Larry Ellison: Oracle Database 1,000x Faster Than AWS Aurora
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You claim it's 1.5x-2x faster? Sure I might believe that despite your prohibition against benchmarks.
10x faster? You better show how your engineers pulled out that miracle.
1000x? You've either picked out a very weird edge case, used something in a way it's not meant to be used, or just made that up. Anyone who's done any serious benchmarking in a competitive space will instantly recognize that as a 'that cant be right' result.
Clickhouse has a similar claim.
If you look at https://benchmark.clickhouse.com/ and pick Clickhouse and Aurora for MySQL you get something in that ballpark. Heatwave claims to be faster than both Snowflake and Clickhouse.
OLTP != OLAP, and the sooner database vendors learn to stay in their lane and focus on one use case, the better.
I mean on the fundamentals Heatwave adds a giant memory cache / query engine in front. That alone makes it faster than anything disk based.
As to Redshift, yes, they claim it's faster than Redshift too by quite a bit.
(I use claim as it's against the ToS to benchmark it independently)
Being in-memory does not make OLAP databases faster. And typically, "in-memory" is a disadvantage and a limiting factor in OLAP database architecture.
I have a presentation on this topic: https://presentations.clickhouse.com/meetup53/optimizations/
It is similar to how frequently someone says "lock-free" to highlight imaginary performance advantages. If someone says a database engine is fast because it is in-memory and lock-free, it smells wrong.
If you’re looking for benchmarks of the same classes of software, among techempower benchmarks, the fastest on the charts are often well over 1000x faster.
Being 1000x slower than shit needs to be is, very literally, the default state of the vast majority of software today. I don’t even blink at 1000x claims cause that’s just the standard gains you get over popular software.
Broadly speaking, there's plenty of public benchmarks indicating that a properly-configured Aurora is within the same order magnitude as a properly-configured RDS Postgres which is in the same ballpark as MySQL. That's an indication to me that Aurora isn't fundamentally broken in some way, making a 1000x claim quite extraordinary.
You can browse virtually any modern website today and see time to full load of 15+ seconds, followed by time to link load of 7+ seconds.
Back in the days of single core pentiums, 1 second loads were considered severely broken.
Modern software on modern hardware takes tens of seconds to start, whereas software with more features in the pentium days loaded instantly.
1000x is not only not “extraordinary”, it’s actually the demonstrable norm today. You think it’s extraordinary as a result of simply not knowing what computers are capable of.
The load time of the oft-considered-bloated reddit.com for me is ~5s. Let's use that as a benchmark. If you told me you got reddit.com to load 1000x faster (5ms), then yes that is extraordinary.
You're also missing the point of my 'apples-to-apples' caveat. A modern webpage might load slowly, but it also does a lot more than a static html one-pager. Sure you might not consider that to be useful, but those features (tracking, A/B testing, ads, redundancy, CDN, etc.) are useful to someone.
But you didn’t like that, so felt compelled to ignore it.
1,000x is literally nothing when discussing modern development practices.
I’m not saying that oracle is definitely 1000x faster, just that writing off claims of 1000x cause you dislike the number is not proper in software when you can immediately find 10,000x benchmarks of two directly competing software packages.
All I'm saying is that if you're approaching a benchmark between serious competitors providing similar functionality used in the intended way, you almost never see 1000x+ performance differences.
This isn't the open source MySQL being compared. MySQL Heatwave is an in-memory analytics cluster that works as a MySQL plugin. It's cloud only.
In a way it's similar to AlloyDB from GCP, which has similar style claims (maybe not 1000x)
There's no way you're seeing a >1000x speed difference in Python/Ruby/JS and C/C++/Rust/Zig/D without building some heavily contrived comparisons. That is not a normal differential.
The "high-level" languages are slower, certainly, but usually only on a single order of magnitude.
So instead of giving actual metrics, just say "very fast", "super-fast" and "much faster". Even for wall street that seems a bit shallow.
So, Infiniband then. It's not like they're the only ones using it, nor the only ones using it at scale.
Even Azure has it as an option:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/ove...
"it is the most nonsensical .. maybe I'm an idiot, it's really just complete gibberish..."
Ellison wasn't confused about any of the technical topics around cloud computing. He was complaining about the marketing trend at the time of slapping the "cloud computing" buzzword on all kinds of things that already existed.
This is a thing that happens in the tech world a lot, and it is pretty annoying. A more modern example is the over-use of "serverless" buzzword.
Should have had an ellipsis between the 2nd and 3rd bit, but the intent wasn't altered. He's calling it gibberish and nonsense.
I wasn't trying to imply that he actually was confused, I was trying to show how he thought the term was gibberish.
I mean, who would take seriously the thought that Ellison actually thought of himself as an idiot.
IE: not wrong, but too literal and short sighted.
> IE: not wrong
Private cloud is cloud, and its not someone else’s computer, so, “not wrong” is not not wrong.
I have absolutely no love for Ellison as you can see in my post history, but it's a bit silly to expect detailed tech specs from the CEO of a company on an earnings call with a bunch of investors that would have no idea what he was talking about if he did.
*I did in fact forget he changed his title when he gave co-CEO to Safra Catz and Hurd to rescue Hurd and not lose Catz in what was another of a long list of ethically questionable moves. It doesn't change the fact that he's completely removed from the technical details of their products and has been for 20+ years.
4.2 You may not, or cause or permit others to: perform or disclose any benchmark or performance tests of the Services, including the Oracle Programs, without Oracle’s prior written consent;
It's nuts!
Lots of commercial software does. SQL Server does (or did in the past), Atlassian does, etc.
No you can't see it. It goes to a different school.
Also, the comment at the end of the article "... RDMA and other key drivers behind Oracle’s ascent to being the world’s hottest major cloud vendor" demonstrates that the person who wrote the article is not interested in asking hard questions. Oracle Cloud is quite a way from being the "hottest cloud vendor" by any meaningful metric, right now.
> "We’ve announced a new database — a new version of MySQL with a fast query processor called HeatWave — and we have customers moving from Amazon Aurora where they’re experiencing a 1,000x speedup versus Aurora."
It would be equally unsurprising if Aurora is 1000x faster for other classes of problems.
Larry's word is worth as much as you think it is: nothing.
You haven't even bothered to compete since SPARC.
When you're back in the game, let us know.
Tencent 814,854,791
Oceanbase 707,351,007
Oracle 11g SPARC 30,249,688
> So we’re a thousand times faster in query processing than Amazon’s version of MySQL
No, “some customers are experiencing 1,000 speedup”, even if true, does not imply that, in general, your db offering is 1,000 faster.
When you put a giant memory based parallel query engine in front, it's definitely possible to be 1000x faster :).
Heatwave adds a cluster of memory based columnar storage to MySQL. It's not your typical disk based query.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/11/efa-suppo...
Perhaps it's better now?