# Oracle Database

40 Hacker News commenters recommended Oracle Database and 124 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 22 years (3 owners).

**Verdict:** Mature, feature-rich enterprise database trusted for critical data. Main caveat: licensing costs are high, and some teams are moving to Postgres.

## Why people recommend it

- Proven for mission-critical enterprise reliability (8 comments): "You'd have to assume businesses were insane/stupid to go with Oracle to the tune of billions and billions of dollars" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47592545)) "For big multinationals where a minute of downtime is millions of dollars in revenue? Oracle is cheap." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47592722)) "Oracle's seen a lot more business problems and has a big portfolio of past solutions that worked." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46166392))
- Rich features unmatched by alternatives (7 comments): "Cool stuff like distributed transactions, the database as OS with raw disks, the database as application platform with APEX." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47592681)) "oracle's database is still a good product, with a lot of features that don't have analogs in open source db products" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49834453)) "its DB capabilities are insane. I've never operated it, but all the docs I've read are legitimately impressive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49325272))
- Trusted default for enterprises (4 comments): "Oracle was definitely seen as the more mature and resilient (and expensive!) RDBMS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47593652)) "It is essentially the "nobody got fired for buying " of the databases universe." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46426118)) "Oracle Database is still the gold standard for data in an enterprise setting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832682))
- Good tooling and PL/SQL (3 comments): "Good databases like Oracle and SQL Server have great IDEs for stored procedures development." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421849)) "these days it's just a container launch to do local dev, no different to postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49327472)) "I've seen how effective pl/sql can be in complex environments." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906461))

## What people warn about

- Expensive licensing and price increases (5 comments): "Oracle buys smaller enterprise companies with rich customers that were already using Oracle DB, or makes them rely on it, then cashes in on licensing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590321)) "licensing for these environments is complicated at best, with the onus of reporting lying on the customer not the cloud provider" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333867)) "Our Oracle license licensing went up so dramatically that the team I work with is moving some very large databases to postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760132))
- Many teams migrating away from it (4 comments): "The market for closed sourced databases imploded to basically legacy products that predate when open source databases became a sane default choice." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46216427)) "Every enterprise company I've worked for that used Oracle either completely migrated from it or is / was in the process of doing so" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49836861)) "Our Oracle license licensing went up so dramatically that the team I work with is moving some very large databases to postgres" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760132))
- Proprietary extensions create lock-in (4 comments): "enterprise SQL products like Oracle and MS are awful at providing ways to do these reusable cross-cutting concerns consistently" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47426198)) "Oracle is a prime example of this. Stored procedures are the place to put all business logic according to Oracle documentation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457692)) "More and more business processes accumulate around the data store, all using some proprietary Oracle extensions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247361))
- Upgrades break queries and hints (2 comments): "the Oracle's incapacity of reordering tests of different kinds (as in constants, functions, rows...) when optimizing a query" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938500)) "the resulting fun times when you'd upgrade the database, something would change, and your hints would make a query slower" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48455496))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [PostgreSQL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/postgresql.md): 816 recommend
- [MySQL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mysql.md): 124 recommend
- [Microsoft SQL Server](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-sql-server.md): 73 recommend
- [Microsoft Access](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-access.md): 62 recommend
- [Turso](https://hackerapproved.com/p/turso.md): 53 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.oracle.com/database/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Oracle Database", https://hackerapproved.com/p/oracle-database/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).