When non-traditional databases became popular, I thought it was primarily driven by people short-sightedly prioritizing development time over all of the good relational database features.

Now I see things differently -- the non-traditional databases are just better at scaling horizontally, eventual consistency, and running in cloud environments than the traditional databases. They are easier to set up and use. Some of them now have pretty good relational features and schemas.

During the past decade the Oracles of the world have continued to think dismissively of new non-traditional databases, as I did at first. The non-traditional databases got better and better while Oracle kept doing a lot of the same stuff. Oracle just didn't take the competition seriously, and that's fair enough because the competition didn't deserve to be taken seriously at first -- but now it does, and it's becoming a threat to Oracle's business.

It's obvious that Amazon would want to use their own database products -- but the impressive thing is that those products, which are not very old, are already good enough to replace Oracle for a lot of use cases at very high scale.