One of the nice things about working with the Oracle RDBMS, compared to say working with technologies sUCh as AS/400, COBOL or mainframes is that it's generally perceived as a "hot" technology. Salary surveys show Oracle skills as being one of the most in-demand skill sets, the Oracle database is way ahead of the competition in terms of features and use of new technology, and most of the world's top companies use Oracle as their database of choice. But what if in fact we've gone past the peak of Oracle's ascendancy, and it's now a legacy product, with all work in future being mainly about maintaining systems in place, and migrating them to newer, more fashionable systems? A couple of Excellent recent articles by ASP?sprog=2">Mogens Nørgaard raised this as a possibility, and certainly give you a few things to think over when you consider the Oracle database technology stack.
The first article was at the end of Mogens' chapter in Oracle Insights : Tales Of The Oaktable, where he looks at the key factor that makes Oracle particularly suited to effective tuning - the fact that the database kernel is heavily instrumented (the famous "wait interface"), and because of this, you can obtain precise details about exactly what is slowing down your application. Other databases, such as DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server, don't have this instrumentation (or at least it's not publicly Accessible) and therefore it's much more "hit and miss" with those platforms.
