 Once a state and boring business dominated by IBM Oracle and at the time new comer Microsoft, along with a handful of wannabes, the database business has exploded in the past decade and has become a staple of financial excellence, customer experience, analytic advantage, competitive strategy, growth initiatives, visualizations, not to mention compliance, security, privacy and dozens of other important use cases and initiatives. You know, on the vendor side of the house, we've seen the rapid ascendancy of cloud databases, most notably from Snowflake, whose massive raises leading up to its IPO in late 2020 sparked a spate of interest and VC investment in the separation of compute and storage and all that elastic resource stuff in the cloud. The company joined AWS, Azure and Google to popularize cloud databases, which have become a linchpin of competitive strategies for technology suppliers. And, you know, if I get you to put your data in my database and in my cloud and I keep innovating, I'm going to build a moat and achieve a hugely attractive lifetime customer value in a really amazing marginal economics dynamic that was going to fund my future and I'll be able to sell other adjacent services, not just compute and storage, but machine learning and inference and training and all kinds of stuff, dozens of lucrative cloud offerings. Meanwhile, the database leader Oracle has invested massive amounts of money to maintain its lead. It's building on its position as the king of mission-critical workloads and making typical Oracle-like claims against the competition. Most recently, just yesterday, with another announcement around MySQL Heatwave, an extension of MySQL that is compatible with on-premises MySQL and is setting new standards in price performance. We're seeing a dramatic divergence in strategies across the database spectrum. On the far left, we see Amazon with more than a dozen database offerings, each with its own API and primitives. AWS is taking a right tool for the right job approach, often building on open source platforms and creating services that it offers to customers to solve very specific problems for developers and on the other side of the line, we see Oracle, which is taking a Swiss Army knife approach, converging database functionality, enabling analytic and transactional workloads to run in the same data store, eliminating the need to ETL. At the same time, adding capabilities into its platform like automation and machine learning. Welcome to this database power panel. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm so excited to bring together some of the most respected industry analysts in the community. Today, we're going to assess what's happening in the market. We're going to dig into the competitive landscape and explore the future of database and database platforms and decode what it means to customers. Let me take a moment to welcome our guest analyst today. Matt Kimball is a vice president and principal analyst at More Insights and Strategy. Matt, he knows products, he knows industry, he's got real world IT expertise, and he's got all the angles, 25 plus years of experience and all kinds of great backgrounds. Matt, welcome. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Holger Mueller, friend of theCUBE, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, in-depth knowledge on applications, application development, knows developers, he's worked at SAP and Oracle. And then Bob Evans, his chief content officer and co-founder of the Acceleration Economy, founder and principal of Cloud Wars, covers all kinds of industry topics and great insights. He's got awesome videos, these three-minute hits. If you haven't seen him, check him out. Knows cloud companies, his Cloud Wars minutes are fantastic. And then of course, Mark Stammer is the founder of Dragon Slayer Research, a frequent contributor and guest analyst at Wikibon. He's got a wide-ranging knowledge across IT products, knows technology really well, can go deep. And then of course, Ron Westfall, senior analyst and director, research director at Futurum Research, great all-around product, trends, knowledge, can take technical dives and really understands competitive angles, knows redshift, snowflake, and many others. Gents, thanks so much for taking the time to join us in theCUBE today. It's great to have you on. Good to see you. Good to be here. Thanks for having us. Thanks, David. All right, let's start with an around the horn. And briefly, if each of you would describe anything I missed in your areas of expertise, and then answer the following question, how would you describe the state of the database, data platform market today? Matt Kimball, please start. Oh, I hate going first, but that's okay. How would I describe the world today? In one sentence, I would say, I'm glad I'm not an IT anymore, right? So it is a complex and dangerous world out there, and I don't envy IT folks that have to support these modernization and transformation efforts that are going on within the enterprise. It used to be, you mentioned it, Dave, you would argue about IBM versus Oracle versus this newcomer in the database space called Microsoft. And don't forget Sybase back in the day, but now it's not just which SQL vendor am I gonna go with. It's all of these different and divergent data types that have to be taken, they have to be merged together, synthesized, and somehow I have to do that cleanly and use this to drive strategic decisions for my business. That is not easy. So you have to look at it from the perspective of the business user. It's great for them because as a DevOps person or as an analyst, I have so much flexibility and I have this thing called the cloud now where I can go get services immediately. As an IT person or a DBA, I am calling up prevention hotlines 24 hours a day because I don't know how I'm gonna be able to support the business. And as an Oracle or as an Oracle or a Microsoft or some of the cloud providers and cloud databases out there, I'm looking my chops because I have my market is expanding and expanding every day. Great, thank you for that, Matt. Holger, how do you see the world these days? You always have a good perspective on things. Share with us. Well, I think it's the best time to be in IT. I'm not sure what Matt is talking about. It's easier than ever, right? The direction is going to cloud. Kubernetes has won. Google has the best AI for now, right? So things are easier than ever where before you made commitments for five plus years on hardware and networking and so on on premise. And I got gray hair about worrying what was the wrong decision? No, just kidding. But you can have both besides just to be controversial, make it interesting, right? So yeah, no, I think the interesting thing specifically databases, right? We have this big, sweet versus best of breed, right? Obviously innovation, like you mentioned with Snowflake and others happening in the cloud. The cloud vendors were to save with their databases. Then we have one of the few survivors of the old guard as Amazon likes to call them with Oracle who's doing well both the traditional database. And now, which is really interesting remarkable from that, because Oracle was always the power of one to have one database, add more to it, make it what I call the universal database. And now this new heat wave offering is coming and my SQL open source site. So they're getting the second blackboard. So it's interesting that older players, traditional players who still are in the market are diversifying the offering. Something we don't see so much from the traditional to folks from Oracle on the Microsoft side or the IBM side these days. Great, thank you, all good. Bob Evans, you've covered this business for a while. You've worked at a number of different outlets and companies and you cover the competition. How do you see things? Dave, you know, the other angle to look at this from is from the customer side, right? You got now CEOs who are of any sort of business across all sorts of industries and they understand that their future success is going to be dependent on their ability to become a digital company, to understand data, to use it the right way. So as you outlined, Dave, I think in your intro there, it is a fantastic time to be in the database business. And I think we've got a lot of new buyers and influencers coming in. They don't know all this history about IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and whoever else. So I think they're going to take a long, hard look, Dave, at some of these results and who is able to help these companies not serve up the best technology, but who's going to be able to help their business move into the digital future? So it's a fascinating time now from every perspective. Yeah, great points, Bob. I mean, digital transformation has gone from buzzword to imperative. Mr. Stamer, how do you see things? I see things a little bit differently than my peers here in that I see the database market being segmented. There's all the different kinds of databases that people are looking at for different kinds of data. And then there is databases in the cloud. And so databases are cloud service. I view very differently than databases because the traditional way of implementing a database is changing and it's changing rapidly. So one of the premises that you stated earlier on was that you viewed Oracle as a database company. I don't view Oracle as a database company anymore. I view Oracle as a cloud company that happens to have a significant expertise and specialty in databases. And they still sell database software in the traditional way, but ultimately they're a cloud company. So database cloud services, from my point of view, is a very distinct market from databases. Okay, well, you gave us some good meat on the bone to talk about that. Last but not least, Ron Westlaw. Dave, did Mark just say Oracle as a cloud company? Yeah. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Take away the database. It would be interesting to have that discussion. But let's let Ron jump in here. Ron, give us your take. That's a great segue. I think it's truly the era of the cloud database. That's something that's rising. And the key trends that come with it include, for example, elastic scaling. That is the ability to scale on demand, to right size workloads according to customer requirements. And also I think it's going to increase the prioritization for high availability. That is the player who can provide the highest availability is going to have, I think a great deal of success in this emerging market. And also I anticipate that there will be more consolidation across platforms in order to enable cost savings for customers. And that's something that's always going to be important. And I think we'll see more of that over the horizon. And then finally, security. Security will be more important than ever. We've seen a spike in rare. We certainly have seen geopolitical originated cybersecurity concerns. And as a result, I see database security becoming all the more important. Great, thank you. Okay, let me share some data with you guys. I'm going to throw this at you and see what you think. We have this awesome data partner called Enterprise Technology Research, ETR. They do these quarterly surveys in each period with dozens of industry segments. They track clients spending, customer spending. And this is the database, data warehouse sector, okay? So it's taxonomy, so it's not perfect, but it's a big kind of chunk. They essentially ask customers within a category and by a specific vendor, are you spending more or less on the platform? And then they subtract the lesses from the mores and they derive a metric called net score. It's like NPS, it's a measure of spending velocity. It's more complicated and granular than that, but that's the basis and that's the vertical axis. The horizontal axis is what they call market share. It's not like IDC market share. It's just pervasiveness in the data set. And so there are a couple of things that stand out here and that we can use as reference point. The first is the momentum of Snowflake. They've been off the charts for many, many, for over two years now. Anything above that dotted red line, that 40% is considered by ETR to be highly elevated and Snowflake's even way above that. And I think it's probably not sustainable. We're going to see in the next April survey and next month from those guys when it comes out. And then you see AWS and Microsoft, they're really pervasive on the horizontal axis and highly elevated. They Google falls behind them and then you got a number of well-funded players. You got Cockroach Labs, Mongo, Redis, MariaDB, which of course is a fork on MySQL, started almost as protest at Oracle when they acquired Sun and they got MySQL. And you can see a number of others. Now Oracle, who's the leading database player despite what Mark Stammer says. We know, their cloud player happens to be a leading database player. They dominate in the mission critical space. We know that they're the king of that sector but you can see here that they're kind of legacy, right? They've been around a long time. They get a big install base. So they don't have the spending momentum and the vertical axis. Now remember, this just really doesn't capture spending levels, just so that understates Oracle but nonetheless, so it's not a complete picture. Like SAP for instance is not in here, no HANA. I think people are actually buying it but it doesn't show up here. But it does give an indication of momentum and presence. So Bob Evans, I'm going to start with you. You've commented on many of these companies, what does this data tell you? Yeah, Dave, I think that all these compilations of things like that are interesting and that folks at ETR do some good work. But I think as you said, it's a snapshot, sort of a two-dimensional thing of a rapidly changing three-dimensional world. You know, the incidents at which some of these companies are mentioned versus the volume that happens. I think it's, you know, with Oracle and I'm not going to declare my religious affiliation either as cloud company or database company, you know, they're all of those things and more. And I think some of our old language of how we classify companies is just not relevant anymore. But I want to ask too, something in here, that the autonomous database from Oracle, nobody else has done that. So either Oracle is crazy with, they've trotted out a technology that nobody's other than them is interested in or they're onto something that nobody else can match. So to me, Dave, within Oracle, trying to identify how they're doing there, I would watch autonomous database growth too because it's either going to be a big plan, it breaks through or it's going to be caught behind. So, and the Snowflake phenomenon, as you mentioned, that is a rare, rare bird who comes up and can grow 100% at a billion-dollar revenue level like that. So now they've had a chance to come in, scare the crap out of everybody, rock the market with something totally new, the data cloud, will the bigger companies be able to catch up and offer a compelling alternative or is Snowflake going to continue to be this outlier? It's a fascinating time. Really interesting points to a whole guy. I want to ask you, I mean, so when you, I've talked to certainly, I'm sure you guys have too, the founders of Snowflake, they came out of Oracle and they actually, they don't apologize to say, hey, we're not going to do all that complicated stuff that Oracle does, we were trying to keep it real simple. But at the same time, they don't do sophisticated workload management, they don't do complex joins, they're kind of relying on the ecosystem. So when you look at the data like this and the various momentums, and we talked about the diverging strategies, what does this say to you? Well, it's a great point and I think Snowflake is an example how the cloud can turbocharge a well-understood concept, in this case, the data warehouse, right? You move that and you find steroids and you see like, with some players who've been big in data warehouse, like say Teradata as an example here in San Diego, what could have been for them, right, in that part. The interesting thing, the problem so is the cloud hides a lot of complexity too, which you can scale really well as you attract lots of customers to go there and you don't have to build things like what Bob said, right, one of the fascinating things, right? Nobody's answering Oracle on the autonomous database. I don't think is that they cannot, they just have different priorities or the database not such a priority. I would dare to say that is for IBM and Microsoft right now at the moment. And the cloud vendors, you just hide that, right? Through scripts and through scale because you support thousands of customers and you can deal a little more complexity, right? It's not against them. Whereas if you have to run it yourself, very different story, right? You want to have the autonomous parts, you want to have the powerful tools to do things. Thank you. Matt, I want to go to you. You've set up front, you know, it's just complicated if you're in IT. It's a complicated situation and you've been on the customer side and if you're a buyer, it's obviously, like Holger said, cloud's supposed to make this stuff easier but the simpler it gets, the more complicated it gets. So where do you place your bets? I guess more importantly, how do you decide where to place your bets? Yeah, it's a good question. And to what Bob and Holger said, you know, around autonomous database, I think, you know, part of as I, you know, play kind of armchair psychologist, if you will, corporate psychologist, I look at what Oracle's doing and you know, databases where they've made their mark and it's kind of, it is their, that's their strong position, right? So it makes sense if you're making an entry into this cloud and you really want to kind of build momentum, you go with what you're good at, right? So that's kind of the strength of Oracle. Let's put a lot of focus on that. They do a lot more than database, don't get me wrong, but you know, I'm kind of going to, I'm going to short my strength and then kind of pivot from there. With regards to, you know, what IT looks at, what I would look at is, you know, as an IT director or somebody who is, you know, trying to consume services from these different, serve it from these different cloud providers. First and foremost, I go with what I know, right? Let's not forget, IT is a conservative group. And when we look at, you know, all the different permutations of database types outfields, SQL, NoSQL, all the different types of NoSQL, those are largely being deployed by business users that are looking for agility or businesses that are looking for agility. You know, the reason why MongoDB is so popular is because of DevOps, right? It's a great platform to develop on. And that's where it kind of gained its traction. But as an IT person, I want to go with what I know, where my muscle memory is, and that's my first position. And so as I evaluate different cloud service providers and cloud databases, I look for, you know, what I know and what I've invested in and where my muscle memory is, do I have, is there enough there? And do I have enough belief that that company or that service is going to be able to take me to, you know, where I see my organization in five years from a data management perspective, from a business perspective, are they going to be there? I mean, if they are, then I'm a little bit more willing to make that investment. But it is, you know, if I'm kind of going in this blind or if I'm cloud native, you know, that's where the snowflakes of the world become very attractive to me. Thank you. So Mark, I asked Andy Jaston in theCUBE one time, you have all these, you know, data stores and different APIs and primitives and, you know, very granular, what's the strategy there? And he said, hey, that allows us as the market changes, it allows us to be more flexible if we start building abstractions layers. It's harder for us. I think also it gave Amazon a good time to market advantage. But let me ask you, I described early on that spectrum from AWS to Oracle. We just saw yesterday, Oracle announced, I think the third major enhancement in like 15 months to MySQL HeatWave, what do you make of that announcement? How do you think it impacts the competitive landscape, particularly as it relates to, you know, converging transaction and analytics, eliminating ELT? I know you have some thoughts on this. So let me back up for a second and defend my cloud statement about Oracle for a moment. AWS did a great job in developing the cloud market in general and everything in the cloud market. I mean, I give them lots of kudos on that. And a lot of what they did is they took open source software and they rent it to people who use their cloud. So I give them lots of credit. They dominate the market. Oracle was late to the cloud market. In fact, they actually poo-pooed it initially. If you look at some of Larry Ellison's statements, they said, oh, it's never going to take off. And then they did a 180 turn. And they said, oh, we're going to embrace the cloud. And they really have. But when you're late to a market, you've got to be compelling. And this ties into the announcement yesterday, but let's deal with this compelling. To be compelling from a user point of view, you got to be twice as fast, offer twice as much functionality at half the cost. That's generally what compelling is. You're going to capture market share from the leaders who establish the market. It's very difficult to capture market share in a new market for yourself. And you're right. I mean, Bob was correct in this and Holger and Matt, in which you look at Oracle and they did a great job of leveraging their database to move into this market. Give them lots of kudos for that too. But yesterday they announced, as you said, the third innovation release and the pace is just amazing of what they're doing on these releases on Heatwave that ties together initially MySQL with an integrated built-in analytics engine. So a data warehouse built in. And then they added automation with autopilot. And now they've added machine learning to it. And it's all in the same service. It's not something you can buy and put on your premise unless you buy their cloud and customer stuff. But generally it's a cloud offering. So it's compellingly better as far as the integration. You don't buy multiple services, you buy one. And it's lower cost than any of the other services. But more importantly, it's faster, which again, given credit for, they have more integration of a product. They can tie things together in a way that nobody else does. There's no additional services, ETL services like glue and AWS. So from that perspective, they're getting better performance, fewer services, lower cost, they're aiming at the compelling side again. So from a customer point of view, it's compelling. Matt, you wanted to say something there. Yeah, I want to kind of on what you just said there, Mark. And this is something I've found really interesting. The traditional way that you look at software and purchasing software and IT is you look at either best of breed solutions and you have to work on the back end to integrate them all and make them all work well. And generally, the big hit against the, we have one integrated offering is that you lose capability or you lose depth of features, right? And to what you were saying, that's the thing I found interesting about what Oracle is doing is they're building in depth as they kind of build that service. It's not like you're losing a lot of capabilities because you're going to one integrated service versus having to use A versus B versus C. You're right. I love that idea. Yeah, not only you're not losing, but you're gaining functionality that you can't get by integrating a lot of these. I mean, I can take snowflake and integrate it in with machine learning, but I also have to integrate it in with a transactional database. So I've got to have connectors between all of this, which means I'm adding time. And what it comes down to at the end of the day is expertise, effort, time and cost. And so what I see the difference from the Oracle announcements is they're aiming at reducing all of that by increasing performance as well. Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but that's what I saw to the announcement yesterday. Yeah, one thing on the market, it's funny you say that because I started out saying, I'm glad I'm not in IT anymore. And the reason is because of exactly what you said, it's almost like there's a pseudo level of witchcraft that's required to support a modern data environment, right in the enterprise. And I need simpler, faster, better. That's what I need. I am no longer wearing pocket protectors. I have turned from break fix kind of person to business consultant. And I need that point and click simplicity, but I can't sacrifice depths of features of functionality on the back end as I play that consultancy role. So Ron, I want to bring in Rana. It's funny. Matt, you mentioned Mongo. I often say if Oracle mentioned you, you're on the map, but we saw them yesterday, Ron. They hammered Redshift's auto ML, they took swipes at Snowflake, a little bit of BigQuery. What were your thoughts on that? Do you agree with what these guys are saying in terms of heat waves capabilities? Yes, Dave, I think that's an excellent question. And fundamentally, I do agree. And the question is why? And I think it's important to know that all of the Oracle data is backed by the fact that they're using benchmarks. For example, all of the ML and all the TPC benchmarks, including all the scripts, all the configs and all the details are posted on GitHub. So anybody can look at these results and they're fully transparent and replicate themselves. If you don't agree with this data, then by all means challenge it. And we have not really seen that in all of the new updates in heat wave over the last 15 months. And as a result, when it comes to these fundamentals and looking at the competitive landscape, which I think is validity to outcomes such as Oracle being able to deliver 4.8 times better price performance than Redshift, as well as, for example, 14.4 better price performance than Snowflake and also 12.9 better price performance than BigQuery. And so that is looking at the quantitative side of things. But again, I think to Mark's point and to Matt's point, they're also qualitative aspects that clearly differentiate the Oracle proposition from my perspective. For example, now the MySQL heat wave ML capabilities are native, but they're built in and they also support things such as completion criteria. And as a result, that enables them to show that, when they're using Redshift ML, for example, you're having to also use their SageMaker tool and it's running on a meter. And so nobody really wants to be running on a meter when executing these incredibly complex tasks. And likewise, when it comes to Snowflake, they have to use a third party capability. They don't have it built in, it's not native. So the user, to the point, is having to spend more time and it increases complexity to use auto ML capabilities across the Snowflake platform. And also, I think it also applies to other important features such as data sampling. For example, with the heat wave ML, it's intelligent sampling that's being implemented, whereas in contrast, we're seeing a Redshift using random sampling. And again, Snowflake, you're having to use a third party library in order to achieve the same capability. So I think the differentiation is crystal clear. I think it definitely is refreshing. It's showing that this is where a true value can be assigned. And if you don't agree with it, by all means challenge the data. Yeah, I want to come to the benchmarks in a minute. But by the way, the gentleman who's the Oracle's architect, he did a great job on the call yesterday explaining what you have to do. I thought that was quite impressive. But Bob, I know you follow the financials pretty closely and on the earnings call earlier this month, Allison said that we're going to see heat wave on AWS. And the skeptic in me said, oh, they must not be getting people to come to OCI. And then they, you remember this chart they showed yesterday, it showed the growth of heat wave on OCI. But of course, there was no data on there. It was just sort of lines up to the right. So what do you guys think of that? Does it signal Bob desperation by Oracle that they can't get traction on OCI or is it just really a smart TAM expansion move? What do you think? Yeah, Dave, that's a great question, along the way there. Just inside of that was something that Allison said on the earnings call that spoke to a different sort of philosophy or mindset almost from Oracle. He said, we're going to make this multi-cloud, right? With a lot of the other cloud stuff is you wanted to use any of Oracle's cloud software, you had to use Oracle's infrastructure, OCI. There was no other way out of it. This one, but I thought it was a classic Allison line. He said, well, we're making this available on AWS. We're making this available on Snowflake because we're going after those users. And once they see what can be done here, so he's looking at it, I guess you could say it's a concession to customers because they want multi-cloud. The other way to look at it, it's a hunting expedition. And it's one of those uniquely, I think, Oracle ways. He set up front, right? He doesn't say, well, there's a big market. There's a lot for everybody. We just want our slice. He said, no, we're going after Amazon. We're going after Redshift. We're going after Aurora. We're going after these users of Snowflake and so on. And I think it's really fairly refreshing these days to hear somebody say that because now if I'm a buyer, I can look at that and say, to Mark's point, do they measure up? Do they crack that threshold ceiling? Or is this just gonna be more pain than a few dollar savings is worth? But you look at those numbers that Ron pointed out and that we all saw in that chart. I've never seen, Dave, anything like that in a substantive market, a new player coming in here and being able to establish differences that are four, seven, eight, 10, 12 times better than a competition. And as new buyers look at that, they're going to say, what the hell are we doing, paying five times more to get a poor result? What's going on here? So I think this is going to rattle people and force a harder, closer look at what these alternatives are. I wonder if the guy, thank you. I wonder if the guy, let's just skip ahead of the benchmarks. Guys, bring up the next slide. Let's skip ahead a little bit here, which talks to the benchmarks and the benchmarking, if we can. David Floyer, the sort of semi-retired Wikibon analyst said, Dave, this is gonna force Amazon and others, Snowflake, he said, to rethink actually how they architect databases. And this is kind of a compilation of some of the data that they shared. They went after Redshift mostly, but also, as I say, Snowflake, BigQuery. And like I said, you can always tell which companies are doing well, because Oracle will come after you, but they're on the radar here. Holger, should we take this stuff seriously? I mean, or is it grain of salt? What are your thoughts here? I think you have to take it seriously. I mean, that's a great question, great point on that, because like Ron said, if there's a flaw in a benchmark, we know this database traditionally, right? If anybody came up there, everybody will put who you put the wrong benchmark. It wasn't audited right, let us do it again, and so on. We don't see this happening, right? So kudos to Oracle to be aggressive differentiated and seem to having impeccable benchmarks. But what we really see, I think, in my view, is that the classic, and we can talk about this in 100 years, right, is the suite versus best of breed, right? And the key question of the suite because the suite's always lower, right? And no matter at which level of the stack you have the suite, then the best of breed, they will come up with something new, like a music cloud with the data warehouse and steroids and so on. The important thing is that you have to assess as a buyer what is the speed of my suite vendor? And that's what you guys mentioned before as well, right? Mark said that and so on, like this is the third release in one year of the heat wave team, right? So everybody in the database open source market and there's so many MySQL spin-offs to a certain point is put on chain on the speed of Nippon Agarwal's team putting out fundamental changes. And the beauty of that is, right, is so inherent to the Oracle value proposition, Larry's vision of building the IBM of the 21st century, right, from the silicon, from the chip, all the way across the seven stacks to the click of the user. And that's what makes the database what Robert Robb was saying, tied to the OCI infrastructure because designed for that, but it runs uniquely better for that. This is why we see the cross-connect to Microsoft. Heat wave, so it's different, right? Because heat wave runs on cheap hardware, right? Which is the bread and butter 886 scale of any data and any cloud provider, right? So Oracle probably needs that to scale OCI in a different category, not the expensive side, but also allows us to do what we said before, the multi-cloud capability, which ultimately CIOs really want because data gravity is real. You want to operate where that is. If you have a fast innovative offering which gives you more functionality and the R&D speed is really impressive for the space, puts everybody in silence, then it's a good bet to look at. Yeah, so you're saying that suite versus best-of-breed. I just want to sort of play back then, Mark. That suite versus best-of-breed, there's always been that trade-off. If I understand you, Holger, you're saying that somehow Oracle has magically cut through that trade-off and they're giving you the best of both. It's the development velocity, right? The provision of important features which matter to buyers of the suite vendor eclipses the best-of-breed vendor, then the best-of-breed vendor is in the hell of a potential trade-off. Yeah, go ahead, Mark. Yeah, and I want to add on what Holger just said there. I mean, the worst job in the data center is data movement. Moving the data sucks. I don't care who you are, nobody likes it. You never get any kudos for doing it well and you always get the ah-craps when things go wrong. So it's a terrible job. In the data center, Mark, all the time at cross-data centers, at cross-class, that's where the bleeding comes. Right, you get beat up all the time. So nobody likes to move data ever. So what you're looking at with what they announced with Heatwave and what I love about Heatwave is it doesn't matter when you started with it, you get all the additional features they announce. It's part of the service all the time. So, but they don't have to move any of the data. You want to analyze the data that's in your transactional MySQL database? It's there. You want to do machine learning models? It's there. There's no data movement. The data movement is the key thing and they just eliminate that in so many ways. And the other thing I wanted to talk about is on the benchmarks. As great as those benchmarks are, they're really conservative because they're underestimating the cost of that data movement. The ETLs, the other services, everything's left out. It's just comparing Heatwave, MySQL cloud service with Heatwave, versus Redshift. That Redshift in Aurora and Glue, Redshift. And Redshift ML and SageMaker, it's just Redshift. Yeah, so what you're saying is, what Oracle's doing is saying, okay, we're going to run MySQL Heatwave benchmarks on analytics against Redshift. And then we're going to run them in transaction against Aurora. Right. But if you really had to look at what you would have to do with the ETL, you'd have to buy two different data stores and all the infrastructure around that. And that goes away. Due to the nature of the competition, they're running narrow, best-of-breed benchmarks. They're using a sweet-level benchmark because they can do something new. Well, that's the earlier point. They're beating best-of-breed with a suite. And that's, I guess, to Floyer's earlier point, that's going to shake things up. But I want to come back to Bob Evans because I want to tap your Cloud Wars mojo before we wrap and line up the horses. You've got AWS, you've got Microsoft, Google and Oracle. Now, they all own their own Cloud. Snowflake, Mongo, Couchbase, Redis, Cockroach. By the way, they're all doing very well. They run in the Cloud, as do many others. I think you guys all saw the Andreessen commentary from Sarah Wong and Company to talk about the cost-of-good-sold impact of Cloud. So owning your own Cloud has to be an advantage because I got to pay other guys like Snowflake have to pay Cloud vendors and negotiate down versus having the whole enchilada, Safra Katz's dream. Bob, how do you think this is going to impact the market long-term? Well, Dave, that's a great question about how this is all going to play out. If I could mention three things. One, Frank Sluteman has done a fantastic job with Snowflake, really good company before he got there. But since he's been there, the growth mindset, the discipline, the rigor, and the phenomenon of what Snowflake has done has forced all these bigger companies to really accelerate what they're doing. And again, it's an example of how this intense competition makes all the different Cloud vendors better and it provides enormous value to customers. Second thing I wanted to mention here was, look at the Adam Salipski effect at AWS. Took over in the middle of May and in Q2, Q3, Q4, AWS's growth rate accelerated. And in each of those three cores, they grew faster than Microsoft's Cloud, which has not happened in two or three years. So they're closing the gap on Microsoft. The third thing, Dave, in this incredibly intense, competitive nature here, look at Larry Ellison, right? He's got his, the product that for the last two or three years, he said, it's going to help determine the future of the company, Autonomous Database. You would think he's the last person, the world is going to bring in it, in some ways, another database to think about there. But he has put his whole effort and energy behind this. The investments Oracle's made, he's riding this horse really hard. So it's not just a technology achievement, but it's also an investment priority for Oracle going forward. And I think it's going to form a lot of how they position themselves to this new breed of buyer with a new type of need and expectations from IT. So I just think the next two or three years are going to be fantastic for people who are lucky enough to get to do the sorts of things that we do. You know, it's a great point you made about AWS. Back in 2018, Q3, they were doing about 7.4 billion a quarter and they were growing in the mid-40s. They dropped down to like 29%, Q4, 2020. I'm looking at the data now. They popped back up last quarter, last reported quarter to 40% at 17.8 billion. So they more than doubled and they accelerated the growth rate. So maybe that portends people are concerned about snowflake right now, decelerating growth. You know, maybe that's going to be different. By the way, I think snowflake has a different strategy, the whole data cloud thing, data sharing. It's not, they're not trying to necessarily take Oracle head on, which is going to make this next 10 years really interesting. All right, we got to go. Last question, 30 seconds or less. What can we expect from the future of data platforms? Matt, please start. I have to go first again. You're killing me, Dave. I think, you know, I think you're going to see, in the next few years, I think you're going to see the major players continue to meet customers where they are, right? Every organization, every environment is, you know, kind of use these words bespoke and snowflake, pardon the pun, but snowflakes, right? But, you know, they're all opinionated and unique. And what's great as an IT person is, you know, there is a service for me, regardless of where I am on my journey and my data management journey, I think you're going to continue to see, with regard specifically to Oracle, I think you're going to see the company continue along this path of being all things to all people, if you will, or all organizations, without sacrificing, you know, kind of richness of features and sacrificing who they are, right? Look, they are the data kings, right? I mean, they've been a database leader for an awful long time. I don't see that going away any time soon. And I love the innovative spirit they've brought in with HeatWave. All right, great, thank you. Okay, 30 seconds, Holger, go. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing that we see is really that the trend to autonomous, as Oracle calls our self-driving software, right? So the database will have to do more things than just store the data and support the DBA. It will have to show what can provide insights, the OLAP side, it will be able to show to one machine learning. We haven't really talked about that. How interesting, exciting, what kind of use case we can get of machine learning running real time on data as it changes, right? So, which is part of the HeatWave announcement, right? So we'll see more of that self-driving nature in the database space. And because you said we can promote it, why check out my report about HeatWave, latest release already posted on Oracle.com. Great, thank you for that. And Bob Evans, please, you're great at quick hits. Hit us. Dave, thanks. I really enjoyed getting to hear everybody's opinion here today. And I think what's gonna happen too, I think there's a new generation of buyers, a new set of CXO influencers in here. And I think what Oracle's done with this MySQL HeatWave, those benchmarks that Ron talked about so eloquently here, that is gonna become something that forces other companies not just try to get incrementally better, I think we're gonna see a massive new wave of innovation to try to play catch up. So I really take my hat off the Oracle's achievement for gonna push everybody to be better. Excellent. Mark Stamer, what do you say? Sure, I'm gonna leverage off of something Matt said earlier. Those companies that are going to develop faster, cheaper, simpler products that are gonna solve customer problems, IT problems are the ones that are going to succeed or the ones that are going to grow. The ones who are just focused on the technology are gonna fall by the wayside. So those who can solve more problems, do it more elegantly and do it for less money are gonna do great. So Oracle is going down that path today, Snowflake's going down that path. They're trying to do more integration with third party, but as a result, aiming at that simpler, faster, cheaper mentality is where you're gonna continue to see this market go. Amen, brother Mark. Thank you. Ron Westfall, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. Well, thank you. And I'm loving it. I see a wave of innovation across the entire cloud, database ecosystem, and Oracle is fueling it. We are seeing it with the native integration of auto ML capabilities, elastic scaling, lower entry price points, et cetera. And this is just going to be great news for buyers, but also developers and increased use of open APIs. And so I think that is really the key takeaways. Just we're going to see a lot of great innovation on the horizon here. Guys, fantastic insights. One of the best power panels I've ever done. Love to have you back. Thanks so much for coming on today. Great job, Dave. Thank you. All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time.