The Oracle database has been the gold standard for enterprise applications for a long time now. It has great performance, solid reliability and most of the features that you could want are available. The big problem is that it is expensive. And I mean REALLY expensive. That’s just for the base product as well. All of the extra features that you might want are chargeable extras which means that wench developing for Oracle, you often have to work without some of the more advanced features because they would cost too much.