Me? 20 years ago I was busy building ROLAP engines that ran cross-RDBMS, because the customer had already decided to blow a million bucks on Teradata et al before I even got there.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. It's all understandable because nontechnical people were making technical decisions? That doesn't make it ok.
And yes, quite a lot of those overpriced appserver installs failed to function. Let me tell you about the time I wrote the backend for Sprite's Sublymonal campaign; their IBM-operated datacenter couldn't provision WebSphere capacity in time (lead time > 2 months), so I ran the thing off a couple VPS nodes (IIRC rackspace), hiding the whole project from their IT staff.
My point is also that making sweeping, moralizing statements like "doesn't make it ok" (nor the repeated forays into other enterpise software topics) isn't helpful in general, and it certainly isn't helpful in furthering understanding or intellectual curiosity on the specific topic, as it relates to Oracle and a single, generalist (arguably "full-stack") engineer performing a sustaining and development role.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. It's all understandable because nontechnical people were making technical decisions? That doesn't make it ok.
And yes, quite a lot of those overpriced appserver installs failed to function. Let me tell you about the time I wrote the backend for Sprite's Sublymonal campaign; their IBM-operated datacenter couldn't provision WebSphere capacity in time (lead time > 2 months), so I ran the thing off a couple VPS nodes (IIRC rackspace), hiding the whole project from their IT staff.