EnterpriseDB goes a long way toward solving that problem, Yuhanna said, because more than 80% of Oracle applications can run "seamlessly" with EnterpriseDB.

Smith agreed. EnterpriseDB is "more or less compatible with Oracle," requires minimal retraining for his Oracle database administrators and costs about one-fifth the price, he said. Those savings gains, combined with competent performance and scalability, are why Vonage is seriously looking to move its billing database, which stores billions of heavily-accessed call data records, to EnterpriseDB, explained Smith.

"There are lots of small records," he said. "We're not too worried about the table size; we just want to be comfortable that we can hammer it [EnterpriseDB] with a load."