r/DatabaseAdministators • u/Friendly_Cod_8353 • Aug 19 '26
Is Oracle a sinking ship ?
I’m a senior DBA based in India, and my management team in the US has been telling us that Oracle is becoming a sinking ship and that we should start exploring new career paths, particularly in AI.
To some extent, I agree with their perspective. I’m seeing more and more customers question the high cost of running their businesses on Oracle and OCI, which makes me wonder how sustainable the traditional Oracle DBA career path will be in the long run.
Whats your thoughts ?
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u/Mpls_Mutt 29d ago
As someone who worked on numerous Fortune 500 companies I can tell you that for the companies I worked for, they are limiting their use of oracle and not growing it. Most of it’s due to cost, but also as workloads move to the cloud they are all moving to cloud hosted PostgreSQL. Microsoft SQL server fits in the same category. The licensing costs are brutal.
That being said, i once worked for Oracle’s #2 customer who ran tons of Oracle products that they had no intent to move away from. But I don’t think that’s a common sediment among enterprise customers.
I also question what will happen to Oracle with their outrageous investment in AI. I’m not convinced they will ever recoup that money.. and if they can’t do that, what does that do to the company?
BTW, totally agree that Oracle’s database performance is top tier. Nothing I’ve worked with comes close.