alt Hacker NewsI'm advising a startup doing software for banks, and the overall attitude of their clients is: "We want to get away from the #&I$*@&^#$ Oracle, but we're stuck for now".
Oracle used to be a must-have because it was one of the few products that could handle transactions on a scale of a bank, with all the requirements for backups, redundancy, etc.
A fun anecdote. Back in 2000, I was present at negotiations (as a note-taker) where database vendors were bidding for a project for a factory control system. Vendors submitted benchmark results for various DB sizes up to 40Gb, and Oracle's rep hautingly said something like: "Our minimal size for benchmarks is 80Gb, so here are our results for that size".
And this was a _lot_ for that time. Now? It's so ridiculously tiny that you can host it on a smartwatch. So why would you pay Oracle?
Agreed, I had the same talks around 2000 but at the time it was still very much mssql/db2/oracle for 'real companies'. Yet i'm still surprised how much pushback we get, especially in Asian countries (India) but we do get it, a lot. And we have conversations with financial partners in the US as they advice our VCs; those calls go the same way 'ah, you are using that hipster open source stuff, yeah we don't do that here'.