I was asked this question, and figured out a few things have moved forward since I thought about this in depth.
There are so many reasons why to get rid of your expensive exadata and oracle licenses, and Microsoft does offer help if you are interested. Total cost of ownership has been shown to be much lower, and the throughput is excellent.
What I shared with my customer came to the following links:
Why else would the NASDAQ throw a 2 PETABYTE data warehouse on SQL (2014)?
SQL Server SURPASSED Oracle in the “Operational Database Systems” magic quadrant since 2014. We have been excellent in the data warehousing category as well.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-license-migration
SQL 2016 is extremely fast. Check the TPC-H results for Data Warehousing
SQL Server is more secure than Oracle in terms of vulnerabilities
We also have “Always Encrypted”
“In SQL Server 2016, for the first time, you will hear about a capability that we call Always Encrypted,” he said. “This is about securing data all the way from the client, into the database and keeping it secure even when query processing is being done. At the database site, the data is never decrypted, even in memory, and you can still do queries over it.”
https://adtmag.com/articles/2016/03/10/sql-server-2016.aspx
Lufthansa used Azure to host an availability group replica of SQL Server to cut DR recovery times
http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/lufthansa-systems-cuts-data-recovery-time-from-minutes
SQL in Hybrid: On-prem doing AlwaysOn to Azure example:
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Deploy-a-SQL-Server-5608b684
More Hybrid SQL 2016 examples
http://sqlmag.com/scaling-success-sql-server-2016/sql-server-2016-hybrid-cloud-integration
SBI Liquidity migrated from SQL 2005 to SQL 2016, and engaged Premier Support to ensure success
Amway went to AlwaysOn in SQL plus Azure to get to a 30 second cutover time for their data.
“These data centers support about 34 terabytes of information spread across 100 instances of Microsoft SQL Server software, with the data load growing at an annual rate of about 15 percent.”
http://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/global-direct-seller-sees-100-percent-availability-wit
As always, feel free to reach out with thoughts or feedback on this article!
George Walters 