UPDATED 17:30 EDT / APRIL 12 2021

CLOUD

Factory for the cloud: Oracle outlines key differences with database competitors

Oracle Corp. did not become a multibillion-dollar technology giant by avoiding comparisons with its competitors.

The firm’s recent string of updates for the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse has given the company an opportunity to point out its differences with other major cloud database providers. Based on an exclusive interview with theCUBE by two Oracle senior executives, it’s taking full advantage of it.

Oracle is staking its claim on the database market by making the point that competitors in the market are not listening when businesses demand less complexity in managing information technology infrastructure. Customers want rapid insights from dispersed data sources without having to build or manage a complex process to achieve that, and Oracle claims its solution is geared specifically for this enterprise need.

“When you have all of this stuff spread over God’s green earth, trying to go from insight into action can take months if not years,” said Neil Mendelson, vice president of big data and advanced analytics at Oracle. “In Oracle’s case, we have the application, we have the infrastructure from the Autonomous Data Warehouse, so we just make it really easy. The reason that a lot of customers are now turning to us is they need to be a lot more agile and they need to be able to turn that insight into action immediately without it being a science project.”

Mendelson spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. He was joined in the interview by George Lumpkin, vice president of product management at Oracle, and they discussed Oracle’s pivot in the cloud platform arena, key differences with competitors in the database space, and the importance for customers to derive value from data warehouses.

Owning the database stack

Oracle’s moves with its Autonomous Data Warehouse come at a time when the company’s share of the cloud infrastructure market sits at 2%, based on research from Gartner, Canalys and Synergy Research Group. Some analysts believe that Oracle is bidding to own the entire database stack, a confluence of its hardware, Exadata database technology, and the data warehouse, all the way through to the application space.

Lumpkin uses the analogy of Tesla Inc. and its early struggles to establish a viable electric car business. The hardest part was building a factory that could make the car reliably at scale, not developing the car itself, according to Lumpkin. Oracle is seeking to build its own cloud infrastructure factory for enterprise users.

“What’s happened is we pivoted to building a cloud platform,” Lumpkin said. “We’re not just building a database; we’re taking all of these resources that we have with the expertise of building database software and we now are building the platform to run and manage the database software in the cloud. What we’re building is the cloud factory.”

Oracle’s position is that in building the factory it is also seeking to simplify cloud infrastructure management. Its autonomous solution, powered by machine learning that adapts and becomes more robust as time goes on, is viewed within the company as a competitive advantage versus other cloud infrastructure providers that Oracle believes are adding layers of complexity with every new release.

“As they continue to add more capability, they will in turn add more complexity,” Mendelson said. “We’re trying to take complexity out while others are adding it in. It’s an ironic twist.”

Providing a granular service

The differentiation between Oracle’s database services and those of its competitors isn’t purely confined to complexity, according to company executives. Oracle claims that Redshift, Amazon’s data warehouse product, was taken from a codebase used by a prior on-premises company and then adapted for the cloud.

“Redshift wasn’t born in the cloud,” Mendelson said. “Our starting point was not another company’s codebase, but our own codebase.”

SiliconANGLE reached out to AWS for comment on Oracle’s assertion and is still awaiting a response.

Oracle is also quick to point out that enterprise users are often forced to purchase more server capacity than needed. This contrasts with Oracle’s need-specific pricing that allows for greater granularity in use.

“If you look at Snowflake, it’s small, medium, large, extra-large, 2X large, but they are all factors of two, or if you look at AWS Redshift, you’re buying your database by the nodes,” Lumpkin said. “This isn’t cloud native; this is saying we have some hardware underneath our database and we need you to tell us how many servers you want. That’s not the way the cloud should work.”

Snowflake takes issue with Oracle’s characterization of its consumption options. In a statement provided to SiliconANGLE by its media representative, Snowflake labeled Lumpkin’s assertion “false” and noted that, from the start, Snowflake offered a true elastic product that leveraged scalable cloud resources.

“Snowflake pioneered elasticity with its unique architecture,” said the statement from the company. “A Snowflake user can start with a small configuration (i.e., XS compute cluster) and scale up or down near-instantly to satisfy their needs at a given moment. If allowed to do so, the compute cluster can also scale up or down automatically based on the workload.”

Functionality for key tasks

Oracle’s differences with Snowflake also involve functionality for key data management tasks, such as masking, a technique used to protect personally identifiable information during exercises such as software testing or user training.

“Last year they added masking, a functionality they didn’t have,” Mendelson said. “But there’s no capability for a business user to actually find the information that needs to be masked, and after the information is found, you require a technical person to implement the masking. In Oracle’s case, we’ve had masking and those capabilities for a long time.”

According to a statement released by Snowflake’s media representative, “Snowflake offers dynamic data masking and is working on additional capabilities to help classify sensitive data and tag-based policy enforcement. Snowflake’s approach to data policies is comprehensive and works for diverse workloads, including data engineering, data lake, data warehousing, data science and data sharing.”

Security remains a paramount concern for enterprises, and the handling of PII within cloud databases is also a key distinction, according to Oracle.

“Every cloud vendor can say they encrypt all of your data,” Lumpkin said. “What they are saying is we are securing your database, your database infrastructure. Oracle has to do that as well, but where we go further is to say we know what business users want; they want to secure their data.”

For its part, Snowflake disagrees with Lumpkin’s assertion about data encryption, claiming that it is also “false.” According to Snowflake’s media representative, “In fact, Snowflake offers encryption functions, cryptographic functions and allows users to define their very own masking functions on data within Snowflake’s databases. Those functions can also be used in conjunction with column-based masking policies.”

Oracle believes that it’s changing perception in the marketplace of how cloud data warehouses should be run along with views of the company’s role in driving that transformation. A “huge number” of existing Autonomous Data Warehouse customers are also major cloud provider users, according to Lumpkin, who claims they are pulling data from the cloud stacks and bringing it to Oracle.

“The big theme here is the business user should be able to get value directly from their data warehouses,” Lumpkin said. “Autonomous Data Warehouse is a service built to allow business users to get more value from their data; that’s what the cloud data warehouse market is. There is a huge misconception people might have when they first hear about this service: They think this is the same Oracle database they knew from 10 years ago, and that is absolutely not true. We built a cloud-native service for data warehousing with cloud features.”

Here’s the complete video interview one of many CUBE Conversations from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE:

Photo: ra2 Studio

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