I worked several projects over the years that heavily involved bending over bigtime for Oracle because they were the only solution that could get the job done at scale even if it was sometimes quite poor (I have a good story about how sensitive Streams is and how it shut down an entire country's flight system over something stupid). We were deploying Dell servers worldwide on a commodity contract (you got the latest base version) with Oracle as the DBMS with a "by the core" pricing. Every other month, Dell would send servers with more and more cores. This was like a $100m contract with about 80% of the cost in Oracle licenses. I remember going to a meeting with Oracle with the CIO of a very, very large government agency about a more equitable pricing model with the CIO giving the whole motherhood and apple pie spiel (this was a few years after 9-11), and the Oracle rep just did the Jesse James "pay up sucker" handshake. Oracle had the upper hand because there were just no offerings to match. We had the same situation when trying to move a major system into the AWS cloud, but Oracle refused to help migrate the Exadata appliance we relied on. I guess it's good to be Oracle, and too bad for everyone else that can't compete.