 The innovation around databases has exploded over the last few years, not only do organizations continue to rely on database technology to manage their most mission critical business data, but new use cases have emerged that process and analyze unstructured data, they share data at scale, they protect data, provide greater heterogeneity. New technologies are being injected into the database equation, not just cloud, which has been a huge force in the space, but also AI to drive better insights and automation, blockchain to protect data to provide better auditability, new file formats to expand the agility of database technology and more. Debates abound as to who's the best, number one, the fastest, the most cloudy, the least expensive, et cetera. But there is no debate when it comes to leadership and mission critical database technologies. That status goes to Oracle and with me to talk about the developments in database technology in the market is CUBE alum Juan Loiza, who's executive vice president of mission critical database technology at Oracle. Juan, always great to see you. Thanks for making some time. Thanks, great to see you, Dave. Always pleasure to join you. Yeah, and I hope you have some time because I got a lot of questions for you. I want to start with- I love questions. Good, I want to start and we'll go deep if you're up for it. I want to start with the GoldenGate announcement. We're covering that recent announcement, the service on OCI. GoldenGate is part of this, your super high availability capabilities that Oracle is so well known for. What do we need to know about the new service and what it brings for your customers? Yeah, so first of all, GoldenGate is all about creating real-time data throughout an enterprise. So it does replication, data integration, moving data into analytic workloads, streaming analytics of data, migrating of databases and making databases highly available. All those are use cases for real-time data movement. And GoldenGate is really the leading product in the market has been for many years. We have about 80% of the global Fortune 500 running GoldenGate today, in addition to thousands and thousands of smaller customers. So it is the premier data integration, replication, high availability, anything involving moving data in real-time, GoldenGate is the premier platform. And so we've had that available as a product for many years. And what we just recently done is we've released it as a cloud service, as a fully managed and automated cloud service. So that's kind of the big new thing that's happening right now. So is that what's unique about this? Is it's now a service? Are there other attributes that are unique to Oracle? Yeah, so the service is kind of the most basic part to it, but the big thing about the service is it makes this product dramatically easier to use. So traditionally the data integration, replication products, although very powerful, all sort of very complex to use. And one of the big benefits of the service is we've made it dramatically simpler. So not just super experts can use it, but anyone can use it. And also as part of releasing it as a cloud service, we've done a number of unique things, including making it completely elastically scalable, pay-per-use and dynamic scalability. So just in time, real-time scalability. So as your workload increases, we automatically increase the throughput of GoldenGate. So previously you had to figure all this stuff out ahead of time, it was very static, all these products have been very static. Now it's completely dynamic, a native cloud product, and that's very unique in the market. So I mean, from an availability standpoint, I guess IBM sorta has this with DB2, but it doesn't offer the heterogeneity that GoldenGate has. But what about like AWS, Microsoft, Google? Do they provide services like GoldenGate? There's really nothing like the GoldenGate service. When you're talking about people like Google and Azure, they really have do-it-yourself third-party products. So there'll be a third-party data integration replication product, and it's kind of available in their marketplace, and customers have to do everything. So it's basically a put-it-together-your-own-kit, and it's very complicated. I mean, these data integration products have always been complicated, and they're even more complicated in the cloud if you have to do everything yourself. Amazon has a product, but it's really focused on basic data migration to their cloud. It doesn't have the same capabilities as Oracle has. It doesn't have elasticity. It doesn't have paper use. So it's really not very cloudy at all. Well, so, I mean, the biggest customers of obviously have always glommed onto GoldenGate because they need that super ultra-high availability, and they're capable of do-it-yourself. So tell us how this compares to DIY. Yeah, so, you mentioned the big customers. So you're absolutely right. The big customers have been big users of GoldenGate. Smaller customers are users as well. However, it's been challenging because it's complicated. Data integration has been a complicated area of data management, one of the most complicated. And so one of the things this does is it expands the market and makes it much dramatically easier for smaller companies that don't have as many IT resources to use the product. Also, smaller companies obviously don't have as much data as the really large giants, and they don't have as much data throughput. So traditionally, the price has been high for a small customer. But now with paper use in the cloud, it eliminates the two big blockers for smaller enterprises, which are the high fixed costs and the complexity of the products. And which, by the way, is helpful for everyone also. And for big customers, they've often also struggled with elasticity. So sometimes a huge batch job will kick in, the rate of change increases, and suddenly the replication product doesn't keep up because on-prem products aren't really very elastic. So it helps large customers as well. Everybody loves these abuse, but the elasticity paper use, the on-demand nature of it, it's really helpful for everybody. Well, and because it's delivered as a service, I would imagine for the large customers that you're giving them more granularity so they can apply it maybe for a single application as opposed to trying to have to justify it across a whole suite. And because the cost is higher, but now if you're allowing me to pay by the drink, is that right? I could just sort of apply it at a more granular level. Yes, that's exactly right. So it's really paper use. You can use it as much or as little as you want. You just pay for what you use. And as I mentioned, it's not a static payment either. So if you have a lot of data loads going on and right now you pay a little more, at night when you have less going on, you pay a lot less. So you really just pay for what you use. And it's very easy to set it up for a single application or all your applications. How about for things like continuous replication or real-time analytics? Is the service designed to support that? Yes, so that's the heritage of Golden Gate. So we've, Golden Gate's been around for decades and we've worked with some of the most demanding customers in the world on exactly those things. So real-time data all over the enterprise is really the goal that everyone wants. Real-time data from OTP into analytics from one system to another system for availability. That is the key benefit of Golden Gate and that's the key technology that we've been working on for decades. And now we have it very easy to use in the cloud. Juan, what would be the overheads associated with that? I mean, for instance, you need a second copy. You need other database copies. And where does it make sense to incur that overhead? Obviously the super high availability apps that can exploit real-time, I think like fraud detection is the obvious one, but what else can you add there? Well, Golden Gate itself doesn't require any extra copies of anything. However, it does enable customers that want to create, for example, an analytics system, a data warehouse to feed data from all their systems in real-time into that data warehouse, for example. And it also enables the real-time capabilities enable high availability. And you can get high availability within the cloud, between on-premises in the cloud, between clouds. Also, you can migrate data, migrate databases without having to take them down. So all these capabilities are available now and they're very easy to use. Okay, thanks for that clarification. What about autonomous? Is that on the roadmap or what's your thought? Yeah, so the Golden Gate is essentially an autonomous service and it works with the Oracle Autonomous Database. So you can both use it as a source for data and as a place, as a sync for data, as a place to your writing data. So for example, you can have an autonomous OTP database that's replicating to another autonomous OTP database in real-time. And both of them are replicating changes to the autonomous data warehouse. But it doesn't all have to be autonomous. You can have any mix of autonomous, non-autonomous, on-prem, in-cloud, in anybody's cloud. So that's the beauty of Golden Gate. It's extremely flexible. Well, you mentioned elasticity a couple of times. I mean, why is that so important that the Golden Gate on OCI gives you that elastic, whatever, billing, the auto-scaling? Talk to me in terms of what that does for the customer. Yeah, there's really two big benefits. One benefit is it's very difficult to predict workloads. So normally on an on-prem configuration, you have to say, okay, what is the max possible workload that's gonna happen here? And then you have to buy the product, configure the product, get hardware, basically size everything for that. And then if you guess wrong, you're either spending too much because you oversized it, or you have a big data real-time problem. The data can't keep up with the real-time because you've undersized the configuration. So that's hard to do. So the beauty of elasticity and the dynamic elasticity of paper use is you don't have to figure all this stuff out. So if you have more workload, we grow it automatically. If you have less workload, we shrink it automatically. And you don't have to guess ahead of time, you don't have to price ahead of time. So you just use what you use, right? You don't pay for something that you're not using. So it's a very big change in the whole model of how you use these data replication, integration, high-availability technologies. Well, I think I'm correct in saying, you know, Golden Gate primarily has been for big companies. You mentioned that, you know, small companies can now take advantage of this service. We talked about the granularity. And I can definitely see, so can they afford it? I guess it's part one. And then the other part of the question is, I can see Golden Gate really satisfying your on-prem customers and them taking advantage of it. But do you think this will attract new customers beyond your core? So two-part question there. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, small customers have been challenged by the complexity of data integration. And that's one of the great things about the cloud service is it's dramatically simpler. So Oracle manages everything. Oracle does the patching, the upgrades. Oracle does the monitoring. It takes care of the high availability of the product. So all that management complexity, all the configurations set up, everything like that, that's all automated, that's owned by Oracle. So small customers were always challenged by the complexity of product, along with everything else that they had to do. And then the other, of course, benefit is small customers were challenged by the large fixed price. So now with paper use, they pay only for what they use, it's really usable easily by small customers also. So it really expands the market and makes it more broadly applicable. So kind of same answer for, beyond your existing customer base, beyond the on-prem guys, that kind of, you answered my two-part question with one answer, so that was pretty efficient, pun intended. So the bottom line for me in squinting through this announcement is you've got the heterogeneity piece with Golden Gate OCI. And as such, it's going to give you the capability to create what I'll call an architecturally coherent and decentralized data mesh, big on this data mesh these days, kind of decentralized data. With the proviso that I got to be able to connect to OCI, which of course you can do with Azure, or I guess you could bring cloud a customer on-prem. First of all, is this correct? And can we expect you over time to do this with AWS or other cloud providers? It can move data from Amazon or to Amazon. It can actually handle any data wherever it lives. So yeah, it's very flexible. And it's really just the automation of all the management that we're running in our public cloud. But the data can be from anywhere to anywhere. Cool. All right, let's switch topics here a little bit. Just talk about some of the things that you've been working on, some of the innovation. I've sat through your blockchain announcement. It was very cool. Of course, I love anything blockchain and crypto, NFTs are exploding, saw the Coinbase IPO. It's just really an exciting time out there. I think a lot of people don't really appreciate the innovation that's occurring. So you've been making a lot of big announcements the last several months. You've been taking your R&D, bringing it into product. So that's great. We'd love to always see that because that's where the rubber meets the road. Just from the database side of the house, you announced 21C, the next generation of the self-driving data warehouse, ADW. Blockchain tables, now you've got Golden Gate running on OCI. Take us inside the development organizations What are the underlying drivers other than your boss? When we talk about our autonomous database, it is the mission critical Oracle database, but it's dramatically easier to use. So Oracle does all the management of automation, but also we use machine learning to tune and to make it highly available and to make it highly secure. So that's been one of our biggest products we've been working on for many years. And recently we enhanced our autonomous data warehouse taking it beyond being a data warehouse to a complete data analytics platform. So it includes things like ETL. So we built ETL into the autonomous data warehouse. We're building our Golden Gate replication into autonomous data warehousing. We built machine learning directly natively into the database. So now if someone wants to run some machine learning, they just run a machine learning query. They no longer have to stand up a separate system. So a big move that we've been making is taking it beyond just a database to a full analytic platform. And this goes beyond what anyone else in the industry is doing because we have a lot more technology. So for example, that ML machine learning directly in the database, the ETL directly in the database, the data replication directly in the database. All these things are very unique to Oracle and they dramatically simplify for customers how they manage data. In addition to that, we've also been working in our database product. We've enhanced it tremendously. So our big goal there is to provide what we call a converged database. So everything you need, all the data types, whether it's JSON, relational, spatial, graph, all the different kinds of data types, all the different kinds of workloads, analytics, OLTP, things like blockchain, microservices, events, all built into the Oracle database, making it dramatically easier to both develop and deploy new applications. So those are some of our big, big goals. Make it simple, make it integrated. Take the complexity. We'll take on the complexity. So developers and customers find it easy to develop and easy to use. And we've made huge strides in all these areas in the last couple of years. That's awesome. I wonder if we could land on blockchain again from I was kind of joking, but sort of on crypto. Dude, you're not about crypto, but you are about applying blockchain. Maybe you can help our audience understand what are some of the real use cases where blockchain tech can be used with Oracle database. Yeah, so that's a very interesting topic. As you mentioned, blockchain is very current. We see a lot of cryptocurrencies, distributed applications for blockchain. So in general, in the past, we've had two worlds. We've had the enterprise data management world and we've had the blockchain world. And these are very distinct, right? And on the blockchain side, the applications have mostly centered around distributed multi-party applications, right? So where you have multiple parties that all want to reach consensus and then that consensus is stored in a blockchain. So that's kind of been the focus of blockchain. And what we've done is very innovative. We're the first company to ever do this is we've taken the core architecture ideas and really a lot of it has to do with the cryptography of blockchain. And we've built, we've engineered that natively into the mainstream Oracle database. So now in mainstream Oracle database, we have blockchain technology built in and it's various, dramatically simpler to use. And the use cases, you asked about the use case. So that's what we've done and it's taken us about five years to do this. Now it's been released into the market in our mainstream 19C Oracle database. So the use case is different from the conventional blockchain use case which I mentioned was really multi-party consensus based apps. We're trying to make blockchain useful for mainstream enterprise and government application. So any kind of mainstream government application or enterprise application. And the idea of blockchain, the core concept of blockchain is it addresses a different kind of security problem. So when you look at conventional security, it's really trying to keep people out. So we have things like firewalls, passwords, network encryption, data encryption. It's all about keeping bad people out of the data. And there's really two big problems that it doesn't address well. One problem is that there's always new security exploits being published. So you have hackers out there that are working overtime, sometimes they're nation states that are trying to attack data providers. And every week, every month, there's a new security exploit that's discovered. And this happens all the time. So that's one big problem. So we're building up these elaborate walls of protection around our core data assets. And in the meantime, we have basically barbarians attacking on every side. And every once in a while, they get over the walls. And this is just what's happening. So that's one big problem. And the second big problem is illicit changes made by people with credentials. So sometimes you have an insider in your company, whether it's an administrator, a salesperson, a support person that has valid credentials, but that uses those valid credentials in some illicit way. They go out and change somebody's data for their own gain. And even more common than that, because there's not that many bad guys inside the company, although they exist, is stolen credentials. So what's happened in many cases is hackers or nation-states will steal, for example, administrative credentials and then use those administrative credentials to come into a system and steal data. So that's the kind of problem that is not well-addressed by security mechanism. So if you have privileges, the security mechanism says, yeah, you're fine. If somebody steals your privileges, again, you get the pass through the gate. And so what we've done with blockchain is we've taken the cryptography elements of blockchain, what we call crypto-secure data management, and we've built those into the Oracle database. So think of it this way, if someone actually makes it through over the walls that we've built and into the core data, what we've done with that cryptographic technology of blockchain is we've made that immutable, so you can't change it. So even if you make it over the gate, you can't get into the core data assets and change those assets. And that's now built into Oracle database. It's super easy to adopt. And I think it's going to really enhance and expand the community of people that can actually use that blockchain technology. I mean, that's awesome. I could talk all day about blockchain. I mean, when you think about the hackers, they're all about ROI, value over cost. And if you can increase the denominator, they're going to go somewhere else, right? Because the value will decline. It's really the intersection of software engineering cryptography. And I guess even when you bring cryptocurrency into it, it's sort of the game theory. That's really kind of not what you're all about. But the first two pieces are really critical in terms of just next generation of raising that security hurdle. Love it. Now, go ahead, please. It's a different approach. I was just going to say it's a different approach because think about trying to keep people out with things like passwords and firewalls. You can have basically bugs in that software that allow people to exploit and get in. When you're talking about cryptography, that's math. It's very difficult. I mean, you really can't bypass math. Once the data is cryptographically protected on a blockchain, you know, a hacker can't really do anything with that. It's just, you know, math is math. There's nothing you can do to break it, right? It's very different from trying to get through some algorithm that's really trying to keep you out. Awesome. I said I could talk forever on this topic, but let me go into some competitive dynamics. You recently announced Autonomous Data Warehouse with, you've got service capabilities that are really trying to appeal to the line of business. I want to get your take on that announcement and specifically how you think it compares, name names, I'm not going to name names, you don't have to, but Snowflake, obviously a lot of momentum in the marketplace. AWS with Redshift is doing very, very well. Obviously there are others, but those are two prominent ones that we've tracked and our data shows have momentum. How do you compare? Yeah, so there's a number of different ways to look at the comparison. So, you know, the most simplest and straightforward is there's a lot more functionality in Oracle data warehousing. Oracle has been doing this for decades. We have a lot of built-in functionality. For example, machine learning natively built into the database makes it super easy to use. We have mixed workloads, we have spatial capabilities, we have graph capabilities, we have JSON capabilities. We have a microservice capabilities, we have rescue. So there's a lot more capabilities. So that's number one. Number two, our cloud service is dramatically more elastic. So with our cloud service, all you really do is you basically move the slides and say, hey, I want more resources, I want less resources. In fact, we'll do that automatically. That's called auto-skilling. In contrast, when you look at people like Snowflake or Redshift, they want you to stand up a new cluster. Hey, you have some more workload on Monday, stand up another cluster, and then we'll have two sets of clusters. Or maybe you'd want a third cluster, maybe you want a fourth cluster. So you end up with all these different systems, which is how they scale. They say, hey, I can have multiple sets of servers access the same data. With Oracle, you don't have to even think about those things. We all auto-scale, you get more workload, we just give it more resources. You don't even have to think about that. And then the other thing is we're looking at the whole data management end problem. So starting with capturing the data, moving the data in real time, transforming the data, loading the data, running machine learning and analytics on the data, putting all kinds of data in a single place so you can do analytics on all of it together. And then having very rich screen capabilities for viewing the data, graphing the data, modeling the data, all those things. So it's all integrated. It makes it super easy to use. So much easier, much more functionality and much more elastic than any of our competitors in the market. Interesting, thank you for those comments. I mean, it's a different world, right? I mean, you guys got all the market share, they got all the growth, those things over time. As you know, you've been around, you see it. They come together and then you fight it out and made the best approach win. So who are we watching? Also, I forgot to mention the obvious thing, which is Oracle runs everywhere. So you can run Oracle on premises, you can run Oracle on the public cloud, you can run what we call clouded customer. Our competitors really are just public cloud only. So customers don't get the choice of where they want to run their data warehouse. And one a while ago, I sat down with David Floyer and Mark Stammer. We reviewed how Gartner looks at the marketplace. And it wasn't surprised that when it came to operational workloads, Oracle stood out. I mean, that's kind of an understatement relative to the major competitors. Most of our viewers, I don't think expected for instance, Microsoft or AWS to be that far away from you. But at the same time, the database magic quadrant maybe didn't reflect that gap as widely. So there's some dissonance there with the detail workload drill downs were dramatic. And I wonder what your take on the results. I mean, obviously you're happy with them. You came out leading in virtually every category or you were one and two and some of the sort of even non-mission critical operational stuff. What can you add to my narrative there? Yeah, so Gartner, first of all, we're talking about cloud databases. So this is not on premises databases, pure cloud databases. And what they did is they did two things. One is the main thing was a technical rating of the databases, of the cloud databases. And there's other vendors that have been had database in the cloud for longer than we have. But in the most recent Gartner analysis report, as you mentioned, Oracle came out on top for cloud database technology in almost every single operational use case, including things like internet of things, things like JSON data, variable data analytics, as well as a traditional OTP and mixed workloads. So Oracle was rated the highest technology, which isn't a big surprise. We've been doing this for decades. We, over 90% of the global Fortune 500, run Oracle and there's a reason because this is what we're good at. This is our core strength, our availability, our security, our scalability, our functionality, both for OTP and analytics, all the capabilities, built-in machine learning, graph analytics, everything. So even when we compare narrowly things like internet of things or variable data against niche competitors that that's what all they do, we came out dramatically ahead. But what surprised a lot of people is how far ahead of some of the other cloud vendors, like Amazon, like Azure, like Google, Oracle came out ahead in the cloud database category. So a lot of people think, well, some of these other pure cloud vendors must be ahead of Oracle and cloud database, but actually not. I mean, if you look at the analysts, the Gartner analysts report, it was very clear. It was Oracle was dramatically ahead of their cloud database technologies with our cloud database. So pretty much out of time by last question, I've had some interesting discussions lately and we've pointed out for years in our research that of course you're delivering the entire stack, the database, part of the infrastructure, the applications, the whole engineered system strategy. And for the most part, you're kind of unique in this regard. I mean, Dell just announced that it's spinning off VMware. It could have gone the other direction and become more integrated hardware and software player for the data center. But look, it's working for Dell based on the reaction from the street post announcement. Cisco, they get a hardware and software model that's sort of integrated, but the company's value that peaked back in the dot-com boom, it's been very slow to bounce back. But my point is for these companies, the street doesn't value the integrated model. Oracle is kind of the exception. It's trading at all time highs and they're not going to comment on the stock price. But I guess an SAP until it missed and guided conservatively was kind of on the good trajectory. But so I'm wondering, why do you think Oracle strategy resonates with investors but not so much those companies? Is it because you have the applications piece? I mean, maybe that's kind of my premise for SAP, but what's your take? Why is it working for you? Well, okay, I think it's pretty simple, which is some of our competitors, for example, they might have a software product and a hardware product, but mostly those are acquired and they're separate products that just happen to be in a portfolio. They are not a single company with a single vision and joint engineering going on. It's really, hey, I got the software on over here. I got the hardware over there, but they don't really talk to each other. They don't really work together. They're not trying to develop something where the stack is actually not just integrated but engineered together. And that is really the key. Oracle focuses on data management top to bottom. So we have everything from our ERP, CRM applications, talking to our database, talking to our engineer systems, running in our cloud. And it's all completely engineered together. So Oracle doesn't just acquire these things and kind of glue them together, we actually engineer them together. And that's fundamentally the difference. You can buy two things and have them as two separate divisions in your company, but it doesn't really get you a whole lot. Juan, it's always a pleasure. I love these conversations and hope we can do more in the future. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Pleasure, Dave. Nice to talk to you. All right, keep it right there everybody or thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time.