[acdha]

Funny story: I worked at a place which spent millions annually with Oracle. They had a couple hours downtime every day because they couldn’t afford the online backup product.

This was an Ivy League university with an endowment in the tens of billions.

[miahi]

This is not true. There is no separate licensing for archivelog mode (the single thing that is needed for online backups).

[acdha]

That may be the case now but it was either different back then or neither their Oracle-trained DBAs nor their Oracle consultants was aware of it.

I was working with an even worse Oracle product (Hyperion) which had a convoluted homegrown script restarting all of the services on a number of servers to work around their inability to reliably handle database connection failures lasting more than a short interval. Before do that, they’d tried to get rid of the backup window but were told that wasn’t possible unless they could come up with a large amount of money for the license.