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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

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Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#2
It has been known for DECADES that Oracle is outrageously expensive compared to the competition. But the unwillingness of larger companies to go with open-source databases which have no multi-billion dollar company behind them has kept Oracle in the saddle all these years.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#3
Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l...:

The standard license (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-...) you agree to when you download software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) does state that you're not allowed to disclose benchmarks.

    You may not: 
    >
    - disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent.
I sadly suspect that Paul Förster might need a lawyer if anyone from Oracle finds out about that post. Which, given that this is trending on Hacker News, they easily might.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#4
I'm a big fan of Postgres, and it's got plenty going for it. That's not to say Oracle isn't a good database in its own right. The knocks against Oracle tend to be lock-in, complexity, price, but rather than go in a checklist comparison I'd rather say what's unique about Postgres:

- Based on its license it's very hard for any one company or individual to "own" Postgres, this makes risk of a company as a bad actor being minimized pretty appealing

- Its geospatial capabilities put it as the most advanced geospatial database, only ESRI software really stands to beat it here

- The improvements for app devs from things like JSON, to a variety of index types put it in unique territory among relational databases

- The extension framework is truly unique and stands to be where a lot of future innovation happens.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#5
post #3

Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l... : The standard license ( http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-... ) you agree to when you download software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) does state that you're not allowed to disclose benchmarks. You may not: > - disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent. I sadly suspect that…

[deleted]

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#7
As a developer:

- No license fees is huge. My company saves tens of thousands on license fees when we can't really afford it.

- The ability to set up environments super quickly is amazing.

- Rollback of DDLs is huge for testing migrations

- The backup features aren't broken by default. I've spent hours researching how to back up an oracle db and transfer it to another. And at that point versions matter. With postures I think I spent 30 minutes total figuring it out over the years.

Overall I am a huge fan of Postgres having used it for about half of my career and oracle for the other half. I genuinely hope I never use oracle again.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#8

Anyone here use Patroni for automated high availability with postgres? Does it “just work” or do you need a lot of housekeeping?

Oh! This looks like a very interesting project. When I finished reading the headline description I was immediately turned off by the mention of Zookeeper. But it then goes on to say "OR etcd OR consul". If this project does what it claims, that's pretty awesome. I'm definitely going to be looking at this a lot more.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#9

Anyone here use Patroni for automated high availability with postgres? Does it “just work” or do you need a lot of housekeeping?

We recently rolled out Patroni on k8s and it definitely does not “just work”. I suppose once you get it up and running, there’s some truth to that, but it’s one of the most hostile pieces of software I’ve come across. This isn’t a complaint, after all, Zalando don’t owe me anything. But the documentation, the project structure, the contributors...it all reveals very clearly that this is really just some internal tooling that they happen to make public, as opposed to a first-class OSS project. Unfortunately it’s also the best Postgres HA system out there, but it’s truly a massive PITA to get setup and it’s extremely opinionated about things that it doesn’t need to be.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#10
post #3

Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l... : The standard license ( http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-... ) you agree to when you download software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) does state that you're not allowed to disclose benchmarks. You may not: > - disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent. I sadly suspect that…

What are the damage claims for something like this, if any? Surely neither side would want to litigate this.
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