Hello everyone, author here. I wrote this post after wondering why Oracle is such a ubiquitous name, but almost no developers I've worked with have ever used it. After some research and conversations with a former employee, it turns out that the story is really interesting: Oracle was basically the first company to commercialize a RDBMS. And today they have what might be the fastest, most performant database at scale – if you're willing to pay for it.
We had lots of head to head competes with oracle when I was working at a rival big-tech company in sales. We would schedule a few calls, maybe send a salesperson on-site. Oracle would send 5-6 people across the country for an on-site discovery (seemingly, from an outside perspective) very often. They've always had a ton of resources and aren't afraid to use them, and are the pinnacle of old-school tech sales strategies.
Oracle competes in the database realm with Microsoft (SQL Server) and IBM (DB/2). Oracle owns MySQL. PostgreSQL and MySQL are widely used but not considered enterprise-scale.
Big companies build their software around the database, so once they have committed to a database vendor they are pretty well locked in. I don’t see any newer players directly competing with Oracle, but there are always competing products aimed at specific requirements.
Besides the database server Oracle also sells enterprise software applications. So do Microsoft, IBM, HPE, etc. Salesforce (founded by a former Oracle exec) is an example of a new-ish competitor. Salesforce of course uses Oracle.
Oracle is the definition of a company that remains huge but hasn't done well offering cloud services, but has a stock that's up 153% over the past five years. Databases are sticky!
Databases have more business value and stickiness than application code. A company may keep its Oracle database for decades while replacing application code multiple times.
From what I'm told, they've been pushing it very aggressively to existing customers, and growth has been slowing over the past few quarters. Pretty impressive all in all, given they had to start from scratch fairly recently
