It is, surely, difficult to create a product that is better than Oracle/DB2 in every dimension. These systems have thousands of engineer-years of work baked int

It is, surely, difficult to create a product that is better than Oracle/DB2 in every dimension. These systems have thousands of engineer-years of work baked into them. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to beat these systems by specializing. Take some part of what they do and do it better. [Insert sports car / minivan / mack truck analogy here] The interesting question is whether the pain of using the new system is less than the pain of using the old system. New system pain often comes from having fewer features or a less robust implementation. Legacy pain often comes from managing software that has to maintain compatibility with 20 year old apps and scaling workloads on software designed when 8mb of ram was a lot and clusters weren't practical. I will also say from experience, if you take a copy of Oracle and the same hardware from the TPC-C leader board, you will have a hell of a time replicating their results. They use every trick in the book and spend huge sums of money tuning for these benchmarks (n.b. I don't fault them). In practice getting throughput close to what they claim on actual real-world apps is not realistic. Now, you should take all benchmarks with a grain of salt (even mine). Ask a vendor how fast the system will run on a real workload that you understand with the configuration you plan to deploy with. If their number is attractive, build a POC and check for yourself.