As the former lead dev on a rather large Oracle-based architecture, I feel obliged to chime in.

Some of this article is extremely true, a couple things are utter bullshit though.

I'll go with the bullshit first.

1) source control

Source control is mandatory, so you have to do it anyway.
But for any Oracle architecture where there is actual PLSQL work beyond funky table functions, meaning triggers, jobs and their ilk, you need to keep around a large schema with enough consistent data, especially with all the issues one can have with the way Oracle optimizes the execution plan of its queries depending on the statistics of each table. You need this information when you develop, so you need amounts of data that approach the order of magnitude of the production system, which is potentially huge.

It's simply impossible for every developer to enjoy their own instance, unless each dev has his own server, and even then: there's far too much maintenance to be made on an active Oracle database, and once a certain scale in the schema has been reached it's practically impossible to maintain an acceptable level of performance on a frigging desktop, especially when your devs are doing more than just PL/SQL, but, also, you know, work on the other tiers.

So in the end, you have one dev instance, two at most, and you keep versioning of the code just for looks because unless your system is trivial (only reversible transactions), any procedure, job or trigger that is executed on a database will massively change it forever. So in the end if your business logic lies at least partly on PL/SQL code, older versions of sources are only kept as a trace, not for proper versioning.

Besides, there are so many encoding issues and your database is so critical that you can't even risk anyone commiting a file rogue-style because if the sql was edited with textpad, notepad, notepad++, created with touch, right click + new, saved as from toad or came from a copy-paste of an e-mail sent from an ipad, the encoding will be different and will mess up tons of stuff. Things like accents in code comments can be interpreted badly and "eat" the following line feed character, which in turns comments the next line, which can lead to ultimate data corruption if it concerns a piece of code that is invoked by a trigger.

This is a risk that you don't, ever, want to take. So your PL/SQL SVN server is only for the two/three people that are entitled to actually write the Patch. Don't leave anything to chance here. The rest of the devs follow the chain of command of writing something, testing on the dev server, crashing it and eventually ruining it, send their script by email or dropbox or whatever to the devs in charge of the patch, who then use SVN to version it properly.

2) Unit testing

Unit testing is cool and all, but if all it does is essentially compile scripts. You can only unit-test functions if they are isolated enough, and isolation is all relative when the code is in the database. Let's unit test a select table function: first you disable triggers on this table, then you insert test data, then you do your test, then you delete the inserted data, then you reactivate the triggers. Happy? No! Why? Because it will take me a week to write all the test case inserts & delete!

I'm very caricatural here, but this is what happens in real cases. Cases where the unit test is very hard, much, much harder to design than the code it's supposed to test itself, not because of bad logic or whatever, but because in the end, it's mostly data that's required, and sometimes a simple select unit test requires a metric ton of one-line table inserts and deletes, and there can be a factorial quantity of test cases for tables with more than a couple dozen columns.
"Just peer review" is the sensible and agile way to do it. TDD is not.

The rest of the article is mostly spot on. I loved the power of PLSQL for this particular system (railway undertaking system). I lack distance still, but I have no idea how we would have handled it had the customer said "no oracle, use [insert NoSQL tech of your choice]". The kind of calculations that were required was: "okay this train here is 5mins late and that train there is 6mins late, we have 6 thousands concurrent wagons circulating in the system that need to be rerouted before any train, anywhere, leaves its station, just warn me asap if this incurs any delay in the deliveries of high priority merchandise within the week, but if possible, fix it automatically yourself".