The thing is that you don't get "out of memory errors" you get the kernel to almost randomly choose a process and sacrifice it in order to free ram.

If the chosen process is a database... That's not funny. At all.

Edit: you could adjust the oom score to avoid Linux killing important process, but I don't want to discover if Linux is actually going to follow the oom score or just "keep it in mind" when choosing a process to sacrifice.

When you get out of RAM, the computer becomes completely unusable for an unspecified amount of time and you end up force rebooting after minutes of frustration. I'd rather have the OOM killer step up and keep things in order.