Dive Brief:

• Oracle is still swinging in the battle for the database market though the race to own the cloud appears to belong to Amazon Web Services. "In terms of technology, there is no way that someone can move — a normal person would move from an Oracle database to an Amazon database," said Larry Ellison, chairman and CTO of Oracle. 

• Amazon made its database technology available on the cloud long before Oracle did, Ellison said, but now Oracle is making its database technology readily available to customers in the cloud. The move lessens the chance customers will opt to move off Oracle technology. Such migrations are "just incredibly expensive and complicated and you've got to be willing to give up tons of reliability, tons of security, tons of performance to go ahead and do it," Ellison said.

• Ellisons comments came during an Q2 earnings call. The company's total revenue remained unchanged year-over-year at $9.6 billion. Its revenue was up 2% year-over-year in constant currency.

Dive Insight:

Ellison is set on his war of words with Amazon, but in the database space Oracle has the advantage. Oracle is a leader in operational database management, according to  Gartner's Magic Quadrant. The company's database management system is ranked as the most popular worldwide, according to Statista. The cloud is a different story.

With a commanding lead, AWS remains king, with Microsoft and Google trailing. Oracle has edged its way into the market, playing catch up in a space where market leaders had a presence for years.

As Ellison notes, Oracle has "to deliver that autonomous database on first-class cloud infrastructure to be successful in the cloud business." With the second generation of Oracle's cloud available, Ellison says it has accomplished just that.

Cloud maturity allows on-premise Oracle database customers to migrate to a cloud-based option, allowing the vendor to hold onto its market share.

But high-profile companies have tirelessly worked to migrate off Oracle database technology. Such transitions are notoriously difficult, with database software tangled in many aspects of a company's operations.

Amazon is about 92% done migrating off Oracle's database software in favor of an in-house offering, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said. Amazon expects to run entirely free from Oracle by the end of 2019.

Salesforce too, wants to eliminate Oracle software from crucial business systems and is reportedly developing an internal database for customer management and marketing automation software.