but it doesn’t change the fact that many organizations chose between those two databases plenty of times before Oracle acquired Sun.

Sure, but the choice is: can we not use Oracle and if the answer is yes, then they won’t.

I understand what you’re saying. I am a database engineer and have worked on several with the business model of taking customers away from Oracle/SQL server/DB2. But I wouldn’t call our products competitors to those. Well, maybe SQL server but that’s a different story. You can’t really be competition if you can’t serve the same customer base in terms of capabilities.

Also, whenever Oracle or DB2 actually wanted to keep a customer, they just made a low enough offer that made them attractive (remember they don’t have a list price) and we’d be left standing. In fact, I’m pretty sure we were used several times just to get those two to make a better offer…