Oracle remains popular because people are buying it for very different reasons than you bring up. Most of those matters (data types, really?) are trivial compa

Oracle remains popular because people are buying it for very different reasons than you bring up. Most of those matters (data types, really?) are trivial compared to things like its approach to clustering, partitioning, indexing, replication, OLAP queries, approach to locking, query optimization, and recovery. Having DBA'd and developed against Sybase, Oracle, and SQL server, Oracle remains both magnificent and horrific in its comprehensiveness. That said, SQL server is quite competitive. I still prefer Oracle to the others, I presume it's just a personal preference. Postgres or MySQL are fine alternatives if you really only need a small subset of the features. Trouble is, most enterprises like to throw on the pork with most projects.