Ellison: “Amazon runs their entire operation on Oracle”

I actually have no doubt that the benchmarks are correct. However, what they are probably doing is using the Amazon Redshift default configuration.

For Redshift to be fast, you need to use a feature called "workload management". Redshift operates in a queuing model, and the default option is one queue with five concurrent queries.

If you throw an Oracle workload at Redshift WITHOUT configuring it, then yes, Oracle will be 15 times faster because Redshift is only running the default concurrency of 5 queries.

However, if you do configure Redshift for your workloads, to allow for higher concurrency, Redshift will blow Oracle out of the water, at 1/10 of the cost.

I know this because at our own company we're running multiple large Redshift instances. And then also our own customers use Redshift, and once we've helpd them fine-tune their cluster, they've never looked back.

But I have to give it to Larry - he's an excellent marketer...

------ I'm the co-founder of https://www.intermix.io/ - we help data engineers who use Amazon Redshift to be more productive with data

What he's saying is that Amazon's retail customer/orders/invoices databases run on Oracle databases. And the finance department is using Oracle Financials. (source: worked at Amazon, long time ago though).