[zooey]

I think people should use software like oracle and look and read (some of) its enormous amount of documentation to understand what it can do BEFORE saying it is shit.

Oracle is a very very very good database. Stop with this non sense

[edw]

I wasn't thinking about Oracle-the-database but all the other stuff they sell that makes huge, faceless corporations go. No YC-style company is in a position to take on Oracle toe-to-toe, in the lapdance-and-BJ market. The only option is some sort of incremental disruption where a product takes market share from Oracle at the low end, where Oracle is probably happy to see these not-very-valuable customers desert them. (This is straight from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma.)

And for the record, I programmed against Oracle using oraperl back in 1994.

[sdz]

I'm sure some parts of Oracle's database are very good. The part I work with (OLAP), though, is ludicrously bad. New bugs are introduced with almost every database patch, and the behavior of existing functions have changed without notice. For this privilege, Oracle charges license fees by the core.