[hga]

Back then it might have been an OK decision, you did get some very nice things with Oracle including scaling and MySQL was a lot less mature, only about half a decade old. It certainly doesn't sound like choosing Oracle per se was instrumental in eToys' failure. On the other hand I've never heard a good thing about Sybase.

[Devilboy]

Sybase is a fantastic piece of engineering. Nice code syntax, rock solid in production.

There you go, now you've heard a good thing about the father of MS SQL Server.