Oracle Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison is focused on competing with Amazon Web Service in the database race, even as rumblings of an impending TikTok deal dominate headlines. At the company’s Q2 earnings report, Ellison evaded questions about Reuters’ reporting that Oracle is striking a deal to store TikTok’s U.S. user data securely away from the app’s parent company, ByteDance.
The deal could mark the finale to TikTok’s U.S. data regulation drama that began in 2020 and briefly included a failed acquisition, in whole or part, by Oracle. But at the time of the Q2 earnings call, Ellison maintained silence before any deal is inked.
With or without TikTok, Ellison has his hands full. The CEO has hopes that Oracle MySQL HeatWave will replace AWS’ Aurora relational database service for Redshift and Snowflake cloud data warehouse users. He claims the high-performance query accelerator outperforms its competition, and in some cases, replaces Aurora entirely. Despite his focus on competing with Amazon, Oracle is preparing to release MySQL HeatWave for AWS as well as Microsoft Azure. AWS dominates the cloud services market, with Azure and Google Cloud closest behind it; Oracle still trails most of the major players.
