Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance • Hacker News Board

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#101

Post by pjmlp » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

augusto-moura wrote: post #78

pjmlp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ, those drivers exist since Java was owned by Sun. Also Oracle was the first RDMS to support stored procedures in Java. So source isn't available yet you are able to judge the code quality, interesting. No, disassembling bytecode isn't a reflection of the quality of the original source code.

Sure it works, and is well tested and mature, and so are most of the jdbc drivers, never had any problem with any jdbc driver, aside of digging to code to understand some not documented behaviours. I don't see why put the Java driver as a benefit point of Oracle, most of the developers problems and issues don't occur at the JDBC level. It might be true for .NET but I'm really supicious if the Oracle support is that b…

Well, to know which obscure and internal hacks are those one has to read the source code.

Also Oracle drivers also run in other JVMs, so which JVM are they abusing then?

As for why speaking about the drivers, I have had my share of driver issues during the last couple of decades, when going enterprise scale.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#102

Post by pjmlp » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:47 PM UTC

thda wrote: post #97

pjmlp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So where is the graphical debugging support and how do I single step a stored procedure? I have used distributed transactions at life sciences.

dbeaver and plugin_debugger. For distributed transactions, it all depends on why you need them in the first place but there are multiple solutions in postgres to handle them.

So some third party solution, and not first class support from the RDMS vendor.

That is not the same as using Oracle.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#103

Post by kstrauser » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

F_J_H wrote: post #24

markab21 wrote: post #14

Why anyone would use Oracle for anything other than supporting legacy systems is beyond me.

I have not been an Oracle fan in the past, especially because of their complicated (and expensive) licensing, but late last year we moved to their hosted autonomous database. The on demand pricing model makes it quite economical, and the performance is amazing. However, the killer feature for me is that it has application Express (or APEX) included, which is a complete web application development framework, as well a…

> YRMV, but it has been incredible for us, both to support our data science initiatives, and for rapidly deploying applications. I couldn't imagine going back to anything else.

Out of curiosity, are your data scientists actually happy with this? All of ours are using Python notebooks with Spark or RDS, and I think there'd be an armed revolt if we asked them to migrate to anything else.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#104

Post by user5994461 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

peterangular wrote: post #69

snarfy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I removed any mention of Oracle from my resume. I have a lot of experience with it, but I never want to work with it again.

Same - it's such a difficult technology to deal with when outstanding flavors of DB exist (many for free): Postgres, MySQL, MSSQL. The Oracle projects I've worked on are just people choosing it because "it's the safe business decision and a household name". I've had semi-good luck convincing folks over to MSSQL in these circumstances which is a night-and-day improvement in ergonomics/features.

I thought MSSQL could only come with windows servers (until last year).

What is your experience with moving folks from Oracle / Linux to MSSQL / Windows?

I too think MSSQL is the best contender to replace Oracle in many regards, but I don't see the change in operations going well, different skillset and sysadmins.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#105

Post by sbuttgereit » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

thda wrote: post #100

dtheodor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> as far as I know no work has been done on it on 13 either. You should check the latest commitfest. Improvements are coming, at a steady pace.

Are you sure?

I just made a very casual search of the most recently completed commitfest and I saw one entry ("JIT expression evaluation improvements") marked as "Moved to next CF" and in the upcoming one the only item planned was the one that was moved.

Maybe there's more there with less obvious names?

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#106

Post by user5994461 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:19 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #52

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he should take steps to move away from it Unless - as it often happens - someone in high places need to keep justifying a business decision taken 1-2-3 years before.

That's what we call throwing good money after bad. Besides, PostgreSQL has actually come a long way since 3 years ago or so. It's not a slow-moving project, especially for this space.

How often do developers recompile postgresql? How often do developers go through the hassle of upgrading databases versions? Whatever postgresql may have done recently, it won't be used and available in the common distro until a while later.

Bear in mind that minor versions in postgresql are breaking changes. It does not follow semver.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#107

Post by modoc » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

markab21 wrote: post #14

Why anyone would use Oracle for anything other than supporting legacy systems is beyond me.

I STRONGLY dislike Oracle the company, and the Oracle DB is quite complex, however Oracle RAC (HA) beats the pants off anything else out there as far as performant, reliable HA. Oracle DB also has been the leader performance wise for complex queries and large datasets. All of that is very important in my niche (enterprise grade eCommerce).

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#108

Post by thijsvandien » Mon, May 04, 2020, 7:02 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #2

I've been on a project where we were forced to migrate the opposite direction: From PostgreSQL to Oracle, because the client was already paying for Oracle licenses and really, really , wanted us to use Oracle to justify the expense. It was actually a pretty big setback. We were using PostGIS to support spatial queries (a key requirement), and Oracle Spatial was just not at the same level (both in performance and feat…

Ah, the Sunk Cost Fallacy at its finest.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#109

Post by ntsplnkv2 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

catblast wrote: post #94

thda wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean, a company with as much data as Amazon leaving is a pretty big deal and obviously is in the news.

Are Oracle cloud offerings actually doing well? What evidence is there of this?

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#110

Post by takeda » Mon, May 04, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #104

peterangular wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same - it's such a difficult technology to deal with when outstanding flavors of DB exist (many for free): Postgres, MySQL, MSSQL. The Oracle projects I've worked on are just people choosing it because "it's the safe business decision and a household name". I've had semi-good luck convincing folks over to MSSQL in these circumstances which is a night-and-day improvement in ergonomics/features.

I thought MSSQL could only come with windows servers (until last year). What is your experience with moving folks from Oracle / Linux to MSSQL / Windows? I too think MSSQL is the best contender to replace Oracle in many regards, but I don't see the change in operations going well, different skillset and sysadmins.

EnterpriseDB seems like PostgreSQL version that can emulate most Oracle's features, although I would personally use it as a step in migrating (i.e. move from Oracle to EDB, then gradually convert your data to be PostgreSQL only, once done move to pure PostgreSQL)