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One RDBMS that I don't see mentioned much is Tibero https://www.tmaxsoft.com/products/tibero/ It's a clone of Oracle & I'm surprised that Oracle legal have never tried to splat it! Interesting blog post discussing it here: https://www.tmaxsoft.com/products/tibero/
I'm a happy Postgres user and recently did some work with a government agency using Oracle - the thing that shocked me most about Oracle was the lack of transactional DDL operations which was something I'd just taken for granted in the Postgres world.
Why anyone would use Oracle for anything other than supporting legacy systems is beyond me.
For one, it does things that the competition is not capable of or just inferior -- and despite the bias on this site, the major consumers of RDBMSes are not price sensitive scrappy startups. There is no comparison between the HA offerings in Oracle and something like Postgres, which are comparatively toys. Replication doesn't equate to HA and the "nobody got fired for buying xxx.." actually has some justification. Wh…
Yes, if you're a startup with an MVP that recommends good deals on imported wine, sure you can, and really should, use a simpler open source RDBMS. But, if you're a large established company with billions in revenue and need a DB that delivers as close to perfect reliability as possible, then spending a small fortune on Oracle licensing and all the hassle that comes with it, is a pretty minor thing relative to the bigger picture. A critical failure even once in a blue moon will cost an order of magnitude more than your licensing fees.
There's a lot of obituary writing for Oracle, but think the real story is that Oracle is going to go from the dominant RDBMS provider in business world, to a niche player occupying the high end of the market. It might be where they want to end up, but it's not a terrible place to be, either.
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> I would argue that using postgres today sets you up better for HA tomorrow The point is, if I have the money I can get enterprise grade HA today. Yugabyte and cockroach are promising but they’re small unproven organizations and as history has shown they’re likely to get bought out and then who knows. Larry Ellison is an asshole, Oracle the company itself makes me want to vomit but they are a pretty known quantity.…
> This trope started reaching fever pitch during the first wave of OSS commercialization hype/fervor in 98. It wasn’t true then and I see no evidence it is any more true today. It is not. And I know of several major banks leaving oracle "en masse" because of licensing nightmare. The major decision makers are now endangered by their choice of oracle as a database to consider. Oracle in a new project is now a firm NO.…
This is true, but misleadingly not the whole truth. On prem RDBMS is dying and its niche shrinking (at least in this part of the cycle)... having said that, Oracle cloud offerings are doing very well.
Amazon made a herculean effort, and made some headlines when they migrated most of the business off Oracle last year. That's wonderful, for Amazon. Most of Oracle's enterprise customers are not Amazon.
> I'd also prefer a galera or an innodb cluster
The thing is.. Oracle sells so much more than just an DB engine, and people are buying. Oracle RDBMS is not an inferior product to open source competitors, in most ways superior, and yet, it is really just a proverbial loss leader.
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I would argue that using postgres today sets you up better for HA tomorrow, as both yugabyte and cockroachdb are built with postgresql compatability in mind. I would also argue your reputation as a competent CTO / Architect / whatever is more at risk by choosing Oracle in 2020.
> I would argue that using postgres today sets you up better for HA tomorrow The point is, if I have the money I can get enterprise grade HA today. Yugabyte and cockroach are promising but they’re small unproven organizations and as history has shown they’re likely to get bought out and then who knows. Larry Ellison is an asshole, Oracle the company itself makes me want to vomit but they are a pretty known quantity.…
(I am the CTO of Yugabyte) Your points are all completely valid. Just wanted to add my 2 cents.
With YugabyteDB specifically, we are more than just PostgreSQL wire-compatible, we "reuse" the upper half of PostgreSQL to support almost all PG features (examples: stored procedures, triggers, partial functions, etc). So the aim is to build something that has "almost all PG features" while being able to "run cloud-native - with HA, scale and geo-distribution" - our hope is that this allows YugabyteDB to really become a viable option instead of PostgreSQL when apps are being built for the cloud. Here is a blog post on the benefits we realized reusing PostgreSQL: https://blog.yugabyte.com/why-we-built-yugabytedb-by-reusing...
When I worked in a large bank we tried to migrate core system from Db2 zOS to Postgres and it went nowhere. I was a in-house developer working with Postgres consultants and they were amazed by db2 performance in OLTP scenarios.
So if your organization is already spending cash on Oracle, Db2 or MSSQL, use them for superior performance. Migration off them is costly and risky process.
If your working at a startup there is absolutely no reason to choose anything but Postgres if you need relational.
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> compilation to native code, graphical debugger. You have this on postgresql. > RAC and distributed transactions across a database cluster Needed only in telcos where galera would be enough
So where is the graphical debugging support and how do I single step a stored procedure? I have used distributed transactions at life sciences.
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> This trope started reaching fever pitch during the first wave of OSS commercialization hype/fervor in 98. It wasn’t true then and I see no evidence it is any more true today. It is not. And I know of several major banks leaving oracle "en masse" because of licensing nightmare. The major decision makers are now endangered by their choice of oracle as a database to consider. Oracle in a new project is now a firm NO.…
> oracle database is dying an its niche is shrinking. This is true, but misleadingly not the whole truth. On prem RDBMS is dying and its niche shrinking (at least in this part of the cycle)... having said that, Oracle cloud offerings are doing very well. Amazon made a herculean effort, and made some headlines when they migrated most of the business off Oracle last year. That's wonderful, for Amazon. Most of Oracle's…
It is also in a lots of extremely critical ways inferior. The huge complexity, the huge footprint, the humongous prices are enough to justify staying far away from it.
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PG community has put a lot effort into performance the last few years, including JIT compilation in PG12. Is that criticism still true today?
It's very true today. The problem discussed here is performance on complex queries (e.g. subqueries), and the query planner plays a huge role in that. The Postgres query planner has various issues. Here are two recent posts talking about planner issues: https://medium.com/@rbranson/10-things-i-hate-about-postgres... https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/things-could-be-impro... Also JIT compilation, while very nice…
You should check the latest commitfest. Improvements are coming, at a steady pace.