A smaller company I worked for a few years ago was migrating its old ERP legacy system and brought in some people from Oracle, SAP and Epicor. They decided to go with SAP, but I remember my boss in several lunch meetings saying that they didn't get a sales pitch from the other vendors as much as a litany of horror stories about why they shouldn't go with Oracle.
It worked since my manager said he asked around and did his own research and wondered how they're even still in business since everybody he talked to said the same thing - whatever you do, do not go with Oracle.
How does anyone in IT management not know that Oracle is poison?
That blows my mind. I encountered two Oracle audits within 7ish years in the industry, and heard about others. If anyone goes to MIS school, there should probably be a contracts day somewhere in that curriculum, and "don't use Oracle" should be the first bullet point.
Maybe in the 80s and 90s without the internet it might be more hush-hush. But this is now two decades of aggressive Oracle audits. Two decades is a LONG TIME for companies to get off of a vendor.
And now there's Postgres with, what, 30 years of engineering into it? Honestly if your database scale exceeds Postgres, you should be on Cassandra or other specialized database that will actually scale to really large sizes, not some weirdo hyper-hardware Oracle setup.
Virtually every large org has a very involved process for vendor selection. HOW DOES ORACLE SURVIVE THESE? How does any IT organization not have a standing policy of "generally don't use oracle unless you absolutely have to"?
postgres dates from 01974, it used to be called ingres, so it has 50 years of engineering, not 30. the 'post' is from when they added 'object-oriented' features to make it 'post-relational'
as i understand it, oracle mostly sells to executives above it management, but there are also lots of executives in it management who aren't as concerned about the survival of their company as they are their own careers. it's hard to point to cases where company failure can be specifically pinned on oracle licensing fees, but since a company running on oracle can never switch away, ultimately there's no reason for oracle to leave any profits for the company shareholders when they could simply extract them in licensing fees. unless the company has pre-existing licensing contracts in place, i guess, and successfully defends them — which it won't be able to do if it fails oracle's licensing audit, and obviously copyright infringement is ubiquitous in every company, so most will fail, and then oracle can alter the deal
It worked since my manager said he asked around and did his own research and wondered how they're even still in business since everybody he talked to said the same thing - whatever you do, do not go with Oracle.