Previously commented on some issues regarding oracle products in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13

Previously commented on some issues regarding oracle products in general: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13726012 Oracle DB has some of the best tech. For e.g Partitioning of tables works great. DB can be seriously tuned and is a workhorse for many different use cases. They have easy access to use tools that make management super simple. Though you pay a hefty price for all of this, often you can get similar things done with open source with a bit more hacking and deep diving though you would need to have much more technical skills than your typical oracle DBA. Then you have what I call the 'propriety DB' tax. Which usually means your open source tools typically support oracle DB as an afterthought. I often come across an open source solution to solve some problem only to realize we need to get data in or out of oracle with support either non existent or patchy at best. PGSql/MySQL are mostly supported first. For e.g - I recall getting cx_oracle(python DB API) was a serious pain in the ass. - Want to use a heroku build pack for your app to deploy to an open source paas solution? Need to roll your own custom build pack - Need continuous integration, auto builds? Need to hack around their stupid license agreement - Need a local dev db? You get a seriously limited version (XE) without feature parity to what is most likely running in production. You have to write specific code for local vs production in some cases - like accessing partitions etc Really I would be surprised if there were Serious SAAS startups that were using it. That $ could be invested elsewhere and open source is good enough.