Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

rolkotech.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 201 posts

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#121

Post by thda »

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…

> 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 as Oracle restful data services (ORDS). With built-in application development and deployment, it is the only complete, full-stack data management platform I am aware of (enterprise level).

Yeah those architectures were nice in the 90s. We don't do that anymore, for a whole lot of reasons. Being locked in with such a nefarious vendor is such a big risk.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#122

Post by boshomi »

takeda wrote: post #110
user5994461 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

With EDB ships a full featured PostgreSQL with some additional useful time-savers and a lot of experience for a fair amount of money. A part of this money goes direct into PostgreSQL development. So it's a fair deal.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#123

Post by thda »

pjmlp wrote: post #62
augusto-moura wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - A much better experience in Java and .NET drivers, including SQL custom data types. I didn't have any better experience with Oracle drivers in Java. Most of the driver is a soup of hacks exploiting obscure features of both the VM and standard library (both the vm and jdk are "Oracle owned" so I guess I was expecting that), also the source code is not available, so debugging it's a hellish experience. On the other…

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.

> Also Oracle was the first RDMS to support stored procedures in Java.

Who in their right mind would do that ? It's a nightmare on so many levels....

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#124

Post by thda »

modoc wrote: post #107
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).

> Oracle DB also has been the leader performance wise for complex queries and large datasets

SQL server has a column store type of storage, and major innovations like 'froid'. Oracle is not such a strong leader there. Also, on a whole lot of workloads clickhouse is much superior.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#125

Post by mjw1007 »

user5994461 wrote: post #106
zozbot234 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know what things are like in the RPM world, but for Debian each new PostgreSQL version is packaged at apt.postgresql.org as soon as it's released, by the same people, and to the same high standard, as the packages that go in the stable release.

(Also, since Postgresql 10 they changed the numbering scheme so that the major version changes for each 'breaking' release.)

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#126

Post by jacques_chester »

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…

My last job was 100% based on ApEx. Which I do not bring up on my LinkedIn profile.

I refer to ApEx as "Access, for the web, for Oracle". For what it's good at, it's pretty good.

The biggest plus in my view is that it rewards careful schema design. Point it at a properly-normalised schema and you can get 80% of a useful CRUD interface for 20% of the effort.

But all things being equal I'll be happy to never use it again. It's hard to test, hard to version control, hard to safely extend (you usually wind up with buckets of PL/SQL below the surface).

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#127

Post by pritambaral »

user5994461 wrote: post #106
zozbot234 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

1. This hasn't been true since three releases ago (i.e., PG 10).

2. Before PG10, X.Y _was_ the major version of PostgreSQL, Y was _not_ the minor version. It has never broken backwards compatibility without a major version change.

3. PostgreSQL is much, _much_ older than semver.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#128

Post by jacques_chester »

thda wrote: post #123
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.

> Also Oracle was the first RDMS to support stored procedures in Java. Who in their right mind would do that ? It's a nightmare on so many levels....

Because the alternative is PL/SQL, which is Ada minus 90% of the things that make Ada reliable and powerful.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#129

Post by takeda »

boshomi wrote: post #122
takeda wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

With EDB ships a full featured PostgreSQL with some additional useful time-savers and a lot of experience for a fair amount of money. A part of this money goes direct into PostgreSQL development. So it's a fair deal.

That's a good point, also comes with support and is still much cheaper than Oracle.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#130

Post by jacques_chester »

catblast wrote: post #57
markab21 wrote: post #14

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…

I think the major feature from proprietary RDBMSes that you rarely see in OSS RDBMSes is workload management.

The ability to set CPU, RAM, disk and network quotas on queries or users is extremely useful and powerful. That capability by itself is pretty close to non-negotiable for any large line-of-business system.

I know there is something of an OSS RDBMS renaissance happening at the moment, but I haven't heard of any of them offering this, except for Greenplum ... which used to be proprietary.

Disclosure: I work for VMware, which sponsors Greenplum, so it makes sense for my awareness to be biased.

Post reply on HN