[VladRussian]

a lot of Sun's prima donnas didn't make it in Oracle wolf pack. They had their day at Sun (it was an unbelievable feast during plague), and it resulted in the failure of the company on all fronts, business and engineering, software and hardware.

[bcantrill]

More accurately, we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go solve much more interesting problems elsewhere -- and in a much better environment besides. Why would anyone wish to suffer at a technically mediocre company when there are so many interesting problems yet to solve?

[VladRussian]

O-o-o-o-h! who can forgot this one. The technical brilliance of scattering profiler calls across Solaris sources (which endeavor took enormous engineering and marketing budgets at the time when Solaris was eaten alive by Linux) is, no doubt, a sound platform to "mediocrate" a company whose products in a highly competitive marketplace are among the leaders, technically and commercially (people actually pay to use them, whereis Sun had trouble convincing people to use its products, in particular Solaris, even for free)

Apples to apples - Oracle DB has excellent profiler capabilities and even useful tools around it. Of course, in this day and age, excellent profiler capabilities and tools is just a normal must-have, a technical mediocracy and nowhere a sign of technical brilliance.

Great, the more of "we (for there are many of us) realized that we could go solve much more interesting problems elsewhere", the less chances for the Oracle server to suffer the fate of Solaris.