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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]

#131

Post by csydas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #108
csydas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Even though everyone I know here calls the process "bribing", it's greasing the wheels "Greasing the wheels" is a popular euphemism for bribery, not a distinct different act which contrasts with bribery.

No, I think you're conflating when I'm specifically talking about just getting better service.

See there's another slight disconnect with service in Russia versus service in the US. You ever have someone go out of their way to make something easier or better for you as part of their job? Go the extra mile? That's not really the status quo in Russia. You goof up your registration form at the post office (one mistake on the 4th page of a 10 page document)? Guess who's filling it out again, even if the office worker has white out handy. Only have 30 minutes to take care of something at the nearby government office but it happens to be 1:45 pm and time for the official's tea break? Guess who's not getting their document done.

When people are talking about greasing the wheel, it's getting access to systems they otherwise don't have. It's people going the extra mile on demand, getting the inside scoop, making sure a document gets processed today, taking care of problems for you internally. Do the big bribes happen? Yeah, I'm not denying that. My point more is that the "bribes" that are talked about so much aren't really what we normally think of as bribes.

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

#132

Post by [deleted] »

mlvljr wrote: post #118
csydas wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? :)

[deleted]

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

#134

Post by pomfpomfpomf3 »

dubcanada wrote: post #120
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.

Yandex offers unlimited users (up to 1000, then you have to contact them and I guess they will allow more) and claims unlimited storage, zoho free tier is 25 users and 5 GB storage/user.

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

#135

Post by dragonwriter »

csydas wrote: post #131
dragonwriter wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even though everyone I know here calls the process "bribing", it's greasing the wheels "Greasing the wheels" is a popular euphemism for bribery, not a distinct different act which contrasts with bribery.

No, I think you're conflating when I'm specifically talking about just getting better service. See there's another slight disconnect with service in Russia versus service in the US. You ever have someone go out of their way to make something easier or better for you as part of their job? Go the extra mile? That's not really the status quo in Russia. You goof up your registration form at the post office (one mistake o…

> You goof up your registration form at the post office (one mistake on the 4th page of a 10 page document)? Guess who's filling it out again, even if the office worker has white out handy.

That's pretty much my experience in most government offices in the US, too.

> When people are talking about greasing the wheel, it's getting access to systems they otherwise don't have.

Paying privately to the official for access for service from public officials that is not generally made available is "bribery". Yes, "greasing the wheel" is a euphemism for bribery that is often used particularly for small bribes for small favors (though "small" is relative to who is speaking.)

> My point more is that the "bribes" that are talked about so much aren't really what we normally think of as bribes.

They are exactly what most people with experience in domains where there is the kind of lack of accountability which makes pervasive bribery a thing expect as the most common kind of bribery. (When there is some accountability, the perceived risk/reward of smaller transactions becomes less favorable more quickly than is the case for larger transactions -- if as a public employee you are going to get fired and be unemployable in the public sector, and maybe prosecuted, if you are caught taking any bribe, and there is even a modest risk of detection in even small bribes, its no longer worth it to take small bribes in any case.)

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

#136

Post by elmigranto »

bobuk wrote: post #112
avar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> salaries and bonuses (even on C level) is too low in Russia to hide any amount of bribe in them

Let's say someone claims that their programmer genius Ivan saved a company ~1m USD/year with latest commit; and awards him $100k. And you see this unusual bonus, how are you going to know 99% of that doesn't go to someone other than Ivan?

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

#137

Post by Jerry2 »

xienze wrote: post #47
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.

Russian email hosting. What could go wrong?

If your mail is in Russia, FBI/DOJ will have an impossible time getting a warrant. Compare that to the US/EU mail hosters who willfully give your mail away.

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

#138

Post by elmigranto »

niftich wrote: post #80
postila wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Price if obvious reason of migration, and in their case (multiple datacenters and "-1 datacenter" policy) it was huge benefit. 2. The other concern was Oracle's slow bugfixing and reaction to feedback. So, this is a good case showing how a company can stop wasting millions of $ for proprietary software, joining Open Source community, contributing to it and taking benefits from tech collaboration with core develope…

So, they say 'shop.oracle.com' was their 'main reason' for switching but that reads as a half-joke, half-serious riff on Oracle's famous ability to extract money from people; the other salient points I can find are: - PL/SQL was harder to deploy than PL/pgSQL (as stated later) - Only synchronous interface in Oracle's OCCI - Problems with Oracle's development environments - Not very responsive support from Oracle. But…

> I can't quite figure out if "3x more hardware" is supposed to be a good thing

Initial architecture with 2 servers was set up that way to save money on Oracle per-core licensing. They wanted to add more, but that was too costly.

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

#139

Post by elmigranto »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #130
fla wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres is free

10 man-years are not though. I'm a postgres fan and booster myself but I'd need a good reason to migrate a data backend on any project I'm managing.

> 10 man-years are not though.

Judging by the salaries from job sites and my yandex interview, the cost would most certainly top up at $0.5 million (that's a very generous guess, probably half or two thirds that, realistically). Not sure how much Oracle costs at Yandex scale (a LOT more?).

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

#140

Post by homero »

xienze wrote: post #47
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.

Russian email hosting. What could go wrong?

I actually like it, sure they read it but they can't get me and they won't allow usa snooping. I use it a lot
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