Oh, i'm not advocating the use of Oracle. I'm trying to find a way to
get Ruby in our corporate door. No matter how great the Ruby
application I develop for my company, if it uses a critical component
that is *alpha* and *version 0.1*  for many years, it will never ever
get pass the door. No matter how well that component works. If you work
for a company with strict standards, that's the reality. My point is
that it's time for the Ruby community to move away from the hacker's
lair and into, well, an office if not the boardroom. You need to dress
the dress, mate.

The comment about Oracle being an '80's technology is valid, but also
shows utter cluelessness in the context of product adoption. It's not
product superiority, and secondly, the people who decide on these
things do not care whether it has half-baked clustering filesystem. It
works for his competitor, his bank, the regulators, so it will work for
him. Why go against something that works 'good enough'? They are
different, them, from us coders, who are always looking for the best,
the quickest, the cleanest, the most compact,  ...

< ... so they will with dbms as money gets tighter. ...>
And a mass exodus to MySQL and Postgres will ensue? Can you imagine the
uncertainty, pitfall, work, and whatever else of converting thousands
of tables and billions of records and thousands of business rules  to
MySQL?

There is a reality out there that unfortunately many developers (who do
not risk their career and livelihood on decisions on tool selections)
fail to appreciate. 

gk