Larry Ellison, Oracle Corp.’s executive chairman and chief technology officer, will need to come up with another excuse to take a dig at Amazon Web Services Inc. after his archrival announced it has finally moved off the company’s databases.

AWS announced today that Amazon.com Inc.’s consumer business has decommissioned the last of its Oracle databases, having migrated 75 petabytes of data from almost 7,500 instances to its own database services.

The move means that Ellison will no longer be able to keep on trashing Amazon for its dependence on its rival, something the Oracle boss has long cited as a reason as to why his own company’s database service is superior.

AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr explained in a blog post that more than 100 teams in Amazon’s consumer business participated in the migration effort, which now serves as a case study for customers considering doing something similar.

“Over the years we realized that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases,” Barr said. “Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators (DBAs) spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted.”

Oracle would most likely retort that its Autonomous Database service eliminates much of this manual work. But still, Amazon was probably eager to ditch Oracle in order to showcase its own databases, such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service and Amazon Redshift.

“AWS’s final move off Oracle marks the end of a multiyear project, said Grant Kirkwood, vice president of Cloud Architecture at Unitas Global LLC. “The move demonstrates the maturity and scalability of AWS’ Aurora and RDS services. While AWS has topped the cloud market for several years, the provider is now strong enough to replace Oracle’s infrastructure for their consumer cloud.”

Naturally Amazon is also claiming some big performance gains from the move, saying it has achieved latency reductions of 40% and lowered its database administrative overhead by 70%. Overall, its database costs have gone down by 60%, Barr said.

Charles King of Pund-IT Inc. said Amazon deserved congratulations for completing its migration, but noted that the company provided little information about the time and costs related to the project. He said these were likely to be considerable, and are critical details for any company considering a similar move.

“It’s great for Amazon and AWS but it would be silly to assume that other companies can capture equal benefits by signing up for AWS database services,” King said.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. agreed, adding that what CIOs would most like to see is a comparison of moving to AWS versus using the latest Oracle Exadata platform. “This is the big question enterprises have, and the answer cannot be derived from what Amazon has shared,” he said.

“Another interesting part of the migration is that Amazon has moved loads from Oracle’s universal database to its own specialized databases,” Mueller said. “But customers will want to know why Amazon did not use those in the first place, and why it went with an inefficient implementation on Oracle to begin with.”

One thing Amazon did say is that it still has to keep using some Oracle databases. “Some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated,” Barr said.

Image: AWS