I imagine a lot of HNers don't really understand the scope of what Oracle offers in the enterprise setting. This question is like asking: why would anyone still

I imagine a lot of HNers don't really understand the scope of what Oracle offers in the enterprise setting. This question is like asking: why would anyone still be using AWS in 2022 when OpenStack is available for free? Yes, PostgreSQL is an impressive piece of software and it certainly deserves all the praise it gets. But the complexity of many mid- to large-sized businesses, particularly those in high-stakes finance and bio/medical tech is impossible to imagine until you've seen it. Years back, I worked in a mid-size finance company whose computing infrastructure was three identical datacenters scattered across the city. One hot, two standby for DR. All populated with big expensive IBM iron and storage with fast network and fiber channel links between them. All writes were continuously and automatically replicated to all three sites so that even a complete outage at one site meant the workloads could be shifted to another site with virtually no interruption to the business. All of the business logic was written in-house in a variety of languages (but mostly Java) and there were a half-dozen separate teams that existed ONLY to manage the infrastructure. An outage could legitimately cost the company millions of dollars (depending on the scope) in either lost opportunity, customer sales, or regulatory fines. I was on the Unix Admin team and not counting the toxic management, the scope of our jobs was relatively easy: provision computing resources as LPARs or VMs, manage storage, manage users and permissions, make sure backups worked, automate the shit out of whatever we could, troubleshoot issues, interface with vendors, etc. The DBAs who sat in the next row over had much harder jobs. They did many of the same things we did, but in the context of Oracle DBs. In addition, they also had to be experts in SQL and schema design, PLUS understand the business decisions underlying the data and structure of the databases they were responsible for. Which sometimes meant arguing with the application developers who didn't grok the platforms their code was running on had finite amounts of RAM, etc. I don't have any love for Oracle as a company, but they just don't have any competition when it comes to deep integration with highly complex enterprise systems like this.