I worked at HP in IT. We had literally hundreds of stupid little internal projects. Some were giant, some were 3 aspx pages. All of them used SQL Server or Oracle. But none of them came anywhere close to leveraging the databases.
I can think of only one app that was large enough and complex enough to really require a "commercial" db, and it was talking with SAP.... ohh, and it ran into constant problems.
What I don't understand is that other than features, the other argument is "Support". I have never seen microsoft get on the phone with a guy for free (yes you can pay...) and help out. But you know what, you can pay for a guy to help you out with postgres.
And you know, by going with proprietary databases, that cost so much money, there were severe restrictions on getting a database. They were in the hands of another team, who took weeks or months to get us setup. I know a part of that is server management, but another part was cost cutting on licenses. Remember that a small cause can have a very large effect in a corporate culture.
The "support" argument is almost always a bad one. Support for infrastructure products is never free; it's sometimes bundled with the license fee, but it's never free. Support is available in the form of paid consultants for any popular piece of open-source infrastructure. What commercial products DO have is official support, which provides some degree of consistency. Even that isn't a strong argument though; it's easy to tell good consultants from bad by asking for references.
My limited experience with "official" support channels is that they're manned by people trained to be "tech support" rather than actual experts on the subject.
Actually, I've talked with quite a few techs in Microsoft Professional Support that know what they are talking about. But you do have to pay a few hundred dollars per incident for that.
It's nice to know they are there when you're doing a hairy Exchange migration...
I can think of only one app that was large enough and complex enough to really require a "commercial" db, and it was talking with SAP.... ohh, and it ran into constant problems.
What I don't understand is that other than features, the other argument is "Support". I have never seen microsoft get on the phone with a guy for free (yes you can pay...) and help out. But you know what, you can pay for a guy to help you out with postgres.
And you know, by going with proprietary databases, that cost so much money, there were severe restrictions on getting a database. They were in the hands of another team, who took weeks or months to get us setup. I know a part of that is server management, but another part was cost cutting on licenses. Remember that a small cause can have a very large effect in a corporate culture.