Oracle

[moonshield]

Why would someone use Oracle as opposed to MySQL? Is Oracle much better in performance?

[chromate]

Oracle's better under very heavy loads. It also has a lot of other features that would be used by high end / mission critical applications.

Generally it's not worth it for the majority of web aps though.

[James]

Yes, that's why it's more used by corperations than people making blogs and small sites.

[Xander]

From my experience at work I've found Oracle to not run very well under high demand(but was more probably bad server/software, even though it was being run by Oracle themselves). MySQL can be good even under high demand but if you really start pushing anything database related you need to make sure its got the resources to run(cpu/mem/disk space/etc).