The most important point is that third one, I think: "any application where reliability requirements do not warrant spending $1M to make it more reliable" Adopting ORAC and/or other HA technologies makes it necessary to spend a Big Pile Of Money, on hardware and the humans to administer it.
If I were CIO that did not follow the Postgres groups regularly, I would take that to mean that Oracle is automatically more reliable than PG because you can spend a BPOM to make it so.
Let's ask a different question. If you take BPOM / 2, and instead of buying Oracle, hire consultants to work on a PG solution, could the PG solution achieve the same reliability as Oracle? Would it take the same amount of time? Or heck, spend the full BPOM on hardening PG against failure - could PG achieve that reliability?
Or, by spending BPOM for Oracle strictly to get that reliability, are you only buying "enterpriseyness" (i.e. someone to blame and the ability to one-up a buddy at the golf course)?
Cheers, -J
