Oracle CTO Larry Ellison promised a “totally automated, self-driving” database and took a few shots at Amazon Web Services (AWS) during the company’s first quarter 2018 earnings call.

In addition to touting the fancy new database, Oracle executives yet again announced better-than-expected earnings, driven by the company’s cloud business. Total cloud revenues during the first quarter hit $1.5 billion, up 51 percent compared to the prior year.

The new database uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. It’s fully autonomous, and it’s way better than AWS’ database, Ellison said.

The company will unveil the next-generation database on Oct. 1 at Oracle OpenWorld. It will start shipping the product by the end of 2017.

“Based on machine learning, this new version of Oracle is a totally automated, self-driving system that does not require a human being either to manage the database or tune the database,” Ellison said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the conference call with investors.

Using artificial intelligence eliminates most sources of human error, Ellison explained. The company will offer public cloud service level agreements that guarantee 99.995 percent systems availability time. This means less than 30 minutes of downtime per year.

This level of reliability will require Oracle to automatically tune, patch, and upgrade itself while the system is running, Ellison said, adding: “AWS can’t do any of this stuff.”

Ellison also promised customers moving from Amazon’s Redshift to Oracle’s database “can expect to cut their cost in half or more.”

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said his company’s database costs less because it automates more. He described AWS’ MySQL-based Aurora database and its open source version, Redshift, as “old fashion technologies.” Oracle’s new database, on the other hand, allows users to “push a button and load your data and you’re done.”

In August, the company announced its database platform now runs on Oracle’s bare metal cloud infrastructure.

In addition to upping its cloud revenues in the first quarter, Oracle’s total revenues grew 7 percent from the prior year to $9.2 billion. Cloud plus on-premises software revenues were up 9 percent year-over-year to $7.4 billion.

During this same time period, cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenues grew 62 percent to $1.1 billion. Cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) plus infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) revenues were up 28 percent to $400 million.

Additionally, non-GAAP operating income increased 11 percent to $3.8 billion, and non-GAAP net income rose 14 percent to $2.7 billion. Non-GAAP earnings per share increased 12 percent to $0.62.