Oracle Is Bleeding At The Hands Of Database Rivals

I've seen several sql server shops with severe performance problems where the in-house DBAs had no clue what had hit them. Different DB engines deal with multi-version read consistency in different ways, Postgres does a defensive copy-on-update, Oracle falls back on rollback segments; unfortunately sql server escalates page locks to table-wide locks, and then performance goes downhill from there.

If your friends don't experience any problems, I would venture to guess they must be running small databases, or databases where the workload is 90% reads 10% writes.

SQL Server 2008 and upwards are incredibly solid, we use it extensive at my current work place doing telecoms stuff and have very few issues.

It's not what I would have picked (I come from a Linux and Oracle background), but I've been very impressed.

SQL Server seems maybe too focused on usability.

Oracle's query interpreter, for example, is extremely anal, you have to commit everything and Oracle is likely to reject your queries if they are slightly off, which helps catch errors.

SQL Server follows more of a "Do What I Mean" approach, even going as far as to perform implicit type conversions for you, which is fine until it guesses wrong. Then, instead of rejecting your query, it screws up your data.

And don't tell me I can configure it to behave differently, it should work correctly out-of-the-box.

If you can drop in a NoSQL backend replacement for Oracle in your application, you never needed Oracle to begin with.

I think your analysis is spot on.

Big companies don't want to house large IT infrastructure anymore. It seems too costly in the long run and benefits are difficult to explain to the board.

Consequently, you already see companies moving what was before considered core infrastructure to the cloud and the trend is probably going to increase.

Deploying a VM on EC2 or Azure is easy, quick and cheap enough considering you don't have to house as many talents as before in the IT department. As companies move to cloud based services, they don't deal with databases anymore, the people providing the solution (we don't even talk about software anymore, that's the current level of abstraction) does. Problem is amongst the cloud based service providers, few are Oracle shop.

That's the reason Oracle is now trying to position itself in the cloud through acquisitions (like Nebula today). Unfortunately, they are a bit late to the game.

I'm not so sure. I've worked multiple places where they fully took advantage of big iron. Data from one department fuels three other departments, who in turn fuel parts of reports for six more. Could it be done with a series of ETL jobs to feed data around the organization? Possibly, but I wouldn't want to architect it.

Along with their own database and operating system a la IBM.

It's a good model to be spread over multiple segments: hardware/software/services. Bad quarters in one segment are usually covered by good quarters in another.