After launching MySQL HeatWave in December, Oracle Corp. did not wait long to add enhancements to the database query accelerator and ratchet up the competitive pressure in the process.

The company announced a number of new enhancements and features for HeatWave this month.

In an exclusive interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio, Nipun Agarwal (pictured), vice president of MySQL, HeatWave and advanced development at Oracle, made it clear that response from customers has signaled an opportunity to offer a viable alternative to services from other cloud vendors.

“Initially, we were thinking there were going to be a lot of customers who were on-premises users of MySQL who were going to migrate to the service,” Agarwal said. “That was the case, but the part that was interesting and surprising is that we see many customers who are migrating from other cloud vendors or migrating from other cloud services to MySQL HeatWave. Most notably, the biggest number of migrations we are seeing are from AWS Aurora and Amazon RDS.”

Agarwal spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, about Oracle’s latest announcement. They discussed how customer interests guided Oracle’s decisions in the changes it made to MySQL HeatWave, the technology challenge of expanding query processing power, and benchmark data that places the database ahead of prominent cloud competitors.

Automation expected

The latest enhancements announced by Oracle were driven by customer requests following the database’s release at the end of 2020, according to Agarwal. At the top of the list was a desire for automation, which prompted the introduction of MySQL Autopilot this month, with automated provisioning, query plan improvement, error recovery and scheduling.

“When customers move their database from on-premises to the cloud, they expect more automation,” Agarwal said. “That was the No. 1 thing.”

Customers also expect to run data analytics at increasingly greater scale. In response, Oracle introduced MySQL Scale-out Data Management, which the company claims improves performance in data reload for HeatWave up to 100-fold. HeatWave’s cluster size has been significantly increased as well.

“When we went out with Version 1, given the footprint of the MySQL customers we spoke to, we thought 12 terabytes of processing at any given point in time would be adequate,” Agarwal recalled. “In the very first month, we got feedback that customers wanted us to process larger amounts of data with HeatWave. We increased deployment from 12 terabytes to 32 terabytes and, in order to do so, we now have a HeatWave cluster which can be up to 64 nodes.”

On the surface, Oracle’s decision to increase cluster size sounds like a simple tweak to expand capacity, along the lines of opening an extra dining room when the line outside a restaurant grows too long. However, Agarwal is quick to point out that the world of query processing is a different game.

“This is something which is extremely difficult to do in query processing,” Agarwal said. “As you scale the size of the cluster, the kind of algorithms, the kind of techniques you have to use so that you can achieve a very high efficiency with a very large cluster are not things which are easy to do. When customers process more data, they should expect the same kind of performance, the same kind of efficiency on a larger data size. This is something traditionally that other database vendors have struggled to provide.”

Benchmarking against rivals

In addition to making enhancements to HeatWave’s features and functionality this month, Oracle provided benchmark data generated by an independent, third-party firm. The company has signaled that it is prepared to compete head-to-head with Snowflake Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Redshift, and Google LLC’s BigQuery in the database market.

The benchmark data provided by Oracle claims that MySQL HeatWave is 1,400 times faster than Amazon Aurora for some query applications. When contacted for a response, an Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

“What we have found is that many customers running on Aurora started migrating to HeatWave, and these customers had a mix of transaction processing and analytics and the data sizes are much smaller,” Agarwal said. “Even those customers found there was a significant improvement in performance and reduction in costs when they migrated to HeatWave.”

Perhaps anticipating that some of its rivals may ultimately challenge the benchmark data supplied by Oracle for its new MySQL database product, the firm has placed its scripts in a GitHub repository with an open invitation for interested parties to test them out at their leisure.

“All of the scripts are published on GitHub, anyone is welcome, and we encourage customers to go and try it for themselves,” Agarwal said. “They will find that the numbers are absolutely as advertised. In fact, we had a couple of companies in the last several months who went to GitHub, downloaded our TPC-H scripts, and reported that the performance numbers they were seeing with HeatWave were actually better than what we had published back in December.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE