy threats that are inside our cloud,” Ellison said.

Security, apps and more trash talk

The Generation 2 cloud has more privacy for customer data and bots that can stop security threats. With the AWS cloud, Ellison claimed, Amazon can see customers’ data, and customers could also potentially access other customers’ data.

“They have no autonomous features, not available…They’ve got none of that,” Ellison said. “We automatically keep running. In this case, we are infinitely faster and infinitely cheaper.”

Ellison also took time to lampoon Amazon for taking and selling open-source database projects developed by others, projects that are made freely available to the public to use and modify.

It’s not uncommon for Amazon to do this, and it even caused software company Redis Labs to introduce licensing changes that would prevent Amazon and other major cloud companies from making money off of their projects.

In the coming year, Oracle plans to focus on growing its application business, CEO Mark Hurd previously told Business Insider.

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