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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

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Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#151

Post by miahi »

swarnie_ wrote: post #32
qeternity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that mission critical, legacy systems from a time before there was big OSS acceptance at the CTO level is the main reason. I’m not sure how many greenfield projects are using Oracle, but I’d expect that is rapidly decreasing over time. However, if you’ve had an Oracle db running for 20 years, and the cost of screwing up a migration starts at 9 figures, and runs into the 10 figures, then Oracle have you by the…

Oracle consultant here -> The Oracle world is shrinking admittedly and its shrinking from the smaller end up. I almost never get called by a company with less then 500 users or $100k a year of licence obligations. Oracle is a tried and tested safe bet when implementing corp wide, multi year projects. The HN crowd won't like it (and for good reason) but CTOs will always bet on name recognition when millions or billion…

As a fellow Oracle consultant, I see the same. Most of the small clients only involve me in migration projects to other DBs now (postgres or mysql), but the ones with >$1M licenses continue to pay their support and migrate to 19c.

But that's also because it's way harder to migrate a huge project/organization to a completely different DB - it's just cheaper and less risky to continue with the current one.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#152

Post by miahi »

acdha wrote: post #138
dataminded wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you don't have experience with Oracle or you would have written millions of dollars in license fees... /s

Funny story: I worked at a place which spent millions annually with Oracle. They had a couple hours downtime every day because they couldn’t afford the online backup product. This was an Ivy League university with an endowment in the tens of billions.

This is not true. There is no separate licensing for archivelog mode (the single thing that is needed for online backups).

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#153

Post by speedgoose »

makapuf wrote: post #104
speedgoose wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do like what Videolan is doing for VLC: the president reply to the lawyers that they have no power there.

Can you elaborate? Do you have a source?

I searched a bit but I didn't find the message I remembered where the Videolan president said that he was replying to the lawyers.

However, here is a similar comment (in French) from him in which he wrote that he isn't scared of replying to the patents lawyers himself. https://old.reddit.com/r/france/comments/736ghk/ama_je_suis_...

And here is the legal page of Videolan that some American lawyers may not appreciate. https://www.videolan.org/legal.html

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#154

Post by acdha »

miahi wrote: post #152
acdha wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny story: I worked at a place which spent millions annually with Oracle. They had a couple hours downtime every day because they couldn’t afford the online backup product. This was an Ivy League university with an endowment in the tens of billions.

This is not true. There is no separate licensing for archivelog mode (the single thing that is needed for online backups).

That may be the case now but it was either different back then or neither their Oracle-trained DBAs nor their Oracle consultants was aware of it.

I was working with an even worse Oracle product (Hyperion) which had a convoluted homegrown script restarting all of the services on a number of servers to work around their inability to reliably handle database connection failures lasting more than a short interval. Before do that, they’d tried to get rid of the backup window but were told that wasn’t possible unless they could come up with a large amount of money for the license.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#155

Post by [deleted] »

growse wrote: post #137
brianwawok wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything in the DB should be UTC. Anything else is crazy.

This isn't true. For example: If a user schedules an event to happen at 15:35 on July 29th 2021 IST, you cannot know with certainty what the equivalent UTC value is. You know what it would be assuming the relationship between IST and UTC stays the same between now and next year. If India suddenly decides to implement some sort of DST, or make any other changes to the definition to IST, the UTC value you stored is now…

[deleted]

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#156

Post by Smeevy »

th3iedkid wrote: post #143

Is DB2 dead ?

My company uses it all the time. It's an absolutely rock-solid database and I've never had any issues with it. They just released their new containerized version a few months back and have recently simplified their licensing rather significantly.

One of my favorite features is the "time travel" query. If you enable this feature on one or more tables you can essentially say "give the results of this query as it would have been at time x". I don't know if anyone else provides that, but it's pretty great stuff.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#157

Post by philjohn »

dilandau wrote: post #75

I'm not as familiar with Oracle, but surely it is providing significant benefits or large organizations would be dumping it and running to more reliable alternatives. These time estimates are also not very pertinent to the actual running of a large database. Nor do they speak to the various technical problems one has when running a big db that is mission critical. Lots of the classic hn "how can they be so stupid?" c…

It's still used in a lot of places because either some bought in ERP system requires it, or because internal software was developed on it WAY back when, when either Postgres didn't exist, or didn't have as many features and no companies providing paid support.

They now have a problem - and it would probably cost more than the yearly cost of Oracle to migrate.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#158

Post by miahi »

hartzell wrote: post #97
vbezhenar wrote: post #15

That's not a very useful comparison. Databases are made to execute queries, not to install them. The only useful metric is performance and features (and price, of course). Sure, Oracle is bloated and pain to manage, but if it works faster, provides unique features and costs less in the end, people will use it.

> Databases are made to execute queries, not to install them. But being able to freely/quicly stand up database servers and quickly create/drop databases makes development and testing much simpler and more reliable. Given the question: "How do you know that deploying this thing will work?" - When it's quick/legal to stand up fresh servers and create databases, the answer can be "I tested it, just now, and it works."…

Actually, the whole "create database" is misleading when comparing the two.

For Oracle, a "database" is the a server instance; you create the database when you install the software (without creating a "database" you don't actually have anything running). For postgres, a database is just a level of data organization/segregation.

In an oracle instance you only have a single database. The equivalent of the postgres "database" would be "user/schema" in Oracle.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#159

Post by Delk »

jrockway wrote: post #134
bmn__ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be inconvenient, but not an existential crisis. Don't generalise from your life; you only have to take care of yourself and Ayaya. A majority of people are deeply committed to a relationship/family/tribe, where losing all one's money definitely constitutes a crisis.

Hey now, leave my Ayaya out of this. Here is my point -- the potential losses are bounded. They can't unteach you what you've learned in 30 years of work, so you can probably earn income even after losing the biggest lawsuit EvilCorp can muster. Or go work at Starbucks if you are somehow banned from using computers, which is not really something that can happen for violating a software EULA. Compare this to driving t…

> Here is my point -- the potential losses are bounded.

Are potential liabilities conjured up by corporate lawyers and awarded by courts limited by the amount of property or income you have right now, though?

Because if they aren't, you could end up owing and paying from your future income as well. Also, we have bounded time, and having your goals significantly postponed by financial setbacks isn't necessarily just a temporary inconvenience.

I'm not saying it's necessarily likely that one would end up paying anything, or a huge amount, or that people on HN (or elsewhere) wouldn't overestimate that probability or the potential damage, so of course this may be just a technicality.

(Also, the comparison to driving may not be very good, depending on where you live. While accidents obviously do happen, and the results can be devastating or fatal, in many developed countries the probability of an individual ending up in a major accident isn't really that great if one does not engage in specifically risky behaviour.)

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#160

Post by Delk »

raziel2p wrote: post #135
nojito wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because benchmarks are largely worthless and just serve as internet forum arguments or mailing list fodder.

Normally I would agree... But 27 seconds to 30 minutes to create an empty database?!

In most scenarios involving databases you would probably be much more interested in run-time performance and scalability than in setup time.

It's an interesting point of information, but a more relevant benchmark to support choice of technology would need to involve data access and manipulation using some kind of a workload that resembles an actual application.

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