[garmaine]

> Could gmail have been built in Oracle forms, how about slack? How about Asana? How about an LMS such as blackboard, moodle, or D2L? Can you name any popular mainstream product that could be built upon and run off the Oracle forms product?

Yes, it could.

Not going to judge whether it's a good idea or not, but it most certainly could be implemented.

I suspect you're not aware just how much capability relational database management systems have.

[thu2111]

Don't know why this post was voted down. I used to work on Gmail, which uses a totally proprietary storage and database stack, like everything else at Google.

One of the most insightful design docs I ever read was an exploration by an engineer of how GMail 1.0 could have been implemented with commodity tech and how it'd compare cost wise. The rather sobering conclusion was that it'd have similar functionality and been cheaper to develop/run.