[wil421]

Oracle and SAP have products that touch niche areas of businesses. Oil company with complex shipping and receiving looking for accounting software? Global metal foundry who needs to track raw materials to finished goods and forecast everything? SAP and Oracle can sell your VP overly complex products for almost anything.

For the DB, corporate executives types feel much more comfortable choosing Oracle or IBM. It usually bites them in the ass down the road due to licensing or support costs.

[ibejoeb]

This is certainly all true, and with Oracle, absolutely everything is negotiable. Nobody pays list. It still isn't cheap. If you are going the Oracle route, you might even consider hiring a consultant to do the buying, because relationships and knowing the Oracle way can make a huge difference.

Also, Oracle Database itself is more than just an RDBMS and has an enormous amount of features that have no analogs in Postgres or any other non-commercial system. Take a look Oracle's data warehousing components, like advanced analytical SQL, pattern matching, and the especially cool modeling: https://docs.oracle.com/database/121/DWHSG/sqlmodel.htm#DWHS...