I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP.

The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.

Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.

So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.

Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.

Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.