Re: good luck to them
Always wondered why the Oracle compatibilty mode of Postgress was not used more to break the lock-in. Is Postgress performance too slow, because my limited experience suggests it performs very well.
Compatibility mode is only available in the Enterprise DB version and is obviously good enough for many: Enterprise DB costs money but the costs are trivial in comparison with Oracle.
Enterprise DB provides information on comparative performance and my understanding is, that for very large deployments (lots of core) there is still a way to go but there increasing customer base means there are more resources (both in terms of paid developers and code contributions) to make this happen.
Oracle's lock-in is, as is usually the case, little to do with the technology. It's cultural and based around the understanding that managers are more afraid of doing the wrong thing than they are interested in doing the right thing. For "no one every got sacked for buying IBM" read "no one ever got sacked for buying Oracle/SAP/Microsoft…". They have the packages and the eco-systems that meet customer's criteria and a veritable army of consultants and SIs only too happy to reassure managers that nothing can go wrong.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
