Comment Re:Oracle = pain (Score 4, Insightful) 117
And before you ask - we're running the 6th busiest Oracle database in Europe - according to Oracle themselves - running across 4*128 SSD drive arrays at a cost of millions.. and for the 3 or 4 features we need to justify the licenses instead or designing our way out of the same problem, at times I really wonder about the hassle, especially when our data is so important and locked up into such a bloated closed up mess.
You might think such things as a fun fantasy, but you would be insane to actually do it. When it (say) turns out your home grown solution corrupts records spanning odd page boundaries, you will be quite sad as you and the one other guy who has a clue how your "clever hack" functions gets to work 24hour days trying to debug the problem, determine the extent of the damage, and try and figure out a solution. It is times like that when having thousands of consultants, and a major corporation with teams of dedicated programmers ready to jump on your problem (for a price, certainly for a price) is the only sane option. If you are really as big as you say, your data is WAY to valuable.
I may not be fond of Oracle either as a corporation or as a product, but there are reasons it rules in the enterprise DB niche.