>>It seems me that Oracle DB will be able to reach this term.
>>May be in the future some of todays large DB servers like Oracle, MS SQL Server, MySQL and DB2 will continue live and will have backward compatibility.
>>But according me every 10 years you client should update and to implement newer technologies, keeping main DB structure.
>
>Using Oracle would defeat the aim of having a small and more or less self-contained application + data. What commonly using applications have the longest lived backwards compatibility? Excel? RTF word processors?

Stuff written in Cobol and Fortran.