[exelius]

You're right about their sales practices -- and I've got more than one client who are slowly ripping out every Oracle product they have as a result. Oracle treats enterprise software sales like it's still the 90s, but in a lot of their markets there is no other serious vendor.

Oracle makes the majority of their money off of industry-function-specific ERP software that runs on top of their database platform. That's a market that's very hard to disrupt or displace, because you have to develop deep domain expertise in dozens of different industries and functions. Their technology platform licenses often sneak in the back door -- the customer wants the solution, and if they have to pay for the DB as part of the solution, then it's just part of the price.