If I want to trial Oracle or Clustrix, well, I'm going to have to start a contact with a sales organization and then they need to pre-qualify me, and then they need to qualify me and then I'll spend a few hours on the phone talking to people (which might take a few weeks in wall-clock time.)

If Clustrix offered cloud-based deployment of their database, they could have a small free tier for people to play around with. Add a console applicaiton for accessing the API. Make it really developer friendly.

Imagine if you could just type:

    $ sudo gem install clustrix
    $ clustrix create my-test-app
    Created cloud.clustrix.com/my-test-app
    username: my-test-app
    password: xd634shx

If they had that, I'd be trying it out in a flash. Then what if they had a per-usage pricing system like AWS? Something where you pay per gigabyte. Something that allows you to test stuff out for a few dollars a mount, and then when you're ready, scale it right up to a few thousand or more.