For legacy stuff that's true. For new projects we can and should make better decisions (if politics aren't in the way). Many DB systems are free and open sourc

For legacy stuff that's true. For new projects we can and should make better decisions (if politics aren't in the way). Many DB systems are free and open source. If you have Unix servers you can choose from PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, Riak, CouchDB, MongoDB, Voldemort, etc. There is no reason not to choose the right tool for the job. You can assess them all if you have the time and resources. It's not the physical world and we basically always have whichever tool we need available to us. I mainly use open source software so that may not be true for everyone I suppose. That's their choice though.