Most databases aren't running a business. It isn't 01973 anymore. My web browser on my phone has a bunch of SQL databases.
I was talking about horizontal scalability, not failover. You don't need horizontal scalability, or for that matter any special software features, for failover. (Though PITR is nice, especially if your database is running a business.) With cloud computing vendors, you may not even need a second server to fail over to; you can bring it up when the failure happens and pay for it by the hour.
The features you're talking about made a lot of sense 30 years ago, maybe even 20 years ago. They still make a lot of sense if you need to handle hundreds of millions of queries per second or if you have hundreds of terabytes of data. But, for everything else, you can get by with vertical scaling, which is a lot less work. Unlike backups or rearchitecting your database, it's literally a product you can just buy.
(A lot of the open-source relational databases I listed also support clustering for both HA and scalability; I just think those features are a lot less important when you can buy an off-the-shelf server with tebibytes of RAM.)
The kinds of databases where your business stops working if the database does are OLTP databases (often, databases of transactions in the financial sense), and they aren't hundreds of terabytes or tens of millions of transactions per second. Oracle itself doesn't scale to databases so big or with such high transaction rates that they can't run on one server in 02025. (It does scale to databases so big or with such high transaction rates that Oracle can't run them on one server in 02025, but that's just because Oracle's VAXCluster-optimized design is inefficient on current hardware.)
People run Oracle because it's too late for them to switch.
I was talking about horizontal scalability, not failover. You don't need horizontal scalability, or for that matter any special software features, for failover. (Though PITR is nice, especially if your database is running a business.) With cloud computing vendors, you may not even need a second server to fail over to; you can bring it up when the failure happens and pay for it by the hour.
The features you're talking about made a lot of sense 30 years ago, maybe even 20 years ago. They still make a lot of sense if you need to handle hundreds of millions of queries per second or if you have hundreds of terabytes of data. But, for everything else, you can get by with vertical scaling, which is a lot less work. Unlike backups or rearchitecting your database, it's literally a product you can just buy.
(A lot of the open-source relational databases I listed also support clustering for both HA and scalability; I just think those features are a lot less important when you can buy an off-the-shelf server with tebibytes of RAM.)