Oracle's new database is half the price of Amazon - and that's in the contract

The Automated Database could solve a lot of security concerns - if it works as promised

Towards the end of September, Oracle announced its 18c Automated Database (AD) product: ‘The biggest technology breakthrough since the internet.' CTO Larry Ellison made this the focus of his opening keynote at Openworld - amongst his jabs at AWS.

The biggest threat in cyber security today is data theft: that's what gets people called before Congress. Cyber security is all about protecting and storing data in a safe place, Ellison said, and that place is the Autonomous Database.

Automation is key to defending data, and the AD can automatically detect threats and patch itself while running. "The worst data thefts in history have occurred after a patch was available to prevent a theft - they just weren't applied," said Ellison. Software updates like patches typically involve downtime, which businesses are reluctant to do.

The platform doesn't need a human to develop and deploy a method of countering a threat ("It didn't work at Equifax") - it does all of this itself, using machine learning.

"If you eliminate human labour, you eliminate human error"

Oracle promises 99.995 per cent reliability and availability, and that gave Ellison his first - but far from his last - opportunity to take a shot at Amazon. Amazon's 99.999 per cent reliability claim, he said, includes exceptions based on "all the times that it will actually be down" - so patching, maintenance, adding compute and more are not covered. "You guys really need to read Section 61 of your Amazon contract," he said, adding that there is no fine print in Oracle's conditions.

The AD is totally elastic, meaning no more over-provisioning to add more compute. Unlike other systems (oh alright, he said Amazon again), it doesn't need to be shut down to add power; switching from eight cores to 16 cores and back again is done live, on a per-task basis. That's where we heard perhaps the most significant announcement of the evening: "We guarantee your Amazon [Data Warehouse] bill is cut in half - and that will be in your contract."

Yes, Oracle is writing its cost savings into a clause in the official contracts. We look forward to seeing the legal fallout from that move. Amazon recently adopted a per-second pricing model, and that kind of granularity is hard to compete with, but Oracle seems very confident.

"You get all of this stuff but you have to be willing to pay much less… It all costs a fraction of what Redshift costs," Ellison joked.

The data warehouse version of the AD will be launched in December, and the OLTP version in June 2018.