[kraig911]

As someone who used to work in/on/underneath websphere. I can tell you I am loathe to even consider anything IBM. I was almost recruited by them and then I recalled how miserable I was on one particular project. The money was good but I said no. I recommend everyone I mean to stay away from IBM and Oracle as best I can. I just don't think the line between open source and enterprise is crystal clear anymore.

[blueside]

As a general rule, if a work task lands on your desk that involves working with a IBM/Oracle/SAP product, preemptively apologize to those regularly around you for your miserable attitude in the near future.

[SSLy]

I don't know, I get this exact attitude when working against Windows Server, Oracle and WebSphere isn't so bad in comparison.

[user5994461]

I'm not sure why Oracle is in the list. The databases are very expensive but they work well.

[marcosdumay]

When The Daily WTF was still maintained it reserved an entire section of the site for Oracle Database. It may rarely have catastrophic failures (although it's the second one I've seen most catastrophic failures, just after MySQL), but it is composed of one unreasonable choice after the other.

[gargravarr]

Having worked at a company that used an Oracle cluster considering of over £1 million in hardware alone (I was never brave enough to ask about the licensing for the actual DB), the complexity of the setup far outweighs anything I could get my head around, and the company employed several full-time DBAs who were constantly tweaking parameters to keep the system performing - it could not simply be left to its own devices, there were humans in the loop around the clock.

Despite this, there was still a semi-major outage every few months that required even more complex failover systems surrounding it (message queues etc.) to deal with the downtime. I was with the company for only a few months but it was long enough for this to occur. Does make me wonder what the company was paying all this money (hardware, software and DBAs) for if the system was still expected to fail regularly.

[fphhotchips]

What makes you say The Daily WTF isn't maintained?

[marcosdumay]

It is online, but it doesn't seem to get much more new content.

[szatkus]

I get new items on RSS everyday.

[easytiger]

Oracle are ostensibly a large services company. They don't just sell the DB

[mschuster91]

Probably due to their extremely shady business practices, first of them being bundling the JRE with crapware on Windows.