I just can’t seem to comprehend how Oracle can be so wealthy off of making a database when it’s theoretically easy for a company to store its own information.
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Spreadsheets have very serious limitations, notably that they cannot be accessed by more than one person at a time.
Doing so can corrupt the file, now imagine having an accounting system built out of hundreds of linked Excel docs that needs to be accessed by a team of 50 accountants. Imagine trying to fix that or reverse engineer it later when there’s problem.
Excel just doesn’t scale that way, which is why you need a database for large datasets and applications like Line of Business Software.
Developing your own in-house software for this is also often a fools errand. It might be cheaper in the short term, but in the long-term factoring in paying/losing developers, developing new features, code efficiency, etc it will cost the company much much more than just buying a canned software platform in the first place.
So why Oracle?
There’s a lot of alternatives these days like PostGreSQL, MS SQL, MySQL, etc etc and many of them are far more cost effective than Oracle.
But a lot of big data applications are legacy meaning that they were purchased ages ago, or are the industry standard, and getting away from running them for a large business just isn’t economical.
The business impact of switching to something else costs a lot more than just continuing with Oracle, which is a fact big software vendors take full advantage of. They know they have their whale customer by the balls so they can basically charge whatever they want.
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