I don't know much about this sector, but how does Oracle compare to its direct competitors? E.g. is SAP friendlier with the developer/technical community?
IBM with its DB2 product is a direct competitor, and seems to do a bit better, blue suits & company hymns notwithstanding.
SAP is a special case, as it has a more limited target audience. The financial environment has a heavy, erm, taint on the typical SAP developer. Most of them are in it for the money, so I don't think a lot of them care all that much. College students in Germany often joke about selling your soul to become a SAP consultant… Whereas most Oracle developers or DBAs I've met are still more engineers than business types.
Some companies just don't need a flourishing developer community. I think Oracle – especially after buying Sun – isn't one where this would seem advisable, but apparently they think different. Wonder how that will work out…
Oracle the database isn't really Oracle's main product. They're real product is a bunch of industry specific applications and middleware (and related consulting services) that happens to need a Oracle database to run. So as such they're not really directly competing with SQL server (or postgres or whatever)
That's a good point. I suppose I should have specifically labelled DB2 and SQL Server as competitors to Oracle 10x or whatever their current DBMS version is. :)
SAP is a special case, as it has a more limited target audience. The financial environment has a heavy, erm, taint on the typical SAP developer. Most of them are in it for the money, so I don't think a lot of them care all that much. College students in Germany often joke about selling your soul to become a SAP consultant… Whereas most Oracle developers or DBAs I've met are still more engineers than business types.
Some companies just don't need a flourishing developer community. I think Oracle – especially after buying Sun – isn't one where this would seem advisable, but apparently they think different. Wonder how that will work out…