Amazon initially chose to use Oracle's database back in the late 1990's when they needed to scale during the dot com boom as it was the most viable option that could handle the transactional volumes. Oracle's shared everything, vertically scalable relational database approach had significant strengths and was an excellent choice at that time.
However, in technology years, that was a very long time ago. Internet demands have pushed architectures towards distributed computing/horizontal scalability. Companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. have developed approaches for massive scaling. Open source is fueling innovation that rivals proprietary approaches. With the growth of specialized approaches for different data challenges, Oracle's dominance has been declining and Amazon's ability to extricate itself from 88% of its Oracle databases highlights this. What likely remains at Amazon is within Oracle's stronghold -- high volume, mission critical, transactional systems. It will be interesting to see how Amazon progresses through that space, but given their technical acumen and vast resources, I wouldn't bet against them.
While not in the headlines at the moment, the high volume, mission critical, transactional issue has been wrestled with and solved elsewhere. It is just a matter of time until Oracle begins to feel significant pressure in its database business. At Oracle HQ, they know it. It is why they are trying to push the field to incent as many customers as possible to buy on-premise Exadata systems or to move to their DBaaS "Autonomous" offering.
Oracle is in a race against time to try and lock in as many customers as possible. All of LE's statements are designed to try and make customers believe that what competitors are offering isn't good enough for "real" business needs. It's totally marketing and, at best, only contains a grain of truth, but that is exactly what LE does. All he needs to do is hold onto enough customers and their revenue stream in order to feed his ego and lifestyle.
This post was taken from another thread ( @W4Oag1Y-dnv ). Thought the OP made sam valid points.