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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

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Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#131

Post by pjmlp »

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....

All big boys RDMS support stored procedures in Java, and some of them in .NET as well on their Windows deployments.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#132

Post by trollied »

fl0wenol wrote: post #91
trollied wrote: post #37

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/

That's not a blog post, that's just marketing material.

Damn, posted the wrong link by accident. Wondered why I was getting downvoted. The link I meant to post was https://blog.dbi-services.com/tibero-i/

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#133

Post by pjmlp »

jacques_chester wrote: post #128
thda wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The only stored procedure language that I consider competitive to PL/SQL is Transact-SQL.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#134

Post by aserafini »

davio wrote: post #74

I've been at 3 separate companies where each respective CIO had "get rid of Oracle" as a strategic initiative.

Amazon even made a promotional video when they shut down their last Oracle database https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4

Perhaps it was retaliation for Larry’s comments about Amazon in this interview https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#135

Post by pjmlp »

thda wrote: post #115
pjmlp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So some third party solution, and not first class support from the RDMS vendor. That is not the same as using Oracle.

Plugin_debugger is availlable on postgresql.org's repo. And supported by our postgresql support provider. You can of course use pgadmin, the official tool, with this plugin. You should reassess your critics before posting, I think. The evolution of postgresql is faster and faster.

I have spent 2014 to 2018 doing PostgresSQL deployments alongside Oracle, I know how good those offerings are versus Oracle.

Pushing for those plugins as alternative just shows how little one knows about the feature level of Oracle capabilities.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#136

Post by makoz »

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.

Which minor versions have you seen with breaking changes? Or are you talking about the way Postgres version things

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#137

Post by cryptonector »

arethuza wrote: post #21
drchopchop wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent a fair amount of time at the Sofitel in Redwood Shores, and I'd often chat with Oracle "sales engineers" at the bar. A simple "so, what do you work on" question would inevitably generate an hour's worth of them explaining some convoluted acronym-heavy product with a pushy sales model, and I'd eventually be like "ok... so it's a database?".

To be fair to Oracle (not something I say very often) - I suspect most of their sales are business applications (ERP, CRM, financial) that happen to use their database engine as a back end.

At Oracle everything uses Oracle DBs. Their bug DB is a thin layer on top of an Oracle DB. Their email server too. Everything that can be a thin layer on top of Oracle... is.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#138

Post by cryptonector »

da_chicken wrote: post #68
revel wrote: post #55

Oracle used to be by far and away the best database out there. Now I wouldn’t use it even if you paid me. It’s shocking how little Oracle invested in developing their products and services over the years. They are a distant second, if not merely an “also ran”, for everything that they do. The company largely exists as an experiment in just how far you can go with a vendor lock-in strategy. Sadly that experiment is pr…

They're a victim of their own success. They became a monopoly and the quality of their product stopped mattering. They're an example of Steve Job's comments on Xerox's failure[0]. It happened at Oracle, IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. It's happening now at Apple, Intel and Google. [0]: https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM

I've a feeling that Oracle succeeded by accident. They won the race to win mindshare without understanding that that's what they were doing, and have since rested on their laurels and high pressure salesmanship. You see their lack of attention to mindshare in... everything they do.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#139

Post by cryptonector »

krakatau1 wrote: post #92
bjpirt wrote: post #22

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.

To be fair I think only Postgres has that feature.

Also SQLite3.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance

#140

Post by ants_a »

sjwright wrote: post #64
Pxtl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've generally found SqlServer's query optimizer to be a hellish nightmare of broken dreams, so if Postgres' is even worse I'm giving up and going back to flat files.

I found SQL Server's query optimiser to be magical, but it relies on its table statistics being somewhat correct. Every now and again they liked to suddenly become wrong enough that queries go from magical to catastrophic mush. (Most recent version I've used was SQL Server 2008.)

All cost based optimisers rely on statistics being correct. And inevitably there will be a case where they aren't. The problem with PostgreSQLs optimiser, and I assume with others too, is that it's too risk happy. It's optimizing for the average case based on the statistics, when people actually tend to care about the worst case.

As an example, say you have a database of all cars ever produced with indexes on model and production date. If you are looking for the latest Ford F-150 then the best plan is to just start looking backwards by date and you will find one soon enough. Much faster than looking up all F-150s and picking the latest one. On the other hand, if you are looking for latest Ford Model-T, that plan is going to be catastrophically terrible, going through 93 years of car production before finding the correct one.

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