As a current consumer of an Oracle database I can say from the purely anecdotal experience that Oracle is sufficently complicated to set up and run that I'd like to ditch it for just that reason. Our Oracle installation sucks and we are in the process of porting away from it. It's just not worth it to try to tweak it to work better.<p>Oracle seems to be built with just one goal. Pay the salaries of people who do nothing but consult on Oracle. We run a Production Grade Oracle instance with high quality hardware and it still won't perform as well as an equivalent mysql db does.<p>(This opinion is purely subjective based on personal experience and should be understood with that in mind. I'm very soured on Oracle right now :-( )