[crop_rotation]

I don't think anyone other than a very very small number on HN would consider Oracle the "best" database. I have not even seen any such argument on HN in like forever.

The reason Oracle makes so much money is not because they are best for some definition of best, but:

1. Lock in -> A database change is hard to do even for extremely focused tech companies. For companies whose core business is not technology, it might not even make sense to bother.

2. They expanded beyond the DB to acquire several companies like Peoplesoft and Netsuite and companies needing these inevitably turn to Oracle database.

Don't get me wrong, oracle has tons of Optimisations packed into it, but there is nothing which makes it the best database, or even an unambiguous top 3 databse product.

[vosper]

> 1. Lock in -> A database change is hard to do even for extremely focused tech companies. For companies whose core business is not technology, it might not even make sense to bother.

Just to back this up - it took Amazon years to complete the project of moving off Oracle, and this is a company that had already built and/or hosted myriad database platforms in AWS. They had no lack of expertise.

> We migrated 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Redshift.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-...