As somebody spending a large amount of my time working on postgres, and obviously being convinced PG is good: Of course people sometimes choose oracle on technical merits (I've not worked with modern sybase versions much, so I can't judge, although some sybase IQ numbers look interesting).
Golden Gate, RAC, Management Tools, stable plans, decent parallelism, decent partitioning, some columnar stuff - that's not just marketing fluff.
Oracle's politics / sales tactics, and cost are one large argument against, being able to influence feature development / add features yourself another, against Oracle, that I've seen driving companies - including big financial ones - away from oracle over time. Often that's not starting with the business critical stuff, but with some smaller project, and then grows over time.
Golden Gate, RAC, Management Tools, stable plans, decent parallelism, decent partitioning, some columnar stuff - that's not just marketing fluff.
Oracle's politics / sales tactics, and cost are one large argument against, being able to influence feature development / add features yourself another, against Oracle, that I've seen driving companies - including big financial ones - away from oracle over time. Often that's not starting with the business critical stuff, but with some smaller project, and then grows over time.