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Comment by throw93 | Hacker News Reader

About 10 years back my company hired consultants, spent close to 6 months translating SQL queries/stored procs to be Oracle. The goal was to support both MSSQL Server & Oracle for the on-premise product. It was quite costly undertaking. Then few years later they just abandoned Oracle because of maintenance costs.

I wonder if anyone starting out today chooses Oracle as their relational database.

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Yes, large organizations that aren't tech oriented will use Oracle every time over other solutions.

It's not a great solution for tech companies, but they do say no one ever got fired for choosing Oracle or IBM or whatever, mainly because you can always pay them to fix your shit and there will always be someone supporting those products.

Oracle is very powerful. As a developer I found it easy to work with. But the cost to run in production is eye-watering. IDK how their licensing works today but in the past it was free to use for evaluation or for developing a prototype. Once you were "gaining business value" i.e. using it even if only internally to develop a real product, you were supposed to be paying for it.

Oracle XE is free for production use, but it only makes sense if

a) you are already familiar with Oracle, and

b) you have a very small data set:

“Oracle Database 18c XE supports up to:

3 Pluggable Databases

2 CPUs for foreground processes

2GB of RAM (SGA and PGA combined)

12GB of user data on disk (irrespective of compression factor)”

> I wonder if anyone starting out today chooses Oracle as their relational database.

Your boss does.

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