I've been looking into other products too, for example Postgres, which has come a long way. Yet, the "no cost" argument comes with a price. One example: you can't execute a COMMIT inside a function and the exception handling is different when compared to PL/SQL. Another one: no autonomous transaction, just a workaround.

So, depending on the requirements of your Development/Organisation, this can be a minor nuisance or a show stopper.

However, I do have some issues with Oracle Corp. too.

The steep price raise from SE1 to SE2 (at least in my opinion) may have an impact in the segment of small/mid sized companies/projects and cloud can (and will) not be the answer to everything.

Just my 2 €-cents ...

I've used SQL Server and Oracle and dealt with this situation for many years. "Oracle's too expensive and we need to get off it."

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/sql-server-Pricing

According to that, a SQL Server EE license per core is a little over $14k, and if I remember right Oracle's is $47.5k. Also, MS gives you access to all the product's features when you buy EE, which is the way it should be, but I digress.

So it's significantly cheaper, but more like 3.5x not 12. Those numbers reek of what Tom has been saying for over a decade, when you see someone claiming numbers like "100x faster" with no metrics, you can pretty much disregard it.

Since you have worked on both and hence know both. You didn't conclude.

Which you prefer to work with?
Which you prefer to buy all pros and cons taken and assuming having the budget.?

I didn't conclude because it depends on a lot of things specific to your situation. Me personally, I definitely prefer Oracle. But it's also very hard to separate dollars from the equation, in which case Oracle makes it much harder on itself by charging extra for features that are the ones that put them a notch above the competition.

What are the strengths of your staff, what are your SLAs and requirements, these things have to be answered before you can determine what's best for you.

I guess the best case I can make for Oracle regardless of cost is even if you have less critical systems, you can buy standard edition and at least that way your're on the same database platform as the other critical ones. This allows you to standardize and reuse all your talent, scripts, automation, etc. Plus your ceiling for what you can support is almost limitless on Oracle in terms of five 9s of availability, tps throughput and so on. If you went with MS and one day you need to support a system with 99.999% or close to it availability, you'd really struggle because Oracle is still one of the only databases that offers shared nothing clustering not to mention MS servers need to be brought down for patching regularly.

So unless I had a staff with MS focused people, that's the direction I'd take.

In addition to what everyone else has said, should also consider the value of the data you want to protect as part of your cost assessment. Oracle (any version) is better at more than performance and availability than Microsoft. It's security is better in many ways as well, and it can be run on more secure operating systems than Windows. What would the cost to your organization be if your database was hacked? Is the possibly higher cost of Oracle worth it compared to that kind of loss? If you store sales records, credit card numbers, personal data of any kind, it might be.

Team,

I was looking at the price of Oracle Enterprise edition at this link.

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=DSTORE:6:::NO:RP,6:P6_LPI,P6_PROD_HIER_ID:4509382199341805719938,4509958287721805720011

1) It shows Rs 63,968.00 / Named User Plus - what is "Named user plus" means ?
2) "Software Update License and Support (First Year) Rs 14,073.02" - If i choose the term as "Perpetual" then do i need to pay this Licensing fee (14,703.02) for every year or just only once in life time ?