A lot of people seem to miss the point about enterprise software and the purveyors of that software; the end goal is not agile or slim (that is incidental) but

A lot of people seem to miss the point about enterprise software and the purveyors of that software; the end goal is not agile or slim (that is incidental) but to enable many, many disparate systems to function at least somewhat coherently. Probably on a level that boggles the minds of most people who have never worked in a large enterprise. Big businesses end up with lots of disparate technology because they consume a lot of software and it creeps its way into the business by way of developers wanting to play with tools; some C-level moron making 'strategic' decisions; or real demands of the business. But unless you're the technological masters of the universe (like Google) the idea of replacing something wholesale is a recipe for disaster once it's entrenched: it's expensive and what would you replace it with? Who out there can furnish an accounting system that works across 40 different countries that also ties in neatly with a company's logistics or shipping department AND comes with consulting and bespoke development services to handle the 50 billion edge cases that each big business has? This is not a simple problem. This very same thing happens amusingly enough just as frequently in startups and SMEs, but on a different scale ("Oh we couldn't use Mongo, it didn't fit our needs, so we rolled our own -- but then we had to use Frob X and Widget Y and patch it up with Python") That's why tools like Oracle RDBMS come with such a kitchen sink variety of tools and features. For instance, I once had to do some reporting and OLAP work across multiple DB systems and stuff the data into an Oracle instance. Unfortunately said systems used a mixture of Oracle, Sybase and MSSQL (oh the wonders of maintaining shrinkwrap products...) so we bought a database link for Sybase and MSSQL so we could query the databases from inside Oracle using two-phase commit. Sure, each adapter cost us $15k but so what? That's pocket change compared to the hackneyed approach of using some external, asynchronous batch job. All this money and patchwork effort in the name of report generation -- but that's all businesses care about.