What are industry experts saying about HeatWave MySQL?
Industry analysts discuss HeatWave MySQL
"The resulting architecture is elegant, allowing the prioritization of queries to enable the Holy Grail of insight to action for enterprise decision-making."
—Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“The evolution of MySQL continues as Oracle accelerates developer velocity. Oracle previously provided a single unified platform for both OLTP and OLAP, eliminating the need for multiple databases and tools to ETL across databases. Now Oracle brings out new innovations which are set to likely disrupt the market, significantly lifting the expectations for what open source cloud databases should be. With machine learning-based automation in Autopilot and scaling in memory, nodes, and storage, Oracle sets developers free to develop next generation applications running on HeatWave MySQL ”
—Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Leading Cloud Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research published his take on MySQL Autopilot and concluded that "Customers using MySQL or MySQL-compatible databases should evaluate MySQL Database Service with HeatWave now."
"HeatWave MySQL is priced less than all comparable cloud database services, so talk about value for your money—HeatWave is off the charts…the addition of MySQL Autopilot to HeatWave MySQL has made an already attractive offering even more attractive."
Read the report (PDF)
"Oracle continues to show the industry what’s possible in MySQL. After introducing HeatWave MySQL, a single unified platform for both OLTP and OLAP, and automating management processes with Autopilot, Oracle now adds machine learning to HeatWave MySQL. Once again, with this innovation, Oracle eliminates the need for multiple service offerings and tools for users to integrate machine learning into their applications—plus costly and time-consuming ETL. But that’s just the start, HeatWave ML fully automates model training, inference, and explanation without data or models leaving the database. The result is faster, and cheaper ML compared to other platforms. For developers, HeatWave ML is a time saver, accelerating their app development velocity, increasing model accuracy."
—Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
"HeatWave does machine learning the right way. By bringing ML to the data with HeatWave ML in a cost-efficient, automated way, HeatWave accelerates ML adoption."
"What if a design could bring the ML to the data, eliminating the need for ETL processes and enabling faster and close to real-time ML usage? That’s what the HeatWave MySQL team has achieved."
"...it moves ML execution and modeling closer to real-time, because the elimination of ETL processes enables ML to directly execute on the data stored in the OLTP area of HeatWave and enhances security, since the data does not leave the database. There are no data movers or connectors involved—as in this case, in-database literally means inside the HeatWave MySQL database service."
"HeatWave ML lowers TCO, reduces the need for manual work and ETL, and accelerates the ML model provision and execution that enterprises need."
—Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“Some cloud database providers continue to offer specialized databases for specific workloads, and assume, especially in the open source space, that developers like to manually tinker with parameters to optimize performance. Oracle is on a different track, looking to combine database functionality in a single system. It provides database convergence and automation in the open source cloud database service, HeatWave MySQL. Oracle introduced HeatWave MySQL late in 2020, bringing full native cloud support and unifying OLTP and OLAP in one database, which eliminated the need for ETL. In this newly announced version, Oracle has added machine learning-based automation, which takes away the guesswork and manual labor involved in provisioning, data loading, query execution, and failure handling. These automations are also a major factor in HeatWave’s performance and price/performance results as reported in the company’s publicly accessible and repeatable benchmarks, providing metrics which should compare favorably with those of other cloud database service providers.”
—Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC
IDC’s top database analyst, Carl Olofson, published his take on Oracle HeatWave MySQL news and concluded that "For MySQL database developers, this is a game changer...With HeatWave, Oracle is leveraging its decades of experience and database expertise to provide first class database capabilities to teams of open-source database application developers at a very affordable price, and elevating the MySQL community to a whole new level of database power and sophistication."
Read Carl’s blog
"It's no secret that developers are a major force in database growth today. Oracle wants to open up a second front in the battle for database market leadership. They are attracting an entirely different user base with this."
Read the article
A new analysis from IDC’s Carl Olofson states that "Combined with HeatWave and Autopilot, MySQL Database Service may very well be the single greatest innovation in open source cloud databases in the past 20 years."
"MySQL Database Service with back-to-back innovations in the form of HeatWave and now Autopilot brings a big boost to the MySQL user community, and wherever there's increased competition, customers will benefit…MySQL Database Service may drive the open source database industry to accelerate engineering efforts."
"HeatWave MySQL and AutoPilot represent a quantum leap for those enterprises, offering an RDBMS optimized with ML, topflight query performance, and superb transaction support."
Read the analysis (PDF)
"Oracle announced HeatWave MySQL with Autopilot last August, which may very well have been the single greatest innovation in open source cloud databases in the last 20 years to that point. Now Oracle has gone beyond its original unifying of OLTP and OLAP in HeatWave, with HeatWave MySQL ML. Oracle is bringing all of the machine learning processing and models inside the database, so that customers not only avoid managing ML databases apart from the core database, but also eliminate the hassles of ETL, gaining speed, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness in the bargain."
—Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC
In his recent analysis, Carl Olofson of IDC states: "HeatWave ML promises to be a game changer for application developers and a broad range of data analysts and scientists...For MySQL users this release represents a substantial leap in performance and functionality that enables more sophisticated data processing without technical complexity…HeatWave ML represents a significant step forward."
“Oracle have shown AWS and Snowflake how to design and architect a True MySQL Cloud Database. Customers can expect HeatWave MySQL to perform about 7 times faster than Amazon Redshift or Snowflake at 2-5 times lower cost. The benefits against Amazon Aurora are even greater. Enterprises of every size can run a single MySQL database for both OLTP & OLAP and eliminate ETL. Lines of business can plan to integrate in-line real-time analytics with systems of record and radically improve business process automation and costs.”
—David Floyer, CTO and Co-Founder, Wikibon
Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante interviews Nipun Agarwal, Oracle senior vice president for HeatWave MySQL development, on theCUBE.
Watch the video (23:21)
Wikibon CTO David Floyer posted his in-depth analysis of MySQL Autopilot and concluded that "Wikibon believes that the technology underlying HeatWave MySQL is an inflection point in database design and architecture...the HeatWave MySQL technology is by far the best in the market now...Wikibon believes that the HeatWave MySQL competitive advantage is sustainable for at least three years…we believe customers will demand that AWS provide similar converged functionality as HeatWave. Wikibon strongly recommends that enterprise IT departments set a three-year plan to eliminate separate OLAP databases and ETL from MySQL transactional databases and move to MySQL converged databases that support transactional and analytic workloads. HeatWave MySQL, the only platform that delivers these characteristics, is the obvious platform to evaluate now and for the next few years."
"New entrants such as Snowflake will need improved cloud technology fast to stay competitive with HeatWave."
"Google is in the worst TPC-H benchmark position with a 9x performance deficit and is 4x more expensive. The advent of HeatWave MySQL has made it harder for Google BigQuery to competein the general-purpose data warehouse market."
"Alibaba, AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Snowflake will need some time to rearchitect their IaaS & PaaS platforms to run converged databases properly. In addition, most of these vendors will need to invest heavily in other converged database hardware and software."
Read the report (PDF)
"I expect that what AWS will try to do is improve the speed and connection between Aurora, which is row-based, and Redshift, which is column-based. The three major cloud players will be pushed to improve MySQL. My view is they will have to do something because this type of capability is vital for business process automation."
“Open source developers who have not yet moved to MySQL Database Service with HeatWave are running out of reasons not to give it a try. Not only has Oracle simplified their lives with a unified OLTP and OLAP MySQL service, it has eliminated the need for a separate analytical database or data warehouse and ETLs between them. Plus, now it has delivered unparalleled performance and cost/performance. The latest additions include Autopilot, which has automated many onerous manual tasks from provisioning to data loading and query execution. Together with massive scale-out capabilities, this combination makes HeatWave MySQL melt down Snowflake and vaporize Amazon Redshift AQUA.”
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, Wikibon
Marc Staimer concludes his analysis saying “It is now crystal clear that Amazon Aurora, Redshift with and without AQUA, Snowflake, Azure Synapse, and Google BigQuery are not in the same class as Oracle MySQL Database Service with Heatwave and Autopilot. They’re not even in the same league.”
"HeatWave MySQL’s TPC-H analytics testing literally blows away Amazon Redshift with AQUA in both performance and cost/performance...it’s 6.8x faster and ~47% less expensive...Amazon Redshift with AQUA is ~18x slower resulting in HeatWave MySQL coming in at ~17x better cost/performance...HeatWave MySQL with AutoPilot sets the bar orders of magnitude higher than AWS, Azure, Google & Snowflake."
Read the report (PDF)
"Oracle is in the midst of a continuous product super cycle with the HeatWave MySQL cloud service. The company is introducing material innovation after material innovation while other MySQL and cloud database vendors have failed to innovate in any significant way. Its eye popping price/performance that’s up to 14 times better than Snowflake and 5 times better than Amazon Redshift with AQUA has left others in the dust scrambling to remain competitive."
"With the addition of HeatWave ML demonstrating up to 25X the speed of Redshift ML at 1% of the price, the HeatWave MySQL cloud service is not just a game changer, but represents a whole new engineering trajectory for cloud databases going forward."
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, Wikibon
Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante interviews Nipun Agarwal, Oracle senior vice president for HeatWave MySQL development, on theCUBE. They discuss the new machine learning capabilities of HeatWave MySQL and other innovations.
Watch theCUBE interview (28:54)
Leading cloud industry analysts gathered together on theCUBE to discuss HeatWave MySQL ML, including Wikibon, Futurum, Constellation Research, Moor Insights, and Cloud Wars.
Watch "Analyst Power Panel: Future of Database Platforms" (43:39)
"HeatWave MySQL is for now and will continue to be a very tough combination to beat. Especially when considering it took a very skilled, knowledgeable, and experienced MySQL Engineering team 10 years to develop HeatWave. Competitors will find just catching up to the current HeatWave to be exceptionally challenging. It will be exceedingly problematic coming up with a viable answer in months or even years. It takes a lot of complex database engineering and time to meet, let alone keep up, with the pace of HeatWave innovations. As Oracle continues to raise the HeatWave bar at an unprecedented pace, that 10-year head start may well prove impossible to bridge."
“When combined with its incredibly low TCO, extraordinarily high degree of automation, easy-to-use and incredibly fast and accurate ML, with unique explainability, HeatWave MySQL is one of the easiest decisions database purchasers can make.”
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, Wikibon
“As sure as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, Oracle’s HeatWave MySQL team continues to deliver incredible innovations solving difficult user problems. Nipun Agarwal and his clever engineers already introduced HeatWave MySQL AutoML last year making it simple for the novice to utilize ML efficiently and effectively eliminating user errors. They made HeatWave MySQL with AutoML available to Azure and AWS users as well as on OCI. And now they made it an order of magnitude simpler and more capable by adding unsupervised anomaly detection, a personalized recommender system, multivariate time series forecasting, auto shape prediction with explanation for OLTP workloads, and auto unload recommends which tables can be unloaded based on workload history. And at the same time, they are providing both a lower cost than their already marketing-leading low cost, as well as a lower cost entry point. Their competitors have yet to match HeatWave MySQL’s first release from 2.5 years ago let alone the continuous innovation. If you’re a MySQL user in a public cloud, you should take a long hard look at HeatWave MySQL on OCI, AWS, or Azure. It will radically improve your performance, while significantly lowering your costs, and greatly simplifying your life. It is compelling.”
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, Wikibon
“These new fully transparent benchmarks demonstrate HeatWave’s performance, price and scale advantages over all other MySQL and cloud databases. With up to 7x the performance and 35x the price/performance of Snowflake—a fraction of the cost—you can see the 5 dozen patents at work with the whiplash-inducing performance of HeatWave. Clearly, the cloud data warehouse market wasn’t ready for this, and now the competition needs to scramble as they grapple for answers.”
—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, Futurum
"I believe TPC-H, TPC-DS, and the new fully transparent CH-benCHmark demonstrate HeatWave’s performance, price, and scale advantages over Snowflake. They are clear, repeatable tests that provide the definitive technical facts which support Oracle’s claims."
Read the Futurum analysis on HeatWave MySQL vs Snowflake
Futurum analyst and frequent CNBC commentator Daniel Newman and his team published their detailed analysis of the MySQL Autopilot news and concluded that: "The bottom line is we believe the competition just got outplayed on every measurable metric imaginable. It also represents a wake-up call for the industry and a rude awakening to the database cloud competition as they all must now respond to the HeatWave MySQL innovation juggernaut…HeatWave is the physical manifestation of nearly 10 years of deep database engineering techniques, over 5 dozen patents, and demonstrates what real cloud database innovation looks like in 2021."
"Snowflake makes about as much sense as spending more to take a flight that gets you from London to New York in 6 days with 15 connections rather than a direct route that takes 8 hours."
"We believe that the MySQL Database Service with HeatWave offers the best value, bar none, across the entire MySQL DB market…the solution stands out with clear and unparalleled price/ performance advantages, against the gauntlet of competition.”
Read the new Futurum analysis report (PDF)
"This latest announcement from Oracle is the third major release of HeatWave MySQL in just over 12 months. Oracle has delivered more cloud database innovations during that timeframe than most cloud database vendors have delivered in the last decade. Not only does the in-database HeatWave ML make Redshift ML look like yesterday’s tech in terms of engineering, performance and cost, but the latest HeatWave MySQL TPC-DS benchmarks demonstrate that Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Azure Synapse and Google BigQuery are all slower and more expensive. It’s rather clear who’s innovating in cloud databases and who’s being complacent."
—-Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, Futurum
"HeatWave MySQL represents the fiscally responsible approach to cloud databases. From my perspective, the question for developers is: “Are you looking to be more productive, or spend time haggling with ETL tools and shuffling data back and forth?"
—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, Futurum
Read the report: "HeatWave MySQL: Teaching the Competition a Lesson in ML" (PDF)
"A new research report just published by leading cloud industry analysts at Futurum on HeatWave ML states “...we believe that the rarefied combination of real-world customer references, fully transparent and repeatable benchmarks and a continuous onslaught of innovation is the proven formula that sets HeatWave MySQL apart from anything else in the cloud database market today."
“HeatWave MySQL keeps expanding the range of machine learning use cases that it supports. Customers can now build classification and regression models, multi-variate time series forecasting, unsupervised anomaly detection, and recommendation systems. And, HeatWave AutoML makes it easy by automating the ML lifecycle across all those use cases. Customers looking to speed up the building of machine learning models should look no further than HeatWave MySQL. Best of all, it leverages real-time data and trains models 25X faster than Amazon Redshift ML at 1% of the cost.”
—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, Futurum
"HeatWave is the only natively integrated analytics engine for MySQL and is unmatched in the industry in terms of performance and cost."
—Matt Kimball, Sr. Analyst, Data Center Compute, Moor Insights & Strategy
“For organizations using MySQL, Oracle has given yet another reason to invest in its HeatWave offering by delivering seven times the performance at 1/5th the cost of solutions such as Snowflake. Oracle continues to align its innovation and resources to the needs of its customers and the market. For those looking to extract the most out of their MySQL environments, HeatWave should be given a hard look.”
—Matt Kimball, Sr. Analyst, Data Center Compute, Moor Insights & Strategy
Moor Insights & Strategy Analyst Matt Kimball published his analysis of HeatWave MySQL in Forbes and concluded "it's hard to look at what Oracle is doing with HeatWave and not be impressed. In many ways, HeatWave is the very essence of what the cloud is about—commodity infrastructure architected in a scale-out fashion, enabling the best performance and price-performance for a given workload."
Read the analysis
The world's top ranked analyst Patrick Moorhead and his co-host frequent CNBC commentator Daniel Newman of Futurum recently hosted a podcast where they discussed the HeatWave MySQL news and concluded that "Oracle introduced HeatWave MySQL and they did send shockwaves because they named and shamed basically every database company out there and my favorite is what they talked about with Snowflake. You can spend $80K on HeatWave and that would cost you $420K to run on Snowflake. It’s a no brainer, Snowflake must be trembling in its boots. But there’s no snow on the ground so maybe it needs to wear sandals."
View the video (28:23)
According to Patrick Moorhead, "It’s the first cloud service to combine OLTP + OLAP + ML automation for MySQL applications at rates of performance that eclipse everything from Snowflake to Alibaba and anything in between...Oracle has positioned itself firmly as a leader in the MySQL space with HeatWave plus Autopilot based on Moor Insights & Strategy's evaluation...We consider Oracle MySQL Database Service with HeatWave and Autopilot as a 'must have' for organizations looking to derive the most from their MySQL environments."
Read the report (PDF)
"HeatWave MySQL is a cloud database service that has been architected for the commodity cloud and is in a state of continuous innovation. Further, the HeatWave engineering team has filed several dozen patents for the algorithms and technology—the HeatWave ML technology alone has around two dozen patents. The company is taking a service that provided real differentiation from its inception and continues to innovate at an accelerated pace for data-driven organizations."
"As a former IT professional, who managed a lot of data, I like how the HeatWave MySQL service takes otherwise complex and expensive functions and makes those available to the masses...HeatWave MySQL simplifies data management, democratizing the latest cloud database technology beyond data scientists and DBAs."
"While HeatWave ML's architecture can drive real, measurable value to an organization in terms of performance and cost, I believe the automation built into HeatWave ML will make it tangibly easier for customers to use, extending ML beyond the realm of data scientists. With HeatWave ML, Oracle has abstracted a lot of the fine-tuning and pseudo witchcraft that organizations must employ to make an ML training model 'just right.' And this applies across the organization—business analysts and data scientists looking to make sure the intelligence is correct and IT professionals being asked to deliver the right overall solution."
—Matt Kimball, Sr. Analyst, Data Center Compute, Moor Insights & Strategy
Read Forbes article by Moor Insights & Strategy
Leading cloud analysts Daniel Newman, founding partner and Principal Analyst of Futurum Research, and Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President and Principal Analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, recently discussed the HeatWave MySQL ML news on The Six Five podcast, stating "We found the benchmarks demonstrated clear outperformance at this current time against Redshift, Snowflake, Synapse and BigQuery. All of them were both more expensive and none of them had the same level of performance."
"HeatWave’s incredible performance has a lot to do with the fact that it’s all in-memory where other solutions are spooling out back and forth to disk so architecturally that gives HeatWave a big advantage on performance pretty much versus anything that touches a disk, so that doesn’t surprise me. I didn’t see any HeatWave competitor saying that these benchmarks were wrong either so I think they know. And this next step...this update added ML in the database at no extra cost."
–Patrick Moorhead, Founder and President, Moor Insights & Strategy
“Detecting anomalies in machine learning is challenging for a number of reasons. Machine learning services that require users to select, test, and tune multiple algorithms to identify local, global, and cluster anomalies from unlabled datasets is time consuming, costly, and prone to mistakes. In its latest update to HeatWave MySQL, Oracle has included new capabilities in MySQL AutoML to assist in anomaly detection. The new MySQL Autopilot auto unload advisor recommends which tables to unload based on those which were never—or rarely—queried, enabling customers to both free up memory and cut costs.”
—Matt Kimball, Sr. Analyst, Data Center Compute, Moor Insights & Strategy
“With the latest update to HeatWave MySQL, Oracle shows no signs of slowing down. And I think this service may be the “killer app” for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure—or even Oracle as a whole.”
“As an analyst who was also an Oracle customer for some time, I feel like I’m witnessing a new company with a new attitude. In the past, Oracle was not known for its emphasis on making life easy for customers. In comparison to that, its trajectory with HeatWave MySQL is a breath of fresh air.”
—Matt Kimball, Sr. Analyst, Data Center Compute, Moor Insights & Strategy
"The MySQL landscape needed a shakeup...Oracle is not only aiming to change the script, but also completely redefining what MySQL is...Oracle MySQL is a well-thought out debut cloud offering that turns up the heat on rival MySQL services."
—Tony Baer of dbInsight and ZDnet
"HeatWave MySQL goes on Autopilot...compared to AWS, Oracle positions HeatWave MySQL as transcending the capabilities of Amazon Redshift (for analytics); AQUA (analytics query acceleration); Aurora (for transactions); and Glue (for ETL)... HeatWave's Autopilot capabilities are designed to introduce intelligent automation to a market working with small departmental databases that prefers open source, is cost-sensitive, and is more accustomed to manual knob turning."
—Tony Baer of dbInsight and ZDnet
Read the article
“Make no mistake about it, with double the scale and ML-based optimization, HeatWave MySQL is very much about reducing cost, increasing simplicity, and introducing analytics to organizations that already have MySQL and are looking for solutions to run them more economically, more simply, while adding real-time analytics... we believe that the use of ML internally presents the biggest bang for the buck for MySQL customers.”
—Tony Baer of dbInsight and ZDnet
“MySQL is a popular cloud relational database for mid-sized users and applications; but it has traditionally come with some limitations. Developers must suffer manual database setup and tuning as well as often poor performance running queries. That all changes now: Oracle’s MySQL Database Service with HeatWave addresses those issues--it's MySQL Autopilot uses advanced ML to automate provisioning, tuning and more, to drive crazy good performance and price/performance. Scalability is enhanced with node and processing capacity increases. With claimed specifications that are so far ahead of its competition as to simultaneously generate a broad grin and some skepticism, Oracle understands that the proof is in the pudding--not only is this open source, but the test case details are all being openly posted, meaning that interested MySQL users that are intrigued by a mix of astounding performance, reduced costs and no need to change applications, can actually go try the pudding for themselves”
—Mark Peters, Principal Analyst & Practice Director, ESG
In its analysis, ESG noted that "…you’re probably looking at a generous order of magnitude price and performance advantage over alternatives you might be using or considering. That’s not a bad forecast to deliver to the CIO or CFO".
"The performance numbers are staggering—mixing Oracle’s test results together with endorsements from those users highlighted in the event announcement—one sees improvements ranging from a mere (!) 7x to 1000x or more on speed, combined with costs that are reduced by 30-80%. There’s one comparison that actually showed Oracle with a similar cost to the competitor, but Oracle was 18x faster!"
Read the analysis by ESG (PDF)
"Organizations are struggling with implementing machine learning broadly in their applications. Some lack the skill sets required, others have the data scientists but they’re overburdened trying to complete projects. Beyond that, using machine learning involves disparate tools, services, and processes which require moving data using ETL to a different service or environment, adding time, complexity, and security risk. Oracle’s HeatWave ML democratizes machine learning by automating the machine learning lifecycle—model training, inference, and explanations—and brings ML into HeatWave, no ETL required. Explanation capabilities, a core feature of HeatWave ML, are particularly impressive by providing users with understandable rationales for the model’s results that may be needed for regulatory compliance. As far as I’m aware, no other cloud provider goes this far with their ML when it comes to automation, explainability, or in providing ML benchmarks using standard data sets. The early benchmark results are eye-opening with performance boosts of as much as 25X at 1% of the cost of the competition. And the kicker is accuracy is improved too. Only MSQL HeatWave."
—Mike Leone, Senior Analyst, ESG
"Choosing not to invest in HeatWave MySQL ML and continuing to use 2-3 ETL tools plus two databases comes down to deciding whether you want to embrace the future or fight the future. Inevitably, all cloud database services are headed toward higher degrees of convergence and automation. The question is whether you want to explain to management that you could be saving money and time but instead are stuck in the past. And as long as all requirements are met, managing one database is always better than two. Remember that."
"There are no more excuses for ML projects failing due to a lack of data scientists, taking too long to execute, using old data, or costing too much. With HeatWave ML, machine learning is democratized, it’s fast, uses up-to-date data, and costs less than other cloud database services."
"ESG suggests pressing vendors for validated benchmark results to best understand how each ML solution can perform. This should be extended to evaluate cost via price/performance. To date, Oracle is the only vendor to publish fully-transparent, repeatable ML benchmarks on GitHub."
—Mike Leone, Senior Analyst, ESG
“The new capabilities that Oracle added to HeatWave MySQL take it to the forefront of open-source cloud databases. Not only are several management functions automated with Autopilot, making guesswork obsolete, when they are combined with new scaling enhancements, the resulting price/performance ratio is far beyond other cloud database services. As we mentioned previously, ETL presents significant security threats. HeatWave’s combining OLTP and OLAP into a single, protected database instance can dramatically reduce the potential attack surface, improve security posture, and in the end, avoid a data breach or a compliance fine.”
—Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst and CTO, KuppingerCole
"Brace yourself, a Heatwave is coming...the very idea that your data no longer needs to move between data stores with different access models and security controls or that it has to be exposed to a complex and error-prone ETL process has massive security and compliance implications: this dramatically reduces the risks of accidental exposure that leads to data breaches, and, inevitably, to compliance fines. It’s also worth noting that HeatWave now enforces full data encryption, both at rest and in transit—a setting that users cannot deactivate."
Read the KuppingerCole blog on MySQL Autopilot
"Oracle is bringing new capabilities in HeatWave MySQL to help customers avoid ETLs that create additional attack surfaces for malicious actors. These security holes are present not only during data movement, but also as different databases and tools inherently have different security and access controls. The new HeatWave ML is the latest result of Oracle’s in-database development strategy, which contrasts with the approach of many cloud database providers that continue to promote specialized database engines and tools. Oracle’s unified HeatWave MySQL database can dramatically reduce the potential attack surface for sensitive data, while demonstrating impressive benchmark results for machine learning and analytics, taking it to a new level in the industry."
—Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst and CTO, KuppingerCole
“HeatWave MySQL further democratizes enterprise capabilities by making them available directly within the familiar MySQL database. It not only brings machine learning closer to the data by providing in-database anomaly detection, forecasting, classification, and regression but also enables more business-focused use cases—such as personalized recommendations for retail products or digital services. The addition of the interactive console makes machine learning even more accessible to non-technical people like business analysts. And do we even need to mention that all the ML processing is done at no additional cost to customers? Clearly, the HeatWave MySQL team is continuing on its path of rapid innovation that is affordable for everyone.”
—Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst and CTO, KuppingerCole
“The latest HeatWave MySQL announcement reaffirms and extends Oracle's commitment to the open source database market. Integrated with MySQL Database and optimized for OCI, HeatWave seamlessly brings together analytic and operational workloads within one database and does without sacrificing scale or performance. More than that, HeatWave MySQL introduces several innovations that promise to greatly elevate MySQL's price/performance value. For example, by engineering internally developed machine learning algorithms within HeatWave MySQL, Oracle can now automate and optimize database provisioning, data loading, query execution, and failure handling. This is not easy to replicate.”
—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst AI Platforms, Analytics, and Data Management, Omdia
In its analysis Omdia notes that "Customers invested in any MySQL derivative, whether on premises or in cloud, should move to or stick with MySQL Database Service on OCI."
Read the report (PDF)
"Oracle continues to deepen its stewardship of MySQL with new enhancements to its leading open source database. Center stage is HeatWave machine learning (ML), which lets data science practitioners run ML workloads right in the MySQL database. This does away with the labor-intensive and costly process of extracting and moving data out of the database to external ML platforms. Instead HeatWave ML fully automates the ML lifecycle from model training to inference and explanation… By building ML directly into MySQL, using technologies familiar to database users and automating workloads typically restricted to ML experts, Oracle hopes to greatly broaden the use of machine learning in organizations—it’s not just for data scientists any more."
"...The introduction of HeatWave MySQL ML is noteworthy not just in terms of its performance objectives but also because it reinforces Oracle's longstanding approach to databases, which emphasizes multi-model and multi-workload functionality within a single database. This philosophy contrasts sharply with many database and cloud platform rivals Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, which emphasize the adoption of specialized databases supporting specialized workloads. Given the level of automation and purported price performance benefits of HeatWave ML, Oracle offers a compelling alternative for customers looking to enrich their investment in MySQL without incurring additional complexity or cost."
—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst AI Platforms, Analytics, and Data Management, Omdia
“Unlike competitive solutions that still rely in part on external compute resources and data movement, the ML processing in HeatWave is done inside the database and as a result neither the data nor the model leaves the database, which translates into lower costs.”
—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst AI Platforms, Analytics, and Data Management, Omdia
“HeatWave AutoML delivers an advanced workflow that automatically create models for unsupervised anomaly detection, recommender systems and multi-variate time series forecasting. These capabilities are very hard problems to solve and differentiated compared to other database offerings that do not deliver AutoML as a part of a complete machine learning (ML) lifecycle; this elevates HeatWave MySQL to whole another level in combining data science and analytical workloads.”
—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst AI Platforms, Analytics, and Data Management, Omdia
“For customers looking for an open source cloud data warehouse, HeatWave MySQL provides an in-memory query acceleration engine that delivers substantial competitive advantages over AWS Redshift, Aurora and Snowflake.”
—Richard Winter, CEO, WinterCorp
In its analysis, WinterCorp notes that "This is MySQL in a way we have never seen it before, with highly parallel query execution, significant machine learning-based automation with MySQL Autopilot, demonstrated excellent price performance compared to other offerings, and other strengths."
Read the report (PDF)
"Oracle has been adding major new capabilities to HeatWave MySQL at a striking pace. In less than 15 months, we have seen an integrated, in-memory query acceleration engine for both OLAP and OLTP; Autopilot for automated management; and now in-database machine learning, elastic scaling and a lower price entry point. In addition, Oracle has released query processing and machine learning benchmarks that show superior performance and price/performance over other popular cloud database offerings. Customers with an interest in an open source cloud database really ought to take a look at HeatWave MySQL."
—Richard Winter, CEO, WinterCorp
Leading database consultant Richard Winter published his take on the HeatWave MySQL ML news and concluded "...this announcement puts HeatWave MySQL much further ahead of comparable offerings on AWS. The closest alternatives would be the combination of AWS Aurora and Redshift or the combination of AWS Aurora and Snowflake. Both of these combined offerings would also require a host of chargeable AWS ETL tools and services to provide the capabilities built into HeatWave MySQL. In the case of HeatWave MySQL, one database is clearly better than two."
Read the report (PDF)
"Oracle Unleashes Heatwave on MySQL, Thumps AWS Redshift & Aurora."
—Bob Evans, Cloud Wars founder
“these last two announcements around MySQL have been somewhat of a surprise…This could be the start of an industry revolution in open-source databases.”
—Bob Evans, Cloud Wars founder, published his take on MySQL Autopilot.
“One HeatWave MySQL database is simpler than two from AWS plus all the associated ETL tools and data movers—that’s a fact, not an opinion...I’ve been around the tech business for some time, and I don’t recall seeing performance gaps as profound as the ones that Oracle has cited for its new HeatWave MySQL database. When technological breakthroughs of this magnitude happen—and please trust me when I say that breakthroughs of this scale do not happen often—the result is not just small-scale incremental moves by competitors trying to play catch-up in an outdated game offering outdated results. Instead, the competitors are forced to regroup and head back to the labs and attempt to compete against entirely new standards, new levels of performance, new levels of value, and ultimately new levels of customer expectations.
"Of all the new features and power within HeatWave MySQL, the biggest one is that customers can now use HeatWave MySQL to handle the trifecta of transaction processing, analytical query processing and machine learning in one single and thoroughly modern cloud database. That clearly represents a triple threat to Snowflake, AWS, Microsoft and Google."
"Enhanced security for dangerous times: the elimination of the ETL process dramatically limits the exposure that companies face when moving data frequently between systems…over the past decade or so, the main criticisms of ETL have been the costs involved and the manual labor required to support the required processes. But now that cybersecurity has become a board-level issue, HeatWave MySQL’s ability to lower security exposure by eliminating ETL has become a major attraction for customers."
"With HeatWave, ETL goes the way of the dodo bird and the data can be analyzed and machine learning models can be generated in the same database in which the transactions were posted in real-time. For customers, that means eliminating security exposure, less labor, and lower expenses, and more speed."
—Bob Evans, Cloud Wars founder, published his take on HeatWave MySQL ML
Corey Quinn interviews Nipun Agarwal, senior vice president of HeatWave MySQL development at Oracle.
Listen to the podcast (34:45)
"You put not just the benchmarks, but data sets, and your entire methodology onto GitHub as well. What led to that change? That seems like the least Oracle-like thing I could possibly imagine."
—Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group and Host of the Screaming in the Cloud podcast
Corey Quinn interviews Nipun Agarwal, senior vice president of HeatWave MySQL development at Oracle, on the HeatWave MySQL ML announcement.
Listen to the podcast (38:06)
Industry analysts discuss HeatWave MySQL on AWS
“It’s clear that the Nipun Agarwal-led HeatWave MySQL Engineering team has out-executed other cloud database engineering teams over the past 24 months in terms of innovation speed and simultaneously re-energized the MySQL landscape. The fact that the MySQL Engineering team can not only deliver the HeatWave MySQL offering on AWS, but also provide architectural adaptations for better performance and TCO, is another proof of the brilliance of the underlying software architecture.”
“After making HeatWave MySQL available natively on AWS, Oracle continues its relentless development pace with significant enhancements. In addition to new machine learning capabilities, a scale-out data management layer built on S3 improves data availability and HeatWave Autopilot’s auto shape prediction in the console makes it even easier for customers to always get very good price-performance.”
—Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“Oracle’s continued innovation in machine learning techniques with HeatWave HeatWave Autopilot is proceeding at an unprecedented rate. This announcement alone includes auto thread pooling, auto shape prediction, richer ML models for Autopilot, and the integration of Autopilot with a new interactive console. These innovations are pushing the boundaries of ML-based automation and placing HeatWave MySQL at the forefront of cloud database services in providing workload-aware automation. Plus, with significant enhancements for OLTP processing—higher throughput, differentiated security features—HeatWave MySQL on AWS is a very compelling solution not just for analytics but also for OLTP and mixed workloads, as may be seen in publicly available benchmarks.”
“For any developers working with MySQL on AWS, Oracle has just dropped a big productivity boost on your doorstep without the big price tag.”
—Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC
“Wikibon believes that supercloud database services are the future of databases and will bring three major benefits. Firstly, they will enable enterprises to distribute the database to where the data is and avoid the delay of moving data and costly egress charges. In addition, they will provide converged support for transactional, analytical, and machine learning applications to eliminate ETL and enable real-time processing. Finally, they will provide full operational automation across the data, database, and operational planes.”
“The announcement of Oracle HeatWave MySQL supercloud services running on AWS currently provides enterprises of every size running MySQL workloads in a multi-cloud environment the fastest MySQL performance, lowest cost, highest automation, and low migration costs. Wikibon believes that the strong Oracle investment in HeatWave, the quality of the HeatWave group, and the future support of other cloud providers will make Heatwave the de facto standard for MySQL supercloud database services.”
—David Floyer, CTO & Co-founder, Wikibon
Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante interviews Nipun Agarwal, Oracle senior vice president for HeatWave MySQL development, on theCUBE about the availability of HeatWave MySQL on AWS.
Watch the video (22:24)
“While AWS offers a smorgasbord of cloud database services specialized for each data type and capability, HeatWave MySQL on AWS follows Oracle’s converged database strategy—offering transaction, analytics, ML, and Autopilot automation all in one. For AWS users, this means no charges for add-on services, extra storage, data egress fees, connectors, and more. For cost conscious IT teams and developers, HeatWave MySQL on AWS represents a whole new TCO calculation with zero cost for what are add-on services on AWS and no data egress fees.”
“… Just as Usain Bolt left all of his competitors in the dust and set new world records that have yet to be broken, the latest price performance benchmark results demonstrate that HeatWave MySQL on AWS is 7X better than Amazon Redshift. If you follow the money, the choice is easy.”
“Putting this announcement into some perspective, AWS started providing cloud services in 2006. Oracle introduced its HeatWave MySQL cloud service 14 years later. HeatWave MySQL completely eclipsed AWS competing database cloud services in performance, cost, and automation.”
“Less than two years after HeatWave MySQL’s introduction, it has been optimized to run much faster and much less costly on AWS’ own architecture than AWS’ own Redshift and Aurora.”
“That’s the equivalent of an NBA championship-winning team being swept in the finals on their home court. This ought to be a wake-up call to AWS. Developers, CIOs, CFOs, and CEOs that take notice, will derive noticeably faster and better outcomes at a much lower cost.”
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, Wikibon
“The HeatWave MySQL engineering team continues to execute at an accelerated pace, and in the midst of their product supercycle, are busy making other cloud database services look rather complacent by comparison.”
“While we expected it on OCI, their home turf, the amount of new capabilities on the AWS platform takes it to a whole new level. These include a rich interactive console to prevent resource contention, auto shape prediction, and performance monitoring. Of course, it wouldn’t be a HeatWave announcement without benchmarks at breakneck speeds and ultra-low costs. They don’t disappoint in price performance, as HeatWave MySQL on AWS is 7x better than Amazon Redshift, 10x better than Snowflake, 12x better than GCP Big Query, and 4x better than Azure Synapse. And in ML, it’s 25x faster than Redshift ML. Clearly, a robust HeatWave warning remains in effect across the cloud landscape.”
“What all this translates to is the fact that Oracle took its HeatWave MySQL cloud database software that was running on its infrastructure in OCI and architected an environment on AWS to run the same software and ended up outperforming Amazon’s own top tier cloud databases in the process—including both Redshift and Aurora. This is the functional equivalent of a Lexus LF-A outperforming a Porsche 911 GT3 on its own test track in Weissach, Germany—you’re not supposed to lose in your own backyard on the track you built from scratch.”
—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst & Research Director, Futurum Research
“Oracle continues its innovation super cycle with HeatWave MySQL on AWS. It’s not just a straight ‘port’ to AWS, HeatWave MySQL on AWS offers a completely new user experience with its rich interactive console. Furthermore, it has been optimized for the AWS cloud and added new capabilities, including Auto Thread Pooling to prevent resource contention, auto shape prediction, and performance monitoring. As a result HeatWave MySQL’s performance advantages over its cloud database competitors are even better than the previously published numbers.”
—Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy
“HeatWave with HeatWave Autopilot on AWS is a gift from the database gods.”
—Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst, Data Center Compute, Moor Insights & Strategy
“Oracle is building HeatWave MySQL into a data destination, not only by combing transaction processing and analytics, but bringing machine learning in-database. By bringing it to AWS, Oracle is going where many of its customers are. And unlike Amazon Redshift ML, which integrates with Amazon SageMaker, Oracle HeatWave MySQL allows you to train and run inference in-database. The same aggressive design and use of machine learning-driven Autopilot that helps HeatWave customers reduce their cloud footprint and TCO has been adapted to the AWS service and optimized for AWS infrastructure. And while we haven’t validated Oracle’s benchmarks against Redshift and Snowflake, the results make clear that this is not your ordinary MySQL.”
“HeatWave MySQL on AWS provides a solution for AWS customers seeking to take advantage of HeatWave MySQL, minus the overhead of egress costs, cross-cloud latencies, and integration issues.”
—Tony Baer, Principal, dbInsight
“The availability of HeatWave MySQL on AWS is great news for everyone dreaming of the future where cloud providers eliminate walls between each other and make their services available wherever customers want them.”
“HeatWave offers users a unique combination of the familiar MySQL experience with Oracle’s latest developments in machine learning, automation, and security, including MySQL masking, de-identification, asymmetric encryption support, and MySQL Firewall. Now all this is available for AWS customers without the latency and data egress overhead of a multi-cloud architecture, but with the ability to tightly integrate with existing AWS services.”
“Oracle has brought advanced security features to HeatWave MySQL on AWS such as data masking, de-identification, asymmetric encryption support, and MySQL firewall, making sensitive data even more secure—all within the database.”
—Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst & CTO, KuppingerCole
“Machine learning is built into HeatWave MySQL on AWS, so developers and data analysts can build, train, deploy, and explain machine learning models in HeatWave MySQL, without moving data to a separate machine learning service—all at no extra charge. This is quite a contrast with users of Amazon Redshift ML who are charged not only for the base service, but also for Amazon SageMaker, AWS Glue to prepare data, S3 storage, and possibly data egress fees. In addition, ML in HeatWave MySQL on AWS is 25x faster than Redshift ML, according to benchmarks published by Oracle. Clearly, AWS users focused on machine learning applications should take a look at HeatWave MySQL.”
—Richard Winter, CEO, WinterCorp
“Oracle has huge plans for HeatWave MySQL, and by enabling it to run natively on AWS, Oracle is making it easier for thousands of customers to quickly and easily see if HeatWave MySQL delivers more value for them. This is the essence of what ‘open’ really means in the digital economy: giving customers choices to drive innovation, performance, and growth. Oracle’s not trying to hold any customers hostage with exorbitant egress fees for cloud databases that simply aren’t up to the challenges of today’s incredibly demanding business world—Oracle is saying, ‘Look at our performance versus what AWS can deliver, and pick whichever generates more value for your business.’”
“…Oracle is making it plain that AWS customers can use HeatWave MySQL *and* still remain AWS customers—they can stay where they are and gain the superior capabilities and price performance that HeatWave MySQL on AWS offers while easily being able to connect to their apps on AWS and natively integrate with other AWS services—such as S3, CloudWatch, PrivateLink and more. That’s why I think this announcement from Oracle will trigger a significant disruption in the cloud database services market.”
—Bob Evans, Founder, Cloud Wars
Corey Quinn interviews Nipun Agarwal, senior vice president of HeatWave MySQL development, on the announcement of HeatWave MySQL on AWS.
“I’m really optimistic about what the launch of this service portends for Oracle.”
“It feels like it’s a new world and in a bunch of different respects, and I just can’t make enough noise about how glad I am to see this transformation happening.”
—Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group and Host of the Screaming in the Cloud podcast
“Oracle is serious about offering multi-cloud solutions. Customer choice is built into these solutions, whether they run on OCI, on Amazon AWS or on Microsoft Azure. By leveraging the HeatWave MySQL database, customers will be able to use industry-standard SQL-based database queries for both OLTP and analytics. This will avoid the expensive ingress and egress fees that are typically associated with moving a company’s data from one cloud to another for analytics purposes. It also addresses the variety of IT skill-sets that exist at many customer sites—making it easier and simpler for MySQL customers to manage their data resources across multiple clouds.”
—Jean S. Bozman, President, Cloud Architects Advisors, llc
“HeatWave MySQL has gone multicloud! Yes, you read that right. HeatWave MySQL is no longer just supported on OCI, but is now generally available on AWS as well. The data plane, control plane and console all run natively on AWS. Some standout features for me include the fact that it obviates the need for separate databases for operational and analytical needs. It also has ML model training, tuning and explainability capabilities, which further reduce the need for a separate ML setup. On top of that Oracle has posted impressive industry benchmark numbers, like TPC-H, and the new service has almost a dozen “auto” features, like “auto shape prediction” that optimizes resource allocation and Auto Error Recovery. This definitely raises the stakes in the MySQL space and in the cloud database market overall.”
“This definitely raises the stakes in the MySQL space and in the cloud database market overall. The HeatWave MySQL Engineering team has been innovating at a very rapid pace. It will be interesting to see how the competition responds.”
—Sanjeev Mohan, Principal, SanjMo
Industry analysts discuss HeatWave Lakehouse
“The innovation leaps just keep on coming for Nipun Agarwal and the HeatWave Engineering Team. Not content to have the only converged MySQL cloud database service with in-database transactions, analytics and machine learning, they have extended the HeatWave offering capabilities to tap into the massive universe of data that resides outside of the database. With the newly announced HeatWave Lakehouse, customers can load and process as much as 400TB of data on object store much faster and at very attractive price performance. HeatWave MySQL has become a very competitive cloud database, in little time, offering CxOs a powerful universal MySQL database for their next generation applications.”
“It has been a given since Big Data has been around, that Big Data / Lakehouse queries are substantially slower than transactional queries. HeatWave MySQL ends that once and forever, demonstrating that Lakehouse performance can be identical to transaction query performance—unheard of and even unthinkable. With query performance parity, HeatWave allows CxOs to stop worrying where to put data and how to query it. The 'secret sauce' is HeatWave’s Autopilot, that optimizes the queries. Once again the HeatWave team has delivered an industry first.”
“If there were an Oscar for database innovation, Agarwal and team would have won it the last few years.”
—Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“The MySQL team has out-innovated the industry, providing 5 different core database use cases in a single database, which gives CxOs the peace of mind to have one database that can do it all—a truly universal database. The alternative is a suite of specialized databases that are harder to procure, operate and build next generation applications for. HeatWave delivers lower cost and higher agility. With the addition of HeatWave Lakehouse, the offering provides CxOs with one single database to bring together both MySQL data and non-MySQL data, with choices of deployment on both AWS and OCI, effectively providing CxOs with a level of flexibility and choice.”
—Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“Customers using MySQL-compatible databases or non-MySQL workloads should assess the immediate benefits of adopting HeatWave in general and of adopting this new offering in particular. Enterprises operating lakehouses now have a chance to bring all of their data together in a single offering. HeatWave’s unique architecture and cost advantages make it an appealing offering, even for enterprises that do not operate MySQL.”
—Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“With HeatWave Lakehouse, Oracle has delivered the pioneering capability to query data in object store at the same speed as the database. The close integration of an OLTP database, an in-memory query accelerator, and in-database machine learning with object storage is designed to ensure that organizations don’t need to pay for multiple services and multiple copies of data stored on multiple object stores. Organizations looking for the best value in the cloud data lakehouse landscape must seriously consider HeatWave Lakehouse.”
—Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC
“HeatWave MySQL, with its latest Lakehouse announcement, just threw a massive challenge to all comers by delivering the fastest query performance and data loading based on the 400TB TPC-H benchmark. The performance results put Amazon Redshift and Snowflake to shame. While Aurora, Amazon’s own modified MySQL cloud database service is limited to 128TB database sizes, HeatWave Lakehouse supports cloud databases in excess of 400TB, demonstrating continued innovation at a compelling price point for customers worldwide.”
“Snowflake’s entire business is based on pulling in data from an object store—based on querying data from files. And now, with the latest publicly available 400TB benchmarks, we see that HeatWave Lakehouse is much faster in terms of query time and load time—and of course it will cost less. The competition appears frozen.”
Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante interviewed leading cloud industry analysts from Futurum Research, Wikibon, and Constellation Research on theCUBE to discuss recent HeatWave MySQL announcements.
Watch the video (44:58)
“HeatWave MySQL, now with Lakehouse, may be the most significant open source cloud database innovation in the last decade. Scale-out data processing has become table stakes in today’s world of analytics, machine learning, and AI. HeatWave MySQL just took a giant leap by increasing out the scale-out processing by a factor of 8x to 512 nodes. The ability of HeatWave to load and query data on such a massive number of nodes in parallel is the first in the industry. Expect it to spur a market focus on much lower cost/performance, accelerated innovation, and increased competition.”
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, Wikibon
See tech industry influencers Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founding partner at Futurum Research, and Patrick Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, weigh in on HeatWave Lakehouse.
“HeatWave Lakehouse sets the competition on fire by blazing the trail to the previously uncharted territory of 400TB cloud database benchmarks at breakneck speeds. HeatWave Lakehouse is a quantum leap for HeatWave in terms of processing capacity and computing power: from 32TB and 64 nodes to 400TB and 512 nodes with performance and price performance that handily beat Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. Customers will be able to quickly load and analyze across transactional data in their MySQL database and data in object store, including Parquet and CSV files as well as Amazon Aurora and Redshift backups while experiencing the same query performance in both environments. Meanwhile, the cloud database competitors have yet to respond to the in-database convergence and the multi-cloud presence of HeatWave MySQL. How will they cope with the 400TB HeatWave Lakehouse? It presents organizations with the smarter option of higher performance at a lower cost—which any fiscally responsible manager looking to reduce their monthly cloud bill should take a close look at.”
“HeatWave MySQL has consistently delivered industry-leading performance. The latest release of HeatWave Lakehouse, which delivers record performance for loading data from object store, is massively impressive. Databases either load data fast and defer some of the transformations to later—or databases do transformations at load time and are efficient at query time. For HeatWave Lakehouse to deliver record performance for both loading data and querying data is an unprecedented innovation in cloud data services.”
—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, Futurum Research
“The innovation train keeps accelerating faster for the HeatWave MySQL engineering team, with a raft of innovations coming online just in time for CloudWorld. Lakehouse functionality is now available natively on AWS; a new vector store and support for LLMs of choice enables users to interact with HeatWave MySQL in natural language; customers can use HeatWave AutoML to perform machine learning operations on data loaded directly from the Lakehouse; JavaScript can now be accelerated by HeatWave; and with JSON acceleration in HeatWave, queries run up to 144X faster. For its competitors such as Redshift, Aurora, Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery, the heat is on as customers have numerous more reasons to make the switch to HeatWave.”
—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, Futurum Research
“The modern enterprise generates data everywhere, all the time in countless formats. Data that—when transformed—fuels the business. In this environment, the modern database must simplify the process of aggregating and querying data across the enterprise, the edge, and the cloud. HeatWave Lakehouse helps companies do this in a way that drives better performance as evidenced by the latest 400TB benchmarks for running queries and loading data. Given this extreme performance, coupled with Oracle’s pricing strategy, it’s clear that the company is focused on gaining market share from its principal competitors.”
“As an ex-IT executive, I have felt the pain associated with data integration. Different types of .CSV files with different schema mappings can cause hours of headache in trying to perform this very tedious function. Hours that could otherwise be spent focusing on more proactive tasks. With MySQL Autopilot, HeatWave Lakehouse automatically generates corresponding schema without requiring the user to specify anything about the .CSV file. HeatWave Lakehouse can simplify the life of data management professionals and should improve the customer experience.”
—Matt Kimball, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy
“Data lakehouses are the next wave of innovation in analytics, as they are redefining dated assumptions about what’s possible with object storage. Oracle HeatWave Lakehouse takes that a step further by proving that optimizations like Autopilot not only make cloud object storage a first-class citizen in the lakehouse, but that it’s possible to get blinding performance from what was once regarded as bulk storage.”
“From the get-go, Oracle has engineered HeatWave MySQL to deliver higher performance than vanilla MySQL. Oracle hasn’t disappointed on performance with HeatWave Lakehouse, where it has turbocharged the data lake.”
—Tony Baer, Principal, dbInsight
“Data lakehouses are meant to bridge the gap between data warehouses and data lakes, bringing together the best of both worlds. HeatWave MySQL is a cleverly-engineered platform that has bridged the limits of the original MySQL open source platform, by rethinking a cloud-native platform to support analytics. HeatWave Lakehouse takes that a step further by making cloud object storage a first-class citizen. And it does so by addressing the wider constituencies served by the lakehouse with features such as a database and MLOps console that a database administrator doesn't need to understand. HeatWave keeps turning the heat up on the competition.”
—Tony Baer, Principal, dbInsight
“We have watched HeatWave MySQL’s engineering innovations over the past 24 months, and it’s quite evident that MySQL customers are going to experience a whole range of game-changing features. Whether it’s the freedom of choice between OCI, AWS, and now Azure, the ability to run analytics, transactions, and machine learning directly in a single familiar database, or a higher degree of security and compliance, the HeatWave MySQL innovation trajectory continues its ascension. With HeatWave Lakehouse, customers now have the flexibility of running cloud database workloads in the 400TB range, further expanding its addressable market and beating several popular competitors at performance and cost efficiency.”
“With HeatWave MySQL’s continuing innovation, both customers and analysts have come to expect new game-changing features in every release. HeatWave Lakehouse takes customers to a new level of capabilities: being able to query heterogeneous data across data warehouses and data lakes at petabyte scale using the familiar SQL syntax, while beating popular competitors at query performance, load times, and cost efficiency. This breakthrough further expands HeatWave’s differentiation from single-purpose cloud data services by enabling customers to run analytics, transactions, and machine learning directly within a single familiar database, thus massively reducing the potential attack surface and compliance burden.”
—Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst & CTO, KuppingerCole Analysts
“As Oracle continues to push HeatWave MySQL into new territories of data outside the database, the company has also expanded HeatWave MySQL's scalability to 400TB and computing to 512 nodes and has introduced new automation algorithms to MySQL Autopilot to deliver improved performance and usability by eliminating manual tasks. For example, Autopilot automatically maps file data to datatypes in the database. It also samples a small portion of the file in object storage to collect stats which are used by the query optimizer. Autopilot can also analyze data to predict the load time into HeatWave MySQL and automatically generate appropriate loading scripts as well as dynamically adapt HeatWave Lakehouse to match the performance characteristics of the underlying object store. Taken together, these innovations enable HeatWave Lakehouse to greatly accelerate load times and optimize query performance and price performance in a 400TB lakehouse that is quite uncommon compared with customary analytical database architectures.”
“With HeatWave Lakehouse, Oracle is presenting MySQL customers on AWS and Microsoft Azure with a proposition they may not be able to refuse.”
“For users seeking to natively blend transaction processing, analytics, ML, and data lakehouse functionality within a single database, Oracle’s automated approach to database management and optimization will hold great appeal, especially as that database can run faster, more efficiently, and at lower cost than its rivals.”
—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst, AI Platforms, Analytics, and Data Management, Omdia
“As more and more data in a myriad of formats continues to flood into enterprises, the desire to improve insights by combining internal with external data becomes irresistible. This has led to the rise of lake houses in general and more specifically Oracle’s introduction of HeatWave Lakehouse. With this announcement, Oracle continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in MySQL databases as well as in cloud database benchmarking… Oracle's HeatWave Lakehouse is now scalable to 500TB and 512 compute nodes. This, plus new automation algorithms with MySQL Autopilot, deliver significantly higher performance compared with purely human-managed endeavors. Taken together, these innovations enable HeatWave Lakehouse to greatly accelerate load times and optimize query performance and price performance in a highly differentiated 500 TB lakehouse benchmark that promises to deliver equal query times for internal database and object storage—an industry “must” if companies are to make the most of the disparate data they have at hand. HeatWave Lakehouse is not your typical analytical database architecture, and its design engineering will continue to push the competitive market forward.”
—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst, AI Platforms, Analytics, and Data Management, Omdia
“Ideally, companies would get the most nuanced business insights from querying mission-critical operational data alongside CSV, IoT and web files in object storage. However, transforming file data and loading it into the database for analysis is complex, time-consuming, and expensive—overwhelmingly leading to stale insights and/or data that remains untouched. The antidote? HeatWave Lakehouse. Files in the object store are queried directly by HeatWave without copying the data into the MySQL database, dramatically boosting the speed and ease with which you can cost-effectively analyze data across both data warehouses and data lakes. Simply put: HeatWave Lakehouse enables you to stay ahead of the competition by taking swift action on meaningful business insights.”
—Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst & Founding Partner, NAND Research
“HeatWave the only cloud data lakehouse service to query data in object storage and in the database at the same speed, which has never been achieved before.”
“HeatWave MySQL is simply one of the best managed-database offerings available from any cloud provider with performance that makes the competition look slow and expensive in comparison.”
“Oracle raises the bar even higher with HeatWave Lakehouse, taking on the complexities of analyzing enterprise data outside the database, but as if that data were stored natively within the database. HeatWave Lakehouse does this cost-effectively without sacrificing performance. It offers the best load performance and query times in the industry. Throw in the enhancements to MySQL Autopilot for automating data management and the story becomes unbeatable.”
“The way that these types of services are currently offered by public cloud providers such as AWS or GCP makes it out-of-reach for most customers. Users lack the skills or budget to do the integration—often both. HeatWave changes this with its fully integrated approach, allowing organizations without deep pockets access to a data lakehouse. On top of this, machine learning is built-in, and available for just 1% of the cost of Redshift ML. That’s compelling.”
“The bottom line is that this level of capability is out of reach for many organizations, requiring a complex integration of other services. Oracle simplifies the experience for users, removing the need to keep multiple copies of data across multiple object stores, paying for data movement and pipelines, all while shuffling critical data around. Oracle HeatWave MySQL is the only MySQL cloud service that brings it all together while keeping it affordable, providing companies the performance needed to be competitive.”
—Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst & Founding Partner, NAND Research
Industry analysts discuss HeatWave GenAI
“HeatWave is taking a big step in making generative AI and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) more accessible by pushing all the complexity of creating vector embeddings under the hood. Developers simply point to the source files sitting in cloud object storage, and HeatWave then handles the heavy lift. Customers can use Oracle’s embedding model or bring their own. And then they can use in-database AutoML to ground the language model and reduce hallucinations all without having to call separate databases or send the data elsewhere. These are major steps toward democratizing AI.”
—Tony Baer, Founder and CEO, dbInsight
“With the latest release of HeatWave GenAI, Oracle has again pushed the boundaries of database technology, demonstrating 30x better performance than the competition at a substantially lower cost. More important, however, is that customers now have a fully integrated GenAI platform that includes everything from a vector store and in-database LLMs to machine learning and natural language capabilities under the same hood. This approach eliminates unnecessary data movement and fragmentation, reduces the attack surface area, and helps to dramatically improve regulatory compliance posture. HeatWave GenAI exemplifies elegant and synergistic engineering design, demonstrating that such a combination of performance, efficiency, and security is impossible to achieve by just randomly connecting individual cloud services”
—Alexei Balaganski, Lead Analyst and CTO, KuppingerCole Analysts
“HeatWave’s engineering innovation continues to deliver on the vision of a universal cloud database. The latest is generative AI done ‘HeatWave style’—which includes the integration of an automated, in-database vector store and in-database LLMs directly into the HeatWave core. This enables developers to create new classes of applications as they combine HeatWave elements. For example, they can combine HeatWave AutoML and HeatWave GenAI in a fraud detection application that not only detects suspicious transactions—but also provides an understandable explanation. This all runs in the database, so there’s no need to move data to external vector databases, keeping the data more secure. It also makes HeatWave GenAI highly performant at a fraction of the cost as demonstrated in competitive benchmarks.”
—Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“GenAI is already a key contributing force to enable Enterprise Acceleration. Oracle’s seamless integration of GenAI and vector store into HeatWave transforms GenAI from a science project into a useful business tool and a platform for developers. This builds on the existing value that HeatWave brings: you don’t have to purchase and integrate another third-party service. With these new capabilities built into the HeatWave system, developers can easily combine GenAI with machine learning or analytics and even add non-MySQL workloads in HeatWave Lakehouse in developing nextgen applications. That’s a very strong value proposition.”
—Holger Mueller, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
“With the latest release of HeatWave, organizations can benefit from the fact that it now combines generative AI, real-time analytics across both data warehouses and data lakes, transactions and machine learning in a single cloud database service. This enables organizations to eliminate the complexity and cost of integrating separate analytics and vector databases and trying to maintain data consistency, as well as separate lakehouse and ML services in their application architecture, not to mention the time-consuming ETL processes to move data around all those services. Additionally, developers can now rapidly leverage Generative AI with ML to build—for example—an online clothing delivery application enabling customers to ask questions in natural language and get recommended outfits from various shopping boutiques based on their preferences using the HeatWave AutoML recommender system.”
—Carl Olofson, Research Vice President, Data Management Software, IDC
“With the launch of HeatWave GenAI, Oracle has applied an economic lens to the world of vector processing and, through third party benchmarks, demonstrated that HeatWave outperforms the competition for the workloads tested. This is relevant for executives responsible for paying monthly GenAI cloud bills as the more efficiently you can perform vector processing workloads, the less you spend. We’re intrigued by what we see as industry-first, in-database LLMs and an automated vector embedding capability. Add in the HeatWave Lakehouse solution to help organizations looking to get started in AI, as well as those ready for large-scale deployments, and you can see the Heatwave train continues to roll.”
—Dave Vellante, Co-CEO and Chief Analyst of theCUBE Research
“Database vendors have been jumping on the GenAI, LLM, and vector search trend by adding vector capabilities to their existing databases. Customers are finding most of these implementations are too slow, too costly, or both. Oracle is changing the game. Based on a new independent benchmark, Snowflake, Databricks and Google BigQuery are several times slower at all aspects of vector processing – embedding, loading, and querying – than HeatWave GenAI. In fact, the benchmark results show that HeatWave GenAI is anywhere from 15X-30X faster, and as much as 6X cheaper. That’s like getting the performance of a Rimac Nevera for the price of a Kia EV6. That’s an incredible HeatWave GenAI value proposition. For organizations looking to run highly accurate and blazingly fast similarity search queries on unstructured data in object storage at an affordable price, HeatWave has the answer today.”
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, theCUBEresearch.
“The unprecedented pace of production-proven HeatWave database convergence innovations—that solve major user problems—has been breathtaking. This latest HeatWave Vector Store continues that solid innovation trend for generative AI and large language models (LLM). It supports any LLM a customer selects while processing up to ½ a petabyte of Lakehouse data residing in either AWS or OCI—at the same unprecedented speed as the data within the HeatWave database. HeatWave’s innovative database convergence accelerates user productivity, time-to-actionable-insights, time-to-market, time-to-revenues, at very affordable costs—and puts to shame all other database cloud services providers.”
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, TheCUBE Research
“Not only is the latest HeatWave considerably faster at concurrent execution than Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery, it also loads several times faster than all of them, and costs less delivering much better price/performance. Oracle’s continuous HeatWave innovation from generative AI to analytics to machine learning keeps improving at a rapidly accelerated pace, while reducing the costs.”
—Marc Staimer, Senior Analyst, TheCUBE Research
“There’s vector processing and there’s vector processing done right. Oracle has unleashed HeatWave GenAI onto the world and has delivered relentless vector processing performance that is 30X faster than Snowflake, 18X faster than Google BigQuery and 15X faster than Databricks—at up to 6X lower cost. Clearly HeatWave GenAI didn’t just turn the heat up on the competition—it melted them down. For any organization serious about high performance generative AI workloads, spending company resources on any of these three other vector database offerings is the equivalent of burning money and trying to justify it as a good idea.”
—Ron Westfall, Research Director, The Futurum Group
“The new HeatWave GenAI and vector store enhancements are targeted directly at meeting the challenges organizations face in making sure that their unfolding AI journeys are proceeding on the right track.”
“Now HeatWave is even better positioned to meet data, analytics, and AI priorities in a single cloud database service. Vector store and generative AI bring the vigor of LLMs to customers, providing them with an intuitive way to interact and the ability to combine external and internal data to get the accurate answers that they need to boost their business outcomes.”
—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, Futurum Research
Read the report on Gen AI (PDF)
“HeatWave makes AI very easy. It automates the entire ML lifecycle as well as the pipeline to ingest unstructured data into the vector store. Having GenAI and Vector Stores as integral parts of HeatWave makes unstructured data analysis extremely fast and easy just by using natural language. It’s like having a very intelligent assistant helping deconstruct and analyze documents but also generate the report on that analysis. This is quite possibly the best yet from the HeatWave engineering team.”
—Ron Westfall, Senior Analyst and Research Director, Futurum Research
“Generative AI holds a world of promise to organizations of all types and sizes. With that big promise comes big challenges as IT organizations are challenged in terms of budget, technology, and AI skills. Because of this, many organizations find themselves having to pause generative AI projects, putting them at risk of falling behind the competition. With HeatWave GenAI, IT organizations can easily move from concept to production through in-database large language models (LLMs) and vector store. This enables IT and app developers to quickly embed GenAI into its most precious resource – its data. These capabilities, married with HeatWave Chat also enable users and customers to perform queries and searches through natural conversations.”
—Matt Kimball, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy.
“Data is changing the way businesses and customers consume data. However, making use of all the data at our fingertips becomes more and more difficult as new (data) stores and types are introduced on a regular basis. The ability for a user to realize the value of data is constrained by a data management platform’s ability to leverage all this information being stored in multiple formats, across multiple repositories. A vector store in object storage is a very innovative idea; customers will get great scalability, even for very large data sets—at a very compelling price point. With the ability to use JavaScript to process and query data directly in the lakehouse and semi-structured data in JSON format, developers can now use Oracle’s HeatWave Lakehouse for a much broader set of use cases. The rate and speed at which HeatWave is being shaped to meet the needs of the data-driven business is unparalleled.”
—Matt Kimball, Vice President, Moor Insights & Strategy
“Oracle just became the first cloud database provider to integrate generative AI into a MySQL offering by implementing Vector Store in HeatWave, continuing the converged database approach. With this new capability, users can interact with data in natural language and responses can combine public data with proprietary enterprise data in HeatWave to generate more accurate and relevant responses. With all of the interest in generative AI, this should make HeatWave an obvious choice for both MySQL and non-MySQL customers.”
—Stephen Catanzano, Senior Analyst, ESG
“What do you get when you combine in-database LLMs and an automated vector store with a scale-out data processing engine optimized for data in object store? You get Oracle's newly released HeatWave GenAI. In typical Oracle fashion, this release seeks to outperform the company's primary competitors such as Snowflake. In terms of speeding up vector processing, Oracle is claiming a rather significant factor of 30X over its competitors “With or without such performance assertions, the bottom line is that HeatWave GenAI packs some serious performance "heat" by doing similarity search processing in-memory. This goes beyond what we've seen from early vector databases and what customers get from many vector "plug-ins" for traditional databases. Importantly, HeatWave GenAI brings this performance mentality to bear on development as well as execution by streamlining database setup and even automating complex tasks like model selection and content parsing/chunking. These moves will speed up the creation of impactful GenAI applications including applications like content summarization, retrieval augmented generation, and natural language conversations with data.”
—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst, AI & Data Analytics, Omdia
“HeatWave speeds into CloudWorld Las Vegas with a flurry of announcements, including the ability to query JSON documents up to 144X faster. But it’s the addition of Generative AI support, including a new vector store that uses a language encoder to create vector embeddings from documents in HeatWave Lakehouse—available now in both AWS and OCI—that should really get organizations’ attention. With the ability to use LLMs of choice to generate a response from an organization’s specific data stored in HeatWave, users can now obtain contextually relevant answers for both MySQL and non-MySQL data in a cloud service that already combines real-time analytics, machine learning and transactional workloads.”
—Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst, AI Platforms, Analytics, and Data Management, Omdia
“In a world where AI complexity reigns supreme, it’s refreshing to see an enterprise-grade AI solution that helps organizations accelerate real-world GenAI deployments as opposed to spending cycles trying to wade through the sea of options and wasting precious time trying to integrate everything—and hoping that it will eventually work. With in-database LLMs that are ready to go and a fully automated vector store that’s ready for vector processing on day one, HeatWave GenAI takes AI simplicity—and price performance—to a level that its competitors such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Databricks can’t remotely begin to approach.”
—Steve McDowell, Chief Analyst, NAND Research
“The HeatWave engineering team is clearly doubling down on AI and machine learning innovation. Not only can customers now train ML models on data both in the database and in object storage with full automation, but with the new generative AI and vector store capabilities they’ll be able to interact with HeatWave in natural language, and they’ll receive accurate answers for their own business purposes only—based on their own enterprise data in addition to publicly available data. The flexibility to use whichever LLMs organizations prefer continues to demonstrate the open and collaborative approach of the HeatWave engineering team.”
—Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst & Founding Partner, NAND Research
“If you’re a MySQL developer, then you now have a straightforward path to becoming an AI developer—just use HeatWave. The vector store is integrated with MySQL Shell, allowing you to ask questions and receive answers in natural language using this familiar interface. Plus, the pipeline to discover and ingest proprietary documents in the vector store is automated—which makes it very easy for developers without ML expertise to fully leverage the vector store.”
—Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst & Founding Partner, NAND Research
“HeatWave GenAI’s automated in-database vector store and in-database LLMs greatly simplify how developers build AI applications and users interact with data. In contrast to many other vendors that require multiple steps to create vector stores and to use vector stores with LLMs, HeatWave GenAI requires only one SQL statement for each task and it’s all automated from there. It’s equally simple for users. They can use HeatWave Chat for contextual conversations with their data in natural language. Beyond simplification, these in-database capabilities mean that customers gain performance benefits without GPUs and don’t need to manage a standalone vector database, to move data and keep it synchronized, or to incur associated costs.”
—Richard Winter, CEO, WinterCorp