I won't argue that support is not a necessary cost of doing business. Of course it is.
It's nice to be "free" to spin up a handful of disposable test instances of a database when doing test driven / agile type development.
Oracle is difficult and arcane to create a DB instance. I had the sys admin at work help me to try to set up an instance (he insisted it was "easy"). It takes MANY steps, some of which were shown to me in tools that did not lend themselves to scripting.
I have a script that can create a ready to rock PostgreSQL instance in 5 seconds, no "Mother, may I???" required to run it. Well, ready to run a schema creation / migration, but the "tablespace" and schema name with admin/app user were in and ready to go.
If you are twiddling a few lines in a legacy app, this doesn't matter. If you are doing a big chunk of new development, automated regression testing data sources matter.
It's nice to be "free" to spin up a handful of disposable test instances of a database when doing test driven / agile type development.
Oracle is difficult and arcane to create a DB instance. I had the sys admin at work help me to try to set up an instance (he insisted it was "easy"). It takes MANY steps, some of which were shown to me in tools that did not lend themselves to scripting.
I have a script that can create a ready to rock PostgreSQL instance in 5 seconds, no "Mother, may I???" required to run it. Well, ready to run a schema creation / migration, but the "tablespace" and schema name with admin/app user were in and ready to go.
If you are twiddling a few lines in a legacy app, this doesn't matter. If you are doing a big chunk of new development, automated regression testing data sources matter.