Oracle doesn't sell software. They sell risk reduction. Someone to sue or blame.
Once you understand that, you see how brilliantly they've achieved product/market fit in a way many people here can only dream of.
The dev team says they can just use this "postgres" but the sales person said he'd seen this situation a lot of times before and that dev team was too inexperienced with "serious software" to know they needed to use a proper database rather than a toy one that people use when learning because it's free.
(not to pick on Oracle for any particular reason; this is common in enterprise sales at all levels)
But postgres didn't have any horizontal scaling (multi-CPU master cluster) story until last year.
The suing part is purely fictional.
If you hand-roll your own solution for (almost) free using open source components, you're the one who gets fired when it goes down.
If you buy an enterprise-level solution from Vendor XYZ, with a requisite expensive support contract, they fucked up when it goes down, and you are safe because goodness, who'd have thought an internationally renowned firm like Vendor XYZ would ever break? Besides, thanks to our expensive support contract, they're on top of it.
Microsoft, Oracle, Accenture, they all share one thing in common: their product more CYA for middle managers than anything else.
I have similar thoughts about management consulting - it's CYA for high-level execs. You rubber-stamp a risky move with a respected firm so that if the shit hits the fan the firm (and yourself) are insulated from the backlash.
It's safety for the middle manager who can point a finger when his boss comes screaming down the hall when the servers go down.
Interesting. I've heard the exact same description for Red Hat.