[chii]

there may be more reasons other than technical that large businesses run on Oracle (database).

The amount of paid "consultants" that oracle pushes thru to make their sale, plus their tactic of charging what you can afford to pay, as well as the "can't get fired for buying IBM" mentality of large IT organizations means that oracle has a distinct advantage over any small competitor.

Not that oracle's tech isn't good, but there are comparable alternatives, but they are only comparable in the technical aspect, not in the (strongarm) sales aspect.

[pron]

I was mainly referring to Java, not to Oracle DB. There aren't really good alternatives to Java.

[ebiester]

.NET is a fine alternative in 80% of the use cases. Honestly, in half of the projects I see coming through, the only reason java is a requirement is because everything else is already in java; the only hang up is DB2/MSSQL/Oracle drivers.

[taylodl]

.NET is never a good option to Java. The CLR suffers the same performance issues as the JVM and as noted in the thread above people are starting to migrate back to C++ as a result and yet .NET has the further restriction that it only runs on Microsoft systems. So with .NET I get the disadvantages of Java combined with the restriction of not being to migrate to other platforms. That's not a good deal for the enterprise.