Oracle you could fine tune nearly everything with a single text file through 8i. And even now that's still supported (the pfile vs spfile). Their recovery procedures are also bulletproof unlike the voodoo with say, Sybase ASE to this day.
I once have resolved some stalled server issues on a machine located in a polar town Severomosk (via 2 sequential ssh connections, via terrible GPRS and one plain long-distance modem call - cu -l /dev/ttyS0 you know) from Katmandu, Nepal.) So, properly designed console tools matters.)
Cool. I've dealt with similar circumstances - one of my favorite incidents was a remote farm inventory database that kept getting corrupted because sheep kept head-butting an electric fence that was shorting the power to the nearby farmhouse.
Sqlplus still is the choice to do most things for old school Oracle DBAs :)
Oracle you could fine tune nearly everything with a single text file through 8i. And even now that's still supported (the pfile vs spfile). Their recovery procedures are also bulletproof unlike the voodoo with say, Sybase ASE to this day.