We should really be more thankful for the existence of PostgreSQL

Salesforce have been building an Oracle replacement based on Postgres for years, named Sayonara and as far as I know, it’s not ready yet.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/05/16/salesforce_replace_or...

There are three different Db2 databases.

I believe the mainframe version was first.

There is a version baked into the os/400 operating system (i series).

Then unix/windows Db2 came last, if memory serves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Db2

As somebody who administers several large DB2 clusters all linked together with multiple replication modes (HADR, SQLREP) for an emergency services communication platform, I can confirm this. It's pretty damn rock solid even on Linux these days.

It's very amusing to me that you bring up IBM in a discussion of the value of Oracle.

I came here to say that if you want to understand Oracle's value, think IBM with less history.

Really, you've always had to be careful with MySQL. It really was the PHP of RDBMSs.

The silent "SHOW WARNINGS" system, nonsense dates like Feb 31, implicit type conversions like converting strings to 0s, non-deterministic group by enabled by default, index corruption, etc.

Not just constraints, transactions were also a no-op. The MyISAM engine is still available in modern versions if you want to experience this, it's just not default anymore.

I love Postgres in 2026, but it really was not a viable enterprise option before 2010. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had.

SQL Server started as a source fork of Sybase.

For the risk of getting downvoted:

MS SQL is today stil a very good product, using it now for more than 20 years in different applications.

And: The free version with max up to 50 GB (?) of DB size is a very good option for smaller environments/apps

Having written a rust client for it, even their documentation is absolutely stellar. You just read how the protocol works from the PDF and implement it.

Can't say the same about Oracle.

For others like me who might be skeptical to hear throughput in any metric other than seconds (and is used to large numbers in hours/days being used to inflate), I think millions per hour is actually quite high for 1998.

Assume that means 5_000_000/hour. 5M/hr => 83k/min => 1400/s. That is impressive for late 90s. I was generous on what "millions per hour" meant, but even if its 2.5M/hr that would be 700/s, which is still quite good.

What do you mean a distributed database running mysql or postgres? Even today you can't have a distribute db running (real) Postgres, it doesn't do multi-master clustering.

DB2 was crazy good for certain use cases but very weird. For one, the pattern for DB2 efficiency was pretty much the exact opposite of every other database. Every other database would say "Normalize your tables, use BCNF, blah blah, small reference tables, special indices etc".

DB2, the pattern was "denormalize everything into one gigantic wide table". If you did that it was insanely fast for the time and could handle very large datasets.

SQL Server 2000 was well received in the segments that mattered as a challenger. Oracle was in first place running on Unix. However, it was viewed as expensive and the procurement experience was regarded as unpleasant. People wanted competition even if they didn't think SQL Server, or another alternative, could unseat Oracle for the most important stuff.

Windows was really picking up steam and there was a move to web development in the Windows-based developer space. Visual Basic and Delphi were popular but desktop development had peaked. ASP was for building your apps and SQL Server was the natural backend. SQL Server fed off this wave. It wasn't dislodging Oracle, but rather than every app being built on Oracle, more apps started to use SQL Server as the backend.

Then ASP.NET appeared on the scene and demand grew even more. It was a well-integrated combo that appealed to a lot of shops. I started my career in a global pharma and there was a split between tech budget. IT was a Windows shop for many reasons and ran as much on SQL Server as possible. R&D was Unix/Linux with Oracle. There was a real battle going on in the .NET vs Java (how about some EJB 1) and the databases followed the growth curves of both rather than competing against each other.

The SQL Slammer worm brought a lot of attention to the product. There were instances running everywhere and IT didn't expect so much adoption. Back then you had a lot more servers running inside offices than you do today. My office was much like my homelab today. This validated the need so the patches got applies, IT got involved in the upkeep, and adoption continued to grow.

Oracle's sales folk and lawyers were horrible to deal with. I had some experience of this directly as they tried pushing Java-related products and my boss dragged me into the evals. One of my in-laws was outside counsel in the IT space doing work with enterprise-sized companies. He claims they are the worst company he's ever had to deal with and wouldn't delegate any decision-making locally which endlessly dragged out deals. They had a good product but felt they could get away with anything. Over time he saw customers run lots of taskforces to chip away Oracle usage. This accelerated with SaaS because you could eliminate the app AND Oracle in one swoop.

MS SQL Server was a cheaper, friendlier plugin replacement for Sybase in the early 2000s.

I built apps in an active-active bidirectional replication telecom Sybase environment and was deeply involved in migrating it to MS SQL server in the early 2000s. I remember a fair amount of paranoia and effort around the transition as our entire business and customers' phone calls depended on it (for "reasons") but in hindsight it went quite smoothly and there were no regrets afterwards.

The Microsoft went and added a nice BI stack to the whole thing which added a new dimension of value creation at a new low price point.

I remember talking to one tech leader at the time who described it as "surprisingly good, for a microsoft product" which sort of summed it up. But it had similar characteristics to sybase except more so because you had to run it on an NT server (iirc) and so there was an even harder cap on the scale of hardware you could run it on, whereas you could run oracle on really top-end sparc hardware that was way more powerful than anything that ran windows.

Depends if the director or VP liked Microsoft or not. I’ve worked at places that loved SQL Server and Microsoft server products in general. Others did not use them anywhere in their datacenter and wouldn’t have considered them. Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft were very dependent on if the people in charged liked them. Not so much technical merits.

SQL Server was very good and used in a lot of enterprises. ime the decision between Oracle and SQL Server tended to be down to whether the IT department or company was a "Microsoft Shop" or not. There were a lot of things that came free with SQL Server licenses and it had really nice integrations with other Microsoft enterprise systems software and desktop software.

Oracle was definitely seen as the more mature and resilient (and expensive!) RDBMS in all the years I worked in that space. It also ran on Unix/Linux whereas SQL Server was windows only. Many enterprises didn't like running Microsoft servers, for lots of (usually good) reasons.

MS SQL Server was forked from Sybase in 1993. Not sure how much the code had diverged by 2000. Informix was also a contender back then.

My experience at the time was that it was perceived as not serious enough and lacking important features. If my memory isn't very bad, I believe as late as 2000 SQL Server still only supported AFTER triggers.

In my experience in the late 90s and early 00s, besides Oracle and Sybase, DB/2 and Informix were also regarded as good. Oracle was considered the best though.

This is a very short comment on SQL Server's code improvements (post-Sybase).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18464429

The top comment in the post is a long complaint about the code quality of the Oracle database (worth a read).

SQL Server was Sybase until (I think) version 4.9, just rebranded as Microsoft SQL Server.

Then the two versions split and I don't think that any of the Sybase source code remains in what is SQL Server today.

That said, a lot of the concepts (like a significant number of system stored procedures) and also TSQL remain almost the same, with small differences (except for system functions, which SQL Server has a lot more functionality).

When you come from the Sybase world getting a start on SQL Server is quite straight forward when it comes to handling the database.

Internals and other low level nuts and bolts differ nowadays, of course.

SQL Server's claim to fame was GUI admin tools making life easier for many who bore DBA responsibilities only in anger.

It remains one of the most reliable Microsoft products, but few would claim that is a high bar.

Open arms, especially given its graphical tooling.

Starting with version 7.5 it was quite alright, however being Microsoft, it has been mostly used in Microsoft shops, alongside VB, MFC two tier applications, ASP, .NET, Sharepoint, Dynamics,...

Sort of. The VirtualBox Extension Pack is free for personal or educational use. It is explicitly not free for work use[0]. You can download it for free, but accepting the license to do so obligates you to pay them for it.

[0]https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

Oracle was the ONLY game in town if you were serious. It was like buying IBM in the 80s. Source: programmed PL/SQL and embedded SQL at the Toronto Stock Exchange in the early 90s, on SCO Unix and Oracle.

Nobody was building WoW on FoxPro, c'mon.

You'd have to assume businesses were insane/stupid to go with Oracle to the tune of billions and billions of dollars if you believe that they had zero value to sell.