Amazon Web Services boss Andy Jassy. Matt Weinberger A week ago, Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy stood onstage at the company's annual tech conference and promised "freedom" to frustrated Oracle users. Now Amazon says that over 1,000 customers have already taken him up on the offer.

The "freedom" came in the form of a new tool called AWS Database Migration Service that helps these users jump ship from the Oracle database to Amazon's competitor, Amazon Aurora, or to some of the other Oracle competitors that Amazon hosts on its cloud-computing service.

Oracle has a really strong hold on its database customers. They love the product and they use it to run their most important applications. But, as we've previously reported, many do not like how Oracle sells and charges for it for the database and the hardball tactics it has been known to use with its customers.

But there wasn't a lot of choice in the matter. The other traditional large-scale database providers, like Microsoft, all had their own licensing issues.

One thousand customers, even in a week, is a drop in the bucket compared to Oracle's enormous global cadre of customers. But if this tool keeps going gangbusters, the battle between Amazon and Oracle will be an interesting one to watch.

Meanwhile, Amazon says that its customers love its new Aurora database, making it the "fastest-growing service in the history of AWS," though it didn't offer specific numbers to explain those claims.