Oracle or microsoft: which database is better?

Oracle wasn't sold. They acquired SUN which should significantly bolster the potential advancements in the products and platform they offer. It still leaves a bit of a gray area for the future of MySQL but all is well for the time being.

As to answer the question above, it may just come down to money. It's generally accepted that businesses migrate to MSSQL or Oracle once they outgrow the cheaper or free solutions available. MySQL can scale very well, but comes up far short on many of the more advanced tasks that MSSQL and Oracle support. On a straight feature level comparison, Oracle is unbeatable. Luckily, 99% of us will never need to use those very advanced features. MSSQL is a great database that supports replication very well, and can scale very large. The downside of both Oracle and MSSQL is the cost. You easily get into the $200,000+ costs just for initial licensing when you need to scale to enterprise levels. MSSQL is about 1/2 the cost of Oracle once you reach a certain point, but is still in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for licensing.

I always recommend using MySQL or PostGre and push it to the limits. Realistically, they can both scale to the needs of 95% of businesses out there. For MySQL, especially when using the Percona, or Google distributions and patches. You may need to drop $50,000 in hardware, but you would be spending the same amount regardless of the database software if you need to get to that level. If it isn't justified, there's no reason to spend a quarter million on software when there's something free that may be able to do the same thing.

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