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Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

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Re: Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

#91
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking seriously, but isn't Russia fundamentally closer to a kleptocracy? Dishonesty is apparently more pervasive and built in to their culture. From my understanding, bribe culture and cheating are an accepted norm. Not to say these characteristics do not exist in America, just not anywhere to the same extent?

The US just uses different words, such as "campaign financing", or "creative accounting".

Go on and try offering "campaign financing", or "creative accounting" to a policeman stopped you for speeding somewhere in California. Don't forget to record it on your smartphone.

In Russia, literally ANY road policeman not only takes bribes, but has a bag of tricks how to get more from you.

Unfortunately it's well-known to me, from my own experience. (10+ years of driving on Russian roads, 4+ in California)

Re: Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

#92
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think that having your data hosted in Moscow is a worse privacy concern than in USA? That's a joke. You realise that google just made location tracking mandatory for anyone using maps or app store, right? The USA is way worse in this respect. Or let me re-phrase that: we know for a FACT that the USA is very very bad in this respect, whereas Russian just has a bad reputation.

How many reporters and dissidents are murdered in the US versus Russia? Russia is way worse in civil rights and surveillance. Doesnt excuse America for the schemes they pull but it's definitely safer here unless you're in the hood.

Well, it's kind of safe for their citizens too, if they don't get involved in the things that get them killed, as those are not random things. But civil rights aside, online surveillance there is not yet at the level of reading everyone's emails and while they really want to do that they have a hard time implementing something like this for various reasons. It's definitely safer to use those online services, than the ones in your own country or allies.

Re: Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

#93
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking seriously, but isn't Russia fundamentally closer to a kleptocracy? Dishonesty is apparently more pervasive and built in to their culture. From my understanding, bribe culture and cheating are an accepted norm. Not to say these characteristics do not exist in America, just not anywhere to the same extent?

The US just uses different words, such as "campaign financing", or "creative accounting".

And I understand what you're saying. Similar things are happening when your child goes to school/college/etc. You pay for smth and she/he gets preferences. As I see, it's common both in US and Russia.

But between bribing and things you mentioned there is one essential difference, that changes everything. It's this question:

- Are rules known in advance, are they written and available in public?

I believe this question helps to distinguish black and white.

Re: Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

#94
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go on. They give you a domain? I never saw that... Link please?

No, they don't. But you can use Yandex.Mail with your own domain by configuring your DNS and setting up Yandex.Mail account. It's a great solution for small businesses and families.

I was reading that link. Do I have to use their DNS servers, or is it just enough to point the MX record to yandex?

Re: Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

#96
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I always find it amusing when people find russia and china on a lower moral/ethical ground when everything on american soil is equally watched and processed. if not by nsa, it's for ads.

Please take a look at the Human Rights Watch reports[0] for USA, China and Russia. I honestly wonder how you can reach such a conclusion about freedom of expression and human rights in those countries. [0] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016

Human Rights Watch being an American organisation, led by a member of the US power elite (e.g. Goldman Sachs, Soros' OSF) might have something to do with it?

Nah, perish the though!

Re: Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

#97
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I always find it amusing when people find russia and china on a lower moral/ethical ground when everything on american soil is equally watched and processed. if not by nsa, it's for ads.

Please take a look at the Human Rights Watch reports[0] for USA, China and Russia. I honestly wonder how you can reach such a conclusion about freedom of expression and human rights in those countries. [0] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2016

Mmm, I'd agree but the parent is specifically talking about surveillance, not about all human rights, and it's true - the US likes to condemn cyber-espionage and surveillance while simultaneously spying on the entirety of the planet and attacking/infiltrating the planet as it sees fit.

Re: Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

#99

My take aways: * Reasons to migrate were: unresponsive support, inconvenient deployment, closed source, huge cost. * It took just 10 man-years to rewrite whole project from Oracle to Postgres (e.g. 10 developers, 1 year), which is amazing. * They benefited from Postgres data versioning, arrays and composite types. * They liked writing logic on PL/pgSQL more than on Oracle PL/SQL: reduced code size, increased test cov…

> Great thing for community is that Yandex now commited to Postgres, meaning it will get more testing and bug-fixes faster.

That remains to be seen. There's a fair amount of huge postgres users that don't even bother to report bugs they find...

Re: Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

#100
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So - as a long time Oracle DBA (who also loves Postgres), I've been seeing a lot of companies do this sort of move. There are a couple of downsides, but really - there's a lot more upsides to Postgres than downsides (IMO).

I'd love to hear more detail. We hear a lot from the PostgreSQL team and its fans (amongst whom i count myself!), but a lot less from people on the Oracle side.

Oh, as the benefits of Oracle vs Postgres?

So the biggest in my experience is not enterprise support. Folks generally expect it to be. The biggest is actually flexibility. Oracle DB is good at handling some edge-case scenarios, such as a RAC cluster with a failover cluster running an Advanced Dataguard Reporting instance in a whole different state.

Basically you are running a (super expensive) near real-time cluster that's doing compressed log-shipping to another cluster, and you have a standby on that secondary cluster that's open in a read-only mode. And none of it requires cron jobs or excessively complicated setup.

However... even though I've done stuff like this for a number of clients, there are SO MANY better ways to address these sorts of scenarios with creativity and elbow-grease that Postgres tends to be a better tool.

The caveat, of course, is when the person who sets it up leaves, and some other person has to take over. With Oracle's scenario, it's mostly just a slightly unusual config of a standard set of tools. The more creative Postgres solution might be quite a bit more of a learning curve.

This is just an example off the top of my head, but it is one that came up recently. A client had a shipping/receiving system that could not go down, so the 20k+ per node was trivial. To reduce the load for reporting, they just simply had us open a standby DB for read-only reporting on the failover cluster - and they liked that so much, we set up another one for them local to the offshore reporting team.

It's absolutely possible to do something like that with Postgres clustering, but there's a whole lot fewer folks doing it.

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