By using ethereum, we didn't need to write microservices to front the database, we didn't need to configure the database (not trivial if you want serializability https://blog.dbi-services.com/oracle-serializable-is-not-ser... ), we didn't need to write any cryptography code, we don't need to run any kind of infrastructure (let alone expensive, distributed infrastructure) to allow people to interact with and update the data. We get broadcasting of changes to clients so that the UIs can be kept up to date for free too.
We do have to carefully audit our smart contracts, but they are much smaller pieces of code than the microservices and triggers that we would otherwise have written.
Mainly, because our use case was similar to the crypto-asset tracking use case, there was a lot of code we could rely on already in ethereum that we would have had to write ourselves in the RDBMS world.
By the way, did you use any historical data from the tracking? Does ethereum provide good tools to analyze that?
Well, yes, it would have been possible. There are a couple of minor things the blockchain does better and a couple of things it does worse for this use case, but fundamentally, I believe the blockchain based solution was cheaper to build and will be cheaper to maintain.
People need to consider these solutions in the context of whether or not they solve business problems effectively, and put aside knee jerk reactions based on technological prejudices.