> Is it really true that Oracle's products are superior if you're going for "no downtime, no data loss, cost not so important"? I don't have any experience in t

> Is it really true that Oracle's products are superior if you're going for "no downtime, no data loss, cost not so important"? I don't have any experience in that arena. But I would expect an open source options to be competitive. Pretty much - Oracle's clustering/replication options are still considerably superior to even a 'real' open source RDBMS like Postgres (as well as providing better performance). MySQL, by contrast, is missing so many important capabilities (transactional DDL, check constraints, window functions, joins other than nested loop) that it's not (imo) especially worth considering. If you look outside the realm of open-source RDBMSs to NoSQL, you tend to find that they'll be missing some critical feature for reliable database operations, like transactionality, or simply won't be that feature rich (i.e. key-value stores). This is not to say that NoSQL stores don't have a place, just that they tend to be designed around web use cases where trading off consistency can be worth it. I'm not meaning to hate on open source DBs here - I think Postgres is fantastic and easily sufficient for most use cases. Technologically Oracle/DB2 are still better products, though.