81–90 of 238 posts
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.
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…
The likeliest outcome is that nothing will happen. The second most likely outcome is that they will say "don't do that again". People in this thread have a lot of speculation as to how evil Oracle is, but I haven't really seen them go out of their way to ruin people's lives. They sued Google over the range check function because they wanted a percentage of Android, not because they wanted to make Larry Page's life miserable. Legal action costs money, a lot of money, and even companies we think of as evil don't go out of their way to expose themselves to lawsuits.
More scary to me than evil corporations are people that spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt to encourage others to self-censor where they are afraid to speak out themselves. Everyone knows about Oracle's benchmark clause. Everyone knows that you personally would never even think of violating it. The author of this post sees it differently, and on a forum called "Hacker News", we should celebrate the risk he's taking, not spread fear about what could happen in the worst case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vacuuming is online, with some performance hit while it's underway.
The latest release has multi-threaded vacuuming so it goes much quicker these days.
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-vacuum.html [2] https://reorg.github.io/pg_repack/
For those still on Oracle, why? Is it regulations or executives demanding certified solutions? And if so then with so many bugs at what point does certification become a negative signal?
Query hints are one reason. I'm not a fan of Oracle as a company, but for certain usage patterns you need query hints and Postgres doesn't support them.
Even if updating analyses, creating indices, changing the query, etc. fails, you can always either use CTEs or temporary tables, or use a stored procedure that manually iterates over results to implement whatever strategy is desired.
It might be more time consuming than having query hints, although this is compensated by the fact that almost always queries just work after creating appropriate indices.
"create stand alone database: ~30m" If creating a database takes 30 minutes, there is something extremely wrong either in the procedure the person used to do so, or in the Oracle software itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You may not: > I mean... does anyone here think this is in any way reasonable? Is this even legal?
It's not about making it reasonable, it's an open threat to punish anyone who does decide to benchmark Oracle. Nobody's going to win the case, but whoever violates the term will surely wind up bankrupt defending themselves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Query hints are one reason. I'm not a fan of Oracle as a company, but for certain usage patterns you need query hints and Postgres doesn't support them.
PostgreSQL provides a variety of options for tuning both the query planner's strategy and the per-table statistical analyses that are used as input to the query planner itself. These tuning methods are actually far more robust than the query hints that are commonly used in other databases, including Oracle.
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 bein…
I know you already know this, but it takes a lot more than just a license. I'd like to call attention to the very enlightened (and noble) work others have done to build a robust political structure and community for Postgres.
The core team, committers and major contributors are spread across many companies and continents. There are different foundations across different regions for handling finances, trademarks, domains, and other basic business operations.
Amazingly, a lot of this structure was being put in place a long time ago, when Postgres was still the weird database option to choose.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Query hints are one reason. I'm not a fan of Oracle as a company, but for certain usage patterns you need query hints and Postgres doesn't support them.
I don't think it's likely that you ever really need query hints. Even if updating analyses, creating indices, changing the query, etc. fails, you can always either use CTEs or temporary tables, or use a stored procedure that manually iterates over results to implement whatever strategy is desired. It might be more time consuming than having query hints, although this is compensated by the fact that almost always quer…
The queries in question can't be allowed to get any slower than they already are. They bottleneck certain critical uses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You may not: > I mean... does anyone here think this is in any way reasonable? Is this even legal?
VMware does it too. It's in the Eula.