Just curious for the older devs on here, how seminal was Oracle in 80/90s? I feel he was actually a good dev but his career as a ruthless sales person and corporate tactician overshadows whatever accomplishments he had as a database developer.
There were "greybeard" DBAs who were all smug Oracle guys.
My impression then was that Oracle didn't invent anything but had dominated through better funding and ruthless expansion. Administrating a Oracle DB at scale was really hard but that created armys of loyal DBAs protecting their hard-won skills.
It wasn't seen as an inherently bad piece of technology, it was just massive overkill (too expensive, too high maintenance) for a lot of the solutions it ended up being used for because of the effectiveness of Oracle's sales organization.
They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes.
We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.
I'm not a dba, but Oracle was effectively the default, and it worked reliably and did what you needed it to do. I think maybe Sybase was faster in certain circumstances.