Amazon’s Aurora and Oracle’s Autonomous ATP

Databases are very much like wine, cheese and trees: they get better as they age.

Amazon Aurora exists since 2015. The word aurora comes Latin, means dawn. The name was borne by the Roman mythological goddess of dawn and by the princess in the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty.

Both Amazon’s “dawn” Aurora and Oracle’s ATP are typical cloud OLTP systems.

The question is: what are their differences, which one is better and meant exactly for my needs?

Oracle ATP is based on Oracle’s database and Exadata, here are all the innovations adopted from both systems:

Amazon’s Aurora has 2 flavors: Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

Amazon Aurora MySQL is compatible with MySQL 5.6 using the InnoDB storage engine. Certain MySQL features like the MyISAM storage engine are not available with Amazon Aurora. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is compatible with PostgreSQL 9.6. The storage layer is virtualized and sits on a proprietary virtualized storage system backed up by SSD. And you pay $0.20 per 1 million IO requests.

Oracle’s Autonomous database comes also in 2 flavors: Oracle ADW and Oracle ATP. Check Franck Pachot’s article ATP vs ADW – the Autonomous Database lockdown profiles to see the differences of both cloud databases.

In general, one can compare Oracle ADW with Amazon Redshift and Oracle ATP with Amazon Aurora.

One way to compare is to look at the ranking provided by DB-Engines: Amazon Aurora vs. Oracle. No-brainer who the leader is: score of 1300 vs score of 5 in favor of Oracle.

Another interesting comparison comes from Amalgam Insights. Check how Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing lowers barriers to entry for data-driven business. Check out the DBA labor cost involved: 5 times less in favor of Oracle ATP compared to Amazon! All the routine DBA tasks have been totally eliminated.

The message from them is very clear: “Oracle ATP could reduce the cost of cloud-based transactional database hosting by 65%. Companies seeking to build net-new transactional databases to support Internet of Things, messaging, and other new data-driven businesses should consider Oracle ATP and should do due diligence on Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud for reducing long-term Total Cost of Ownership.”

This month (August 2018), there was an interesting article by Den Howlett entitled Oracle introduces autonomous transaction processing database – pounds on AWS. Here are 2 interesting and probably correct statements/quotes from there:

1. It really is hard to get off an established database, even one that can be as expensive as Oracle can turn out to be.
2. Some of the very largest workloads will not go to the public cloud anytime soon. Maybe never which in internet years is after 2030.

As a kind of proof of how reliable and fast Oracle’s Autonomous Transaction Processing database is consider the following OLTP workload running non-stop in a balanced way without any major spikes and without a single queued statement!

No human labor, no human error, and no manual performance tuning!