> would do just fine with a "lesser database"

And I would grant you that if you could make the credible argument that a "lesser" [1] database could be a suitable replacement on a drop-in basis, without significant engineering effort.

As I pointed out in a downthread comment, a very useful feature is that existing stored procedure that encode business logic already work.

Are you really saying that only 0.1% of business database users fall into even that category? My second-hand (DBA I know) experience contradicts this, but if you have a better source, I'm certainly interested.

[1] I don't actually intend to make any overall value judgment, since my point isn't that Oracle has feature/performance superiority over any other database. Instead, I'm saying that it has specific features that the business needed at the time it was chosen that may not be offered by a different one.

Of course once you already have application an built around a platform, the switching costs can be high. See also: IE6. No argument from me there.

But Oracle doesn't sell their product with the pitch "hahaha too bad you're stuck with us". They try to convince the next generation of ill-informed technology leaders that it would be a mistake to choose anything else. I've heard the pitch, and by the third time I heard "invest in Oracle RAC" I was consciously suppressing the urge to punch the salesman.

I'm saying that 99.9% of Oracle customers would have been significantly better off from a cost, flexibility, and support perspective going with an alternative like Postgres when they started building their product. And most of the remaining 0.1% would have been better off with MSSQL.

> I'm saying that 99.9% of Oracle customers would have been significantly better off from a cost, flexibility, and support perspective going with an alternative like Postgres when they started.

Although I agree that some huge proportion [1] of businesses today would do very well to seriously consider Postgres as the first option before even looking at Oracle, I don't recall this being true 17 [2] or even 10 years ago.

Remember, we're likely talking about non-tech businesses here, ones where they're sustaining operations with a single developer. You mention "ill-informed technology leaders" but it's hard to imagine there are any technology leaders actually involved on the buyer's side.

I don't think it's helpful to look back at such a decision through the lens of today's technologies and the kind of talent/expertise that is, today, available to a business whose core competency is tech.

I'm no fan of "enterprise" anything, so don't mistake my critique as cheerleading Oracle. I just feel the context of technology decisions is paramount. It also seems especially germane to the overall thread topic, which is whether a generalist can possibly have enough depth in key areas to be considered competent enough in them.

[1] your repeatedly asserted claim of 99.9% is extraordinary, requiring extraordinary evidence.

[2] Oracle 9i was released in 2001. EnterpriseDB wasn't founded until 2004.

I was building enterprise apps 10 years ago. 20, actually. I made the same arguments then, and I will stand by this evaluation now.

It reminds me of the early 2000s when IBM and WebLogic were selling 5-figure appserver licenses hand-over-fist into enterprises. I would have to dig, but I do recall a study sometime later finding that almost all of these customers were just using them as servlet containers. It's not that WebLogic, Oracle et al have no purpose, it's just that the people buying these things tend to have no idea what they're doing.

> I made the same arguments then, and I will stand by this evaluation now.

To whom? This particular business? 999 out of 1000 businesses (each of whose needs you evaluated and found only one of whom really needed Oracle and therefore excluded)?

What was the argument? That they could do it cheaper by hiring (possibly then non-existent) Postgres DBAs and using Postgres instead of Oracle DBAs and spending exorbitant amounts of money on Oracle?

To us, technical people, that argument might sound perfectly reasonable, but to a non-tech executive it might sound cuckoo-bananas crazy.

> It's not that WebLogic, Oracle et al have no purpose, it's just that the people buying these things tend to have no idea what they're doing.

This strikes me as a dismissive stereotype. As you admit, it's not as if they made a choice that failed to function at all. Social proof is a thing. They merely paid a very high price.

Where were all the people who did have an idea of what to do, those 20 years ago? Busy trying to educate them, or separate them from their money? How about you?

Me? 20 years ago I was busy building ROLAP engines that ran cross-RDBMS, because the customer had already decided to blow a million bucks on Teradata et al before I even got there.

I'm not quite sure what your point is. It's all understandable because nontechnical people were making technical decisions? That doesn't make it ok.

And yes, quite a lot of those overpriced appserver installs failed to function. Let me tell you about the time I wrote the backend for Sprite's Sublymonal campaign; their IBM-operated datacenter couldn't provision WebSphere capacity in time (lead time > 2 months), so I ran the thing off a couple VPS nodes (IIRC rackspace), hiding the whole project from their IT staff.

My point is that overall context matters.

My point is also that making sweeping, moralizing statements like "doesn't make it ok" (nor the repeated forays into other enterpise software topics) isn't helpful in general, and it certainly isn't helpful in furthering understanding or intellectual curiosity on the specific topic, as it relates to Oracle and a single, generalist (arguably "full-stack") engineer performing a sustaining and development role.