C versus object-oriented lanuguages like C++/Java is a topic I have discussed a lot with programmers. I believe that traditional procedural approaches and languages, like C, are the best for 'systems programming', by which I mean implementing anything with complex data structures and lots of parallelism. A DBMS is a typical example of such a complex program. My opinion is based on:

1) The object-oriented paradigm recommends that algorithms are structured around 'objects', that is, around data structures. But I think it is easier for humans to understand complex algorithms, like the splitting of a node in a B-tree, if the algorithms are presented on their own terms, and not fragmented around the 'objects' involved. Donald Knuth of the Stanford University remarked that proving the correctness of an 'object-oriented' algorithm is hard, because keeping track of autonomous 'objects' is difficult.

3) A weakness of C compared to Java is memory management. In C you can easily write programs that leak memory or run over allocated buffers. In practice, it has turned out to be relatively easy to keep these memory management bugs at a tolerable level in our C programs, so that a move to a language with automatic memory management is not needed.