Oracle is beginning to find they are in trouble. Here's a small example: I'm hearing from a fairly reliable source that quite a few large Australian banks are replacing Oracle (my source didn't say with what). They are citing the enormous cost of the licenses, along with difficulty getting adequate support without paying a fortune. My contact himself is in upper management of a large corporation and Oracle screwed him on licensing, forcing him to pay a huge amount of money from his budget that he badly needed to spend on other projects. This delayed these projects by about 3 months, and put a bit of pressure on the area of the business he oversaw. He's also investigating the best way of quietly getting rid of Oracle as fast as possible. That will take some time, but he's at the point of rejecting any new solutions that require Oracle products.

I'm not at all surprised. Medium sized businesses used to use Oracle due to perceived reliability and features, however there have been a number of things that are making them reconsider:

* A number have been shaken down by Oracle sales reps who threaten a license review and potentially stiff penalties and litigation if they find anything at all out of order - unless they purchase software they don't need.

* difficulty in getting support - Oracle are notorious for not responding in a timely fashion to tickets, and a willingness by the CSO to completely ignore serious security flaws.

I experienced this myself four years ago when my boss put me in charge of a clear Unicode bug in their OLEDB driver - the bug had been open for 2 years and by the time I left a year later Oracle had almost wilfully ignored everything we wrote, even ignoring a program we built in .NET that showed the problem. Throughout the ticket we dealt with something like 4 support people, each of whom didn't understand Unicode and who needed a basic backgrounder on how UTF8 works.

* license costs are ridiculous, and frankly not worth it.

* it can often be hard to find people who can troubleshoot performance issues. Even highly skilled people face a black box when they work on improving query performance as the CBO is largely a black box that can change from version to version. Without a clear explanation of how the CBO actually makes decisions it's often a bit of a crapshoot when tuning queries.

* Oracle DBAs are very expensive, compared to how much you can pay an equivalent skilled DBA who knows Postgres or even SQL Server.

* there are few features most medium sized businesses need that can't be done in Postgres.