Vendor lock-in and relational databases
Avoiding features to enable portability In the early 2000s the company that I was working for got a fright when the database vendor that we were tied to came out with a different approach to charging for their software license. Having applications on "the Internet" got the vendor's attention so they wanted to have a way of deriving more revenue from websites. From then on all developers on our relatively small team were directed towards avoiding using any non-standard features of that particular database engine, as it would make it more difficult for us to be able to transition across to an alternative vendor. For example, stored procedures were only allowed for edge cases such as an advertising engine (yeah, we rolled our own advert engine for a customer back in the day). Keep in mind that this was back when self-hosted physical servers were pretty much the only way to operate, well before cloud computing such as AWS even existed, so it was a big deal to set up a databas...