Having only cursory experience with Oracle databases (as in install and run some queries and that's it), is there any advantage to them over MariaDB or PostgreSQL? Better development experience, easier to tune or no tuning necessary, anything that makes it worth over the free database servers?
As someone who spent some time in Oracle land: MariaDB can't hold a candle to it, but postgresql comes close.
Some things better in Oracle vs Postgres (and I might be dated on my postgres knowledge):. The active/active failover story of Oracle is better with RAC. Auto vacuum horror stories don't exist in Oracle.
Also pro oracle: The 'enterprise' ecosystem is better. Everything enterprisey integrates with oracle, postgresql is still a toss up.
But at the end of the day, I still vastly prefer postgresql. The endless list of weird idiosyncracies and weird limitations in oracle makes you always feel a bit dirty, compared to the relatively clean syntax of postgresql. In oracle land, it is common to wait 1 major version before using new features, because they are unstable when released.
And dealing with oracle support is hell with an additional bonus of pain. They take months for a simple bug fix. They won't admit a bug exists, then call you at 3AM and give you a patch written 2 years ago.
Oracle licensing is a game for advanced poker players. It will be expensive. Then you negotiate, walk away with a 40% discount, making it more expensive than competitors, and find out later it was still a bad deal. They'll interprete standard words like CPU in a slightly different way in their licenses, and finding out in an audit will cost you a lot. Licensing is a never ending drain on your time, and you will loose their games in the end.
As someone who worked with Oracle DB for a quite some time.
Stay as far away form it as possible. It only exists to milk already 'captured' companies, and all competitive niche advantages it had were slowly taken over by postgres.
About 10 or 15 years ago, OracleDB was years and years ahead of other databases. They had better replication, they had a better query optimizer, they had better storage management. OracleDB was the big thing you wanted in a business for a reason.
However, by now, MariaDB and especially PostgreSQL have caught up so much that this edge is gone and it feels like they are just siphoning money from companies who have invested in their big oracle cluster years ago. I do veto any new oracle-first or oracle-only development at work.
