Your comment seems to imply that java hasn't been successful for db development. HBase, Cassandra and ElasticSearch would all disagree.
Yes, there are situations where GC is not appropriate. But I think those situations aren't as common as they are made out to be.
HBase and ElasticSearch, and even Cassandra can be seen as somewhat niche today. This doesn't mean they aren't doing something of value; and it doesn't mean using the same platform for OLTP and OLAP is the way of the future; but it does mean the competition in their space is more limited and less indicative. There are ground-up rewrites of Cassandra in non-GC'd languages out there, for what it's worth.