>Oracle has a horrible reputation among devs. But I think they bypass devs for purchase decisions and straight up wine and dine and bamboozle the low information execs.
That is only partially true. Oracle has a wide portfolio of a bunch of products and the "wine & dine the execs" is the sales cycle for software like ERP Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Health (Cerner). E.g. it's the hospital CFO & CIO that are the true "customers" of Oracle Health and not the frontline doctors and nurses that use it.
However, for the Oracle RDBMS database ... it was often the developers that chose it over competitors such as IBM DB2, Sybase, Informix, MS SQL Server.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of us devs did a "bake off" with various databases and Oracle often won on technical merit. E.g. Oracle had true row-level locking but MS SQL Server before v6.5 was page-level locking. And the open source alternatives of MySQL and PostgreSQL at that early timeframe were not mature enough to compete with advanced Oracle features such as Parallel Query Execution and Recovery from a Standby database.
So young devs today who aren't aware of history will wonder why Amazon ever got locked into Oracle in the first place?!? It was because in 1994, Oracle db was a very reasonable technical choice for devs to make.
That is only partially true. Oracle has a wide portfolio of a bunch of products and the "wine & dine the execs" is the sales cycle for software like ERP Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Health (Cerner). E.g. it's the hospital CFO & CIO that are the true "customers" of Oracle Health and not the frontline doctors and nurses that use it.
However, for the Oracle RDBMS database ... it was often the developers that chose it over competitors such as IBM DB2, Sybase, Informix, MS SQL Server.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of us devs did a "bake off" with various databases and Oracle often won on technical merit. E.g. Oracle had true row-level locking but MS SQL Server before v6.5 was page-level locking. And the open source alternatives of MySQL and PostgreSQL at that early timeframe were not mature enough to compete with advanced Oracle features such as Parallel Query Execution and Recovery from a Standby database.
E.g. the C Language programmer Shel Kaphan at Amazon chose Oracle in 1994: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jpcharles_in-1994-amazons-fir...
(that anecdote cited this deep link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3qIWN-ZIPk&t=1h11m56s)
It took Amazon 25 years to finally migrate off of all Oracle databases: https://www.google.com/search?q=oracle+shuts+off+last+oracle...
So young devs today who aren't aware of history will wonder why Amazon ever got locked into Oracle in the first place?!? It was because in 1994, Oracle db was a very reasonable technical choice for devs to make.