[YouWhy]

I am trying hard to see who could be the target audience for such a thing.

My best guess is engineers who are not currently employed, but who would like to up specifically their Oracle skills, as opposed to other valuable alternatives like Postgres.

Am I missing something?

[314156]

Postgres doesn't even hold a candle to the OLTP performance that Oracle is capable of. It is probably decades ahead of Postgres in terms of technology. Oracle had multi-instance capability 22 years ago. Robust multi-instance support still seems to elude Postgres. Postgres high availability and failover capabilities are laughable.

Sure, Postgres is much easier to setup and tune (because it does much less compared to Oracle anyway), but it's not going to dethrone Oracle anytime soon when it comes to powering the most demanding OLTP workloads (like stock exchanges and telecom) out there.

[toyg]

Simple VMs for testing purposes are useful for infrastructure consultants and developers, in niches where the products support Oracle as deployment database.

It's a smaller and smaller audience, because of cloud taking over, but someone still needs it.

[Kate4876]

smaller and smaller, really? my friends (students as me) like it a lot for its simplicity and maturity: look at those new features inside, there is much more than the MERGE command ;D and this is the database we'll have to work with in large companies.

Oracle thank you for that one!

[toyg]

Desperate astroturfing is desperate.

If you really are a student (lol), good luck making a living as an infra consultant in the Oracle space, man. It's a dying field.