I love Oracle

I have to admit it. But it was not a love on first sight when I met version 7. But I think that it was more due to fact that it was partly misused in that project for things that should have been done with standard Unix features.
Things I like about Oracle:

• + Multi-version read consistency
• + No limit to the number of locks
• + Always use row locks if useful
• + No lock escalation (row->page->table)
• + Fast startup, even if you have a large uncommitted transaction. I could tell you a funny story about a DB2 doing recovery at start-up for more than 24h.
• + Nice web interface to pinpoint most problems easily. ( Although the old non web Enterprise-Manager was much faster)
• + Very nice tools for developers to find performance problems (statspack, automatic monitoring with awh*, trace-events!)
• + Very good support. Although the first answer is normally kind of a standard question, I always got to the point where they acknowledged the bug and fixed it.
• + They work hard to make it a better product even at the core level.

Some of the things I don't like:

• - AQ is slow as hell. We used AQ heavily in one part of our application with  small messages. When I looked at a statspack report I couldn't believe it. 700 buffer_gets_per_exec on average to fetch a single message!
• - Sometimes it's hard to find out what you have to licence. Although I like the fact that I could try out every feature, I would like to be able to limit it's functionality to just the things that I licensed or plan to license.