> I was always a Sybase and DB/2 guy myself, but Oracle could do things. Things Sybase couldn't be tuned for. You don't put Wordpress on Oracle. You do crazy insane shit on it that will break MySQL.
I'd highly doubt that there's something one can do with Oracle that couldn't be done with a FOSS database - although it's certainly true that it requires more servers but servers are a commodity these days anyway.
What's going to keep Oracle in the market is the amount of enterprise software that has been written without database abstraction and would require complete rewrites to support anything else than Oracle as its engine.
The only exception to that I know of is SAP which supports MySQL backends, but then again SAP is only used by companies big enough to just mindlessly shell out big bucks for Oracle too if that's what they already use.
While I mostly agree with the general point you're making, please do not confuse one particular kind of heavy work with the much more general "real serious use".
Random case in point NASA is using pgsql for handling data streams from several of their probes, is that not real serious use ?
I'd highly doubt that there's something one can do with Oracle that couldn't be done with a FOSS database - although it's certainly true that it requires more servers but servers are a commodity these days anyway.
What's going to keep Oracle in the market is the amount of enterprise software that has been written without database abstraction and would require complete rewrites to support anything else than Oracle as its engine.
The only exception to that I know of is SAP which supports MySQL backends, but then again SAP is only used by companies big enough to just mindlessly shell out big bucks for Oracle too if that's what they already use.