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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]

#111

Post by twic »

randomnerdiness wrote: post #100
twic wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, i was thinking more of the upsides to Postgres - apologies for not being clear.

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

#112

Post by bobuk »

avar wrote: post #72
bobuk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yandex is a public company with stocks on NASDAQ. Can you ever imagine how it is hard to hide bribes inside of public company budget? :)

Just give someone a big performance bonus with the understanding that part of it is to be used on bribes? Seems rather easy.

Nope, both salaries and bonuses (even on C level) is too low in Russia to hide any amount of bribe in them. Anyway, I never heard about bribes for electricity for last 5 years in Russia.

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

#113

Post by tajen »

jorgecastillo wrote: post #83
the_common_man wrote: post #58

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.

I don't think you can lump Russia and China together. China is truly "on lower moral/ethical grounds". I can't trust any country that has such pervasive censorship policy and such blatantly protectionist policies as China. Frankly I trust the Russian government as much as I trust the US government or as much as I trust my government (the Mexican government). I don't think I would feel safe living in China! I wouldn't…

What about a country which has one forth of the China population which has institutional rules about the police being able to seize the money you carry, your money on cards you carry and your car without even charging you with an offense, where 6% of the black population is in jail, and 1% of the total population, and where you can be routinely shot dead if you are mentally disabled or if you play poker at home or accused of treason of you publish information about some of the most impacting activities of the govt? I've already been in Russia, but I'll never go to USA.

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

#114

Post by Shorel »

niftich wrote: post #53

So having read through the slides, these are not bad slides, but I'm missing the 'real' wow-factor of why Postgres was a better choice in the end than Oracle. There's no doubt that the rewrite (which, because of PL/SQL -> PL/pgSQL, there was a rewrite) benefited them, but all I can glean from the slides is Postgres hasn't failed them yet and the rewrite worked. So as much as I want to talk about Oracle vs. Postgres,…

> but all I can glean from the slides is Postgres hasn't failed them yet and the rewrite worked

That's actually huge for companies that have invested in Oracle and feel trapped.

And the companies that buy Oracle, have a slight tendency to write all their core business logic inside the database.

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

#115

Post by Spearchucker »

coolspot wrote: post #89

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…

I have no love for Oracle (at all, actually), but let's not kick the donkey when it's down. Having been through tech refreshes myself I'll bet most of those benefits would've been realized, regardless of data provider. Too much opportunity for a competent team to reduce or eliminate technical debt.

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

#116

Post by zepolen »

Shorel wrote: post #114
niftich wrote: post #53

So having read through the slides, these are not bad slides, but I'm missing the 'real' wow-factor of why Postgres was a better choice in the end than Oracle. There's no doubt that the rewrite (which, because of PL/SQL -> PL/pgSQL, there was a rewrite) benefited them, but all I can glean from the slides is Postgres hasn't failed them yet and the rewrite worked. So as much as I want to talk about Oracle vs. Postgres,…

> but all I can glean from the slides is Postgres hasn't failed them yet and the rewrite worked That's actually huge for companies that have invested in Oracle and feel trapped. And the companies that buy Oracle, have a slight tendency to write all their core business logic inside the database.

Which is really the best place to put it in the end.

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

#117

Post by randomnerdiness »

twic wrote: post #111
randomnerdiness wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, i was thinking more of the upsides to Postgres - apologies for not being clear.

I thought you were already a huge Postgres advocate? Or do you mean 'upsides to postgres that appeals to heavy oracle sites'? /edit Perhaps that wasn't you...

So #1 benefit of Postgres for Oracle shops is transition cost. It's cheaper than Oracle (by sometimes substantial amounts), and relatively painless to switch to. A lot of code can move unmodified, all the same platforms, and often even the same teams of folks in the same jobs. Postgres scales very well, at the very least it can handle 90% of a given company's Oracle load with no real issue. Things like clustering, backups, failovers, and reporting systems can be re-engineered to work in similar ways on Postgres, though some will require substantial hackery.

The #2 benefit is stability. Oracle has a very bad track record (especially lately) when it comes to patching and supporting older databases. If you just want a DB to sit in the corner and work for a year, with push-button easy security patches at most... Oracle isn't really the product anymore. Oracle CPU (critical patches) are cumulative now, and the bloat is getting out of hand. I recently just installed a set of patches that were almost an extra 5GB for the footprint... minor for a 20TB database, but ridiculous if you're thinking of thousands of small distributed hosts.

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

#118

Post by mlvljr »

csydas wrote: post #105
healthnutter wrote: post #68

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?

I've lived in SPB for a few years now (american expat), and there's...some truth to it. The idea of cops just grifting you non-stop is overstated; more likely than not they just wanna not have to do work. Even when it comes to checking documents for folks from the southern countries (uzbekistan, tajikistan, etc) most of the time the police try to speed stuff along so they can get back to smoking, having tea, or stopp…

Which part of the city you are in, btw? :)

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

#119

Post by sologoub »

healthnutter wrote: post #68
the_common_man wrote: post #58

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.

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?

Russian culture and the current situation in the country are quite different. Honesty and sincerity are highly valued traits, to the point that Westerners are still labeled as disingenuous for smiling too much - Russians view this as fake and therefore less trustworthy. This of course is changing, as the younger generations are more exposed to western behaviors.

The real problem is the economic situation and people that focus on personal enrichment by any means instead of building something sustainable. Basically, in an environment where you cannot be sure of what next year is going to look like, it's brutally rational to try and extract as much value now, as opposed to invest for the future.

As the result, you get everything from poor infrastructure investment and lack of true small business growth, all the way to bribing because the official taking the bribe isn't sure he or she will have this access tomorrow, so better to enrich now and as fast as possible.

This is not something that is endemic to Russian culture, but rather to the survival situation. Unfortunately, Russia seems to teeter in this state for centuries at a time.

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

#120

Post by dubcanada »

zuron7 wrote: post #44

Yandex.Mail provides custom domain E-Mails for free, the only large company to do so and not to mention how good it is.

zoho offers free custom domain email hosting. It's also surprisingly good, the UI/integration between the pieces is very well done.
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