Yes I agree with Oracle's database technology being amazing. It was born in an era when disk space was expensive and the only data storing mechanism that most developers know was transactional ACID SQL stores. However we are living in an era when disk is cheap, data volumes grew way beyond a single node capacity and we have a handful of different approaches when it comes to store data on disk. We also have much better understanding on tradeoffs in this world (CAP, etc.).
I have moved a bunch of companies from MySQL/Oracle to scalable key-value stores having much better operational characteristics than the SQL ones. Was it hard? Hell yes, we had to educate developers about not having transactions, network partitions, order of operations and a bunch of things that solutions like OracleDB hides from you. Was it worth it? Absolutely, we had 99.99% yearly uptime while the previous SQL based solution was somewhere in the 90.00 - 95.00 range. Did we save money? Absolutely, the licensing cost and the fact that we do not need beefy boxes around payed off. Is this relevant to the subject as Oracle is in trouble or not? I am not sure. If the most of money coming from the government and fortune 100 than probably not.
I am in the same boat like other here on HN, I prefer to build systems myself that I understand 100%, and trying to avoid using technology like Oracle as much as I can based on the experience with support and the pricing. Again, I mostly work with startups and companies where the budget cannot be blown on SQL licenses.
The biggest caveat for oracle and other proprietary solutions is the /dynamic/ licensing/pricing models having an effect on architecture based on disk, cpu and other paremeters.
With OSS solutions, postgres/mariadb etc I have the flexibility of deploying as many nodes, disks, cpu, machines as I want without thinking of how will effect the price, and without worrying of a sales organization tracking my use. That's why I don't worry about clustering, partitioning, linking and many other features lacking.
If I'm going to plan for 100M to 2B monthly active users for a growing organization Oracle/Ms SQL aren't an option at all. For small scale of up to 10K users, they seem to have a use case for "legacy" organizations.
I have moved a bunch of companies from MySQL/Oracle to scalable key-value stores having much better operational characteristics than the SQL ones. Was it hard? Hell yes, we had to educate developers about not having transactions, network partitions, order of operations and a bunch of things that solutions like OracleDB hides from you. Was it worth it? Absolutely, we had 99.99% yearly uptime while the previous SQL based solution was somewhere in the 90.00 - 95.00 range. Did we save money? Absolutely, the licensing cost and the fact that we do not need beefy boxes around payed off. Is this relevant to the subject as Oracle is in trouble or not? I am not sure. If the most of money coming from the government and fortune 100 than probably not.
I am in the same boat like other here on HN, I prefer to build systems myself that I understand 100%, and trying to avoid using technology like Oracle as much as I can based on the experience with support and the pricing. Again, I mostly work with startups and companies where the budget cannot be blown on SQL licenses.