As mentioned big companies use it. Imagine a company with many many years of software development and libraries built on top of Oracle. Not easy to switch.
(Same for perforce)
Ask HN: Who is still using Oracle?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who is still using Oracle?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I interviewed for a company which made auditing software for government departments. I asked why they chose Oracle and they explained that governments get a hefty discount, so it was actually more cost-effective than the alternatives (e.g. enterprise SQL Server). So the motivation can actually be the opposite!
Even at half-price, the cost is still out-of-this-world.
For a lot of businesses the Oracle license cost is a rounding error.
Re: Ask HN: Who is still using Oracle?
#13Governments, universities, hospitals, banks, insurance companies, any big company where tech is just a utility, not a product (car manufacturers, factories etc).
Re: Ask HN: Who is still using Oracle?
#14Have used Oracle for almost 20 years ( also sql server, postgres, mongo, redid, sqlite). The database itself is a great product and has a free and cheapish option. I've worked on major UK utilities, oil and gas and investment banking projects.
Many enterprise companies have multi-million lines of plsql and thousands of db tables. I've migrated some systems away from Oracle to "save money" but it costs a lot to move an entire business to a new platform while they are running in production.
Re: Ask HN: Who is still using Oracle?
#15If you support packaged applications, you'll be having an Oracle backend.
Oracle was very clever offering free development licenses to software developers years ago.
This made them the db of choice for people buying a premade solution.
Nowadays it is different because we have a lot of open source DBs available to test for free; but long running monolythical apps won't change easily.