They also sue you for so many other reasons. It's like the management hierarchy joke that Oracle is a litigious law firm with a sales team.

https://palisadecompliance.com/oracle-org-chart/

Also, if a sales rep or manager are struggling to make their numbers, they will audit customers.

Here's some background for those who are interested [0].

[0] A solution to DeWitt clauses. https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/

Oracle Exadata is very fast but expensive. I bet it would beat a similarly sized cluster from these 2 vendors. The problem is price to performance and elasticity. Because DB and SF are in the cloud, they have a lot more options that Oracle doesn’t have. This is why Kurian left Oracle to go to Google, because LE would not allow Oracle to make cloud native products that would run in other clouds. The SF cofounders are ex Oracle engineers and LE was not interested in creating a cloud native DB from scratch. If he did, we wouldn’t have a SF computing right now.

Yeah, the biggest benefit something like Snowflake or Databricks or whatever AWS tools has over the more traditional technologies is the pay-as-you-go pricing.

We're are now trying to scale unnamed technology running on EC2 from 100 nodes to 200 cores and the process to buy larger license is pretty painful. If we were using Snowflake or Databricks, we could just scale it up and update our opex estimate.

I think this has been quite common clause in the license contracts. Databrics has a blog post about it: https://databricks.com/blog/2021/11/08/eliminating-the-dewit...

This is kind of understandable. Benchmarking complex software is complicated. It’s easy to give totally wrong picture of things either accidentally or deliberately.