> There is no reasonable question for which “Oracle” is a good answer.

"Which company's certifications should you go with, if you want to have a career in enterprise development or enterprise consulting?"

"Which database should you go with in an enterprise setting for governmental projects, if you know that you'll be out the door in 2 years and don't want to deal with back pressure from ops/management in the mean time?"

Though i get what you mean, for many those would also be red flags, such as not being allowed to use PostgreSQL due to some client's or organization's lack of experience with technologies like that and/or unwillingness to adopt anything new.

As the saying goes: "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM." where you can replace IBM with something else, depending on the regional and social circumstances (such as Oracle or MS products).

For example, in my country, many governmental systems still run on the old .NET and Windows servers, which utterly baffles me, since in my experience dealing with those servers is harder than it would be in something like Linux based distros (though personally i still think that Windows does desktops a bit better in workstations).

I should probably have qualified my first statement: There is no longer a reasonable question for which "Oracle" is a good answer.

I agree that Oracle definitely used to be the right answer for enterprise development. These days however, the senior management panacea du-jour is AWS.

I'm not sure about that: there are companies in this country, which have a heavy buy in into Azure products and offerings. Similarly for Oracle, GCP and also the same way for AWS. And attempting to use the platform that's not adopted in the company (e.g. wanting AWS when Oracle is what's been used for years) is a non starter.

The reasons for choosing one over the other are probably plentiful, as are the advantages and disadvantages of each. Personally, i think that the cloud more or less always results in bunches of risks and vendor lock. Of course, one can also talk about the track record of each of the companies, but i think that all of them fail a litmus test in one way or another (Google with privacy issues, Microsoft with "embrace, extend, extinguish", Amazon with what working there is like, Oracle with their licensing).

Most people out there want managed services for some reason, rather than to run their own FOSS software instances in containers or something. I guess maybe because they don't want to be the ones held responsible for something not working, since saying that "the Azure/GCP/AWS/Oracle service is down" absolves them of much responsibility.