It was very slow and resource hungry, and also very time consuming to develop things on. Imagine if you were only allowed to write or run applications that ran on top of Oracle. Even if you try to write a program that works on text files, those text files are stored as blobs in an Oracle database.
Isn't that the sort of problem you solve once, though? If you want a "this is just a stream of characters I can do POSIXy things to" interface, that's a library with fread(3) et al in the front, and a query for a single field in the database at the back.
