alt Hacker NewsI actually sat through an Oracle sales presentation around 1999 (I was the product engineer, along with company executives) and honestly it sounded pretty good. At the time we were using Lotus Notes for a database so even pencil and paper would have been better. Oracle absolutely was the market leader and there was no doubt about its technical chops. Oracle Parallel Server could run active-active across two sites separated by many miles of fibre, which was a remarkable thing to do back then.
Oracle came back with a quote that was so far outside what our company could afford that we went with Informix (not a cheap database). Pretty lucky escape.
A year or two later I ported the whole stack to PostgreSQL and it worked absolutely fine since we didn't have that much scale. Unfortunately when I left the guy who took over was a huge Informix fan so he deleted all the PG code and went back.
Oracle was (and I assume is) able to provide "hardware" level support for their software, if you paid enough and your database was shitting itself at 2 AM, they'd have engineers on the phone and maybe on the plane to get you back up and running.
For smaller companies and businesses? Not needed. For big multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap.