Actually, none of these matter: - PL/SQL is a horrible programming language. It consistently scores bad on e.g. stack overflow. I know about 4 non-oracle-DBA

Actually, none of these matter: - PL/SQL is a horrible programming language. It consistently scores bad on e.g. stack overflow. I know about 4 non-oracle-DBA people who say something positive about it, and just about anybody else hates it with a passion. PL/SQL is a reason for lock-in when you have a few million lines of it, but that's about it. - Graphical thing - nobody cares. An SQL database needs reasonable textual tools for the pros to do SQL editing. I would love an IPython for Oracle. But what you describe is tooling in the hand-holding, for dummies world. And I don't mean that negatively, we all started there and most people don't want to be IT-er just to solve their problem. But dummies is also a market segment where oracle is easily worst in class. I don't know why, but every oracle GUI seems inspired by that GoT Iron throne which cuts whoever tries to touch it. - I worked with their Java and their C/C++ OCI driver. Both had crippling bugs, and caused serious migration issues or data corruption when upgrading oracle or even patching windows. The guys admitted some of them should have been documented in their migration guide, even if Oracle was internally aware of them. Yeah, thanks a lot. - Integration with other stacks: Integration in the Microsoft world with mssql is a lot better if you want a good integrated stack. Integration within the oracle stack, there you might be right. And that stack is huge. But it is also very low-quality and hated by most of its users (oracle financials is an example where I never heard an end user tell anything remotely positive) There are good reasons for using oracle. mulmen's post here above lists a few technical ones. It is very hard to make oracle lose data after successfull commit. There is also the management fallacy that oracle=enterprise class and open source=toy, and you can use that very well to sell your program by making it require oracle. So yeah, oracle has good sides. But please not these.