I had a similar experience to this at an early programming internship while I was in college 20 years ago. I was working on some component and needed to add a

I had a similar experience to this at an early programming internship while I was in college 20 years ago. I was working on some component and needed to add a new table to our database. I was fairly new to SQL at the time, so I wanted to do some experimentation and prototyping on my own, before submitting the schema changes to our DBA in order to get them into the shared dev database. Oracle did have a free trial version you could download for dev purposes or learning or whatever, but like this mentions, it was slow and cumbersome to set up that I soon decided it would be faster to spin up a PostgresQL database, make any necessary changes to our schema and code to be compatible with Postgres, and do my prototyping there, then submit the schema modification request to our DBA. So that's what I did; it took a single evening to do all of that in Postgres, even for someone who was pretty much brand new to SQL. After I submitted my schema chages for review, rather than emailing review comments back, my DBA made me come down for a meeting to explain the issues. Of course this was intimidating to me as a young itern; had I done something so wrong that it deserved a talking to? After all that, it turns out the issue was that I had ordered a VARCHAR column before some other column of fixed width in the schema of the new table; and apparently, it's preferable to order all fixed width columns before all variable width columns in order to speed up the column accesses. I agreed with the DBA that I could change the order of the columns, though I did have to point out that this particular table was a table of worldwide regions like "North America", "South America", etc, and that there would never be more than 5-10 of these, so any optimization of this particular table was likely premature. After all that experience; the complexity of just getting a dev environment up, the fact that production instances cost somewhere around ~$50,000 per CPU per year, the fact that we had a full time DBA who was spending a substantial fraction of her job letting interns know that they needed to apply some trivial optimization that you would expect such an expensive database to just do for you automatically, I resolved to never touch Oracle again if I could avoid it, and have had good luck in that I've never had to deal with Oracle in any jobs since. Funny thing was that the project I was working on was named "ASAP" which officially had no expansion but unofficially stood for "Another Siebel Avoidance Project", because we were actually using our Oracle database as a place to dump information for which the primary store was Siebel, due to how much more of a pain it was to interact directly with Siebel so doing a periodic dump into Oracle and then building our API on top of Oracle was a better choice.