I was at a large public university in the 90s / early 2000s that used Oracle. The database product itself was absolutely rock solid if well-administered. They also kept trying to sell us enterprise services built on top of the database that were pure trash. "Oracle Forms" was one of those things iirc. We never bought that stuff, but it did get us a nice free lunch or two.
kagakuninja|1 year ago
They set up a test computer in our building, so me and a buddy go down to play around with it. The AT&T computer is slow as shit even though we are the only users. We are messing around with Oracle Forms, we press a hot key, for something important, like enabling triggers on a field. Forms crashes.
We call our friendly on-base Oracle rep, his advice is to not press that key. We also asked for a quote on the cost of an Oracle DB license, and it was something like 5x the cost of the DEC DB we were using on our mini-VAX. We decided to not use Oracle.