The #1 knock against the Oracle Database is its price. The #2 knock against it is the difficulty of managing it. For the last 10 years, Oracle has been continu

The #1 knock against the Oracle Database is its price. The #2 knock against it is the difficulty of managing it. For the last 10 years, Oracle has been continuously attacking #2 so that enough people will overlook #1. Now, Oracle is just about as easy to set up and configure as MySQL. It really can't get much easier to configure than it already is. That is why they are going down the stack to the operating system and hardware. They want you to be able to order a box from them, plug it in, and instantly have Oracle running. Companies will save money because they will need fewer DBAs and and fewer sysadmins. It is the same strategy that Microsoft is pursuing, except Microsoft also wants you to migrate from your own servers to Microsoft-managed servers in Microsoft's data centers.