Back in the day MS SQL was Windows-only and Postgres was not mature, so the choice was Oracle or DB2. And Oracle was more popular, because it used more progressive model (versions vs DB2 locks). Plenty of people who don't closely follow recent trends associate database with Oracle, so when they have a word, they'll choose it.
Oracle it not that bad anyway, it's just stupidly expensive. I'd choose Postgres any day, but I worked with Oracle a lot and it never was a main culprit in my work. It has its issues, sure, but they're solvable.
> Oracle it not that bad anyway, it's just stupidly expensive.
Full of bugs, some that destroy speed, some that destroy data, some that just make a feature that you need unusable. More heavyweight than lead (although it gets fast after you throw enough hardware). Lacking any capable or usable management interface (but then, that excludes everyone except for postgres and mysql). Impossible to program. Impossible to predict how your program will run.... And my favorite, absolutely fragile, any wrong code you run there can take everything out of the air.
And yeah, stupidly expensive and comes with the Oracle legal team.
The Oracle's documentation on bugs is paywalled... What is actually an improvement over others like Microsoft, that denies a bug with all their might, up to the point it is fixed, and then say the minimum possible.
Anyway the most recent pair I found on the wild was a problem that made indexes of georeferenced data fail at random, pushing your queries into a non-indexed search and breaking things like materialized views, and one that causes some inconsistency on testing clobs for null or empty string (what made them impossible to test for either when it applies). But there's a well known one that breaks optimization plans at random and goes with the last try (it doesn't matter if that it will scan that table 100000 rows 1000 times), and there's some bug where if you create some tables, populate them, drop them and repeat enough times you will lose your database. But that's just from the top of my head.
Oh, of course, that isn't including designed behaviors like the one that takes your database offline if you don't do backups often enough (where "often enough" is something that you can estimate but never be sure about its frequency).
There were more than just Oracle or DB2. Informix, SyBase, 4D and I’m pretty sure there was something with the word “fox” in its name too. Plus of course MySQL, though that was many taken seriously until relatively recently.
not so sure that is correct. ms sql WAS sybase from 1989 until the fork in 1993 and i have been told that substantial changes to the codebase did not occur until years after the 1993, during the jim gray tenure.
Our Vendor offered Sybase in the mid 200x's as a choice for our college middleware, but they used 'case-insensitive' sort, which the linux version of Sybase did not work with.
Oracle it not that bad anyway, it's just stupidly expensive. I'd choose Postgres any day, but I worked with Oracle a lot and it never was a main culprit in my work. It has its issues, sure, but they're solvable.