...don’t believe that Oracle
has, or will ever get,
servers 2x faster than the
big three cloud providers.
...also would argue that
“speeding up the database”
isn’t something Oracle is
uniquely positioned to
offer.
Why is that so unreasonable? I can definitely imagine Oracle engineering a different kind of cluster, that could optimize for better throughput, and more efficient storage.
An RDBMS company is going to attack problems differently, and supply different services. They aren't hosting video content to support properties like YouTube, or photo sharing. They aren't virtualizing compute environments like Amazon. They aren't running Xbox gaming networks like Microsoft.
They operate business platforms, and SQL DBA tasks often optimize for high normalization of data. They run a proprietary network stack:
So, take all of this together, and a lot of bloat is trimmed from computing demands.
Their spend being 1/10th of other providers probably has a lot to do with who they deliver for. Consumer computing is pretty wasteful, in ways that business operations are not.
Sure, Oracle can't operate systems that exceed the speed of light, and probably doesn't have access to CPU architectures radically different from the rest of the industry, but based on those broad sweeping statements, it doesn't seem impossible that Oracle operates in ways other providers don't.
> a different kind of cluster, that could optimize for better throughput, and more efficient storage
It doesn't even require all that much imagination, considering how anemic the storage IO choices are under AWS. Until recently, EBS was connect by 10Gb/s ethernet. Now, I believe the best is 40Gb/s ethernet, but even that's not ubiquitous and is only equivalent to single 4-lane SAS3 connection. Local (to the node) storage options are extremely limited.
The typical cloud provider model seems geared toward scaling "out", even before scaling "up" (while price:performance effective), which, of course, is a great way to maximize revenue. For a user/customer, it's terrible for cost and for performance, but this doesn't seem to bother VC-funded startups, for example.
Whether Oracle has the knowledge already or is able to hire that knowledge to create such a different offering is an open question, as is if there are enough customers who care enough to pay for it.
An RDBMS company is going to attack problems differently, and supply different services. They aren't hosting video content to support properties like YouTube, or photo sharing. They aren't virtualizing compute environments like Amazon. They aren't running Xbox gaming networks like Microsoft.
They operate business platforms, and SQL DBA tasks often optimize for high normalization of data. They run a proprietary network stack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Net_Services
So, take all of this together, and a lot of bloat is trimmed from computing demands.
Their spend being 1/10th of other providers probably has a lot to do with who they deliver for. Consumer computing is pretty wasteful, in ways that business operations are not.
Sure, Oracle can't operate systems that exceed the speed of light, and probably doesn't have access to CPU architectures radically different from the rest of the industry, but based on those broad sweeping statements, it doesn't seem impossible that Oracle operates in ways other providers don't.