[falcolas]

Because at a certain size of business, paying developers to make patches against your favorite OSS database doesn't scale. It's cheaper to pay for a, let's be honest, damned fine piece of software.

Oracle, despite being the very definition of evil, has one hell of a software product. It is performant, has built-in features that makes Postgres look like BerkelyDB, HA solutions, and perhaps most importantly, the backing and support of a multi-billion dollar company.

[jbooth]

Eh. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Most of those built-in features are anti-features IMO, and none of them make up for having to maintain long-ass PL/SQL functions as opposed to a reasonable programming language. And as far as performance goes, SSDs are cheaper than Oracle licenses, by a lot.

Oracle doesn't have any magic pixie dust that changes your underlying hardware. If you want raw performance, BerkeleyDB will wipe the floor with Oracle, because it's that much simpler. You've just got a much smaller feature-set as a result.

You probably see things differently than me, though. Related question since you're a DBA -- what are the best practices for testing PL/SQL, you have a link or anything? Every place I've seen it done was a nightmare and involved a lot of crossed fingers during releases.