Now, as an Oracle professional, I can argue against both of these disadvantages too. Yes Oracle is expensive ... but its also the leading RDBMS engine and you get what you pay for sometimes. If you just need a simple solution to hold a couple of tables for a web app, by all means use something else. If you have a solution that can be ably supported by a mid-range solution like MS Sql server, then go with it. But don't deploy some multi-million dollar, mission critical application on a shareware database solution that you've given little thought to in terms of design or engineering capabilities and then be surprised when it bombs.