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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

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Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#161
post #72

"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.

Well, if the database has the number of tables, triggers, stored procedures, etc that SAP or Oracle’s ERP has then this seems less unreasonable. We’re talking thousands

It was stated the db is empty.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#162

We could sum up the post as: "I don't like Oracle DB because: - "Takes up more space - "Is slower to start/stop/init - "Is not free - "Has bugs" Umm... Sure, Oracle's slower to start/stop. Sure, it takes up more space. So what though? And then, "it has a lot of bugs and that causes downtime." Would be great to list some examples. All software has bugs. Why is this on the front page? Does it have any value what so eve…

You took time to criticize the post for being upvoted despite not being deep enough / giving enough examples. It's likely upvoted because most of us in the industry have no love for Oracle and confirmation of that bias feels good. Turnabout is fair play: Why don't you give some examples of why a startup doing a greenfield project should use Oracle today?

Data point of 1 - we use Oracle in our greenfield platform (in 2018). My reasoning:

- our engineers already know Oracle (this is absolutely reason #1). We don't need to get into religious wars about software, just to write good code quickly.

- Oracle is cheap enough for our needs. The price of an oracle RDS instance is immaterial in the grand scheme of things. We are saas so our customers will never be installing our software.

- noone ever got fired for buying Oracle. When our customers security teams grill us, running on Oracle and Java ticks one box on their spreadsheet. Same is true if we get acquired.

- Oracle is hugely scalable. Even if/when we get super big and successful, we won't need to change our database - there's always a bigger Oracle instance.

- Oracle is insanely reliable. In my career I've never seen data loss on Oracle that was not caused by human error. I totally trust that that will be the case going forward as well.

- as a company, oracle's not going away.

I'm sure some of these apply to postgres as well - but your question wasn't "which is better", which is a much harder question to answer.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#163
post #112

These don't seem like generally useful metrics for judging or comparing a database. Is this how experienced DBAs commonly see the world?

Some of these things matter; they are not the main factor, but it something you take in consideration in the bigger picture.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#164
post #156

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…

Oracle does since version 10 at least. It’s actually available by default.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#165
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "dat…

Not at all. Because Oracle does not have multiple databases per instance does not equal a PostgreSQL database to an user in Oracle. On the contrary, it means PostgreSQL is way more flexible, because there we have and databases, and users and schemas as ISO meant it.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#166

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.

I am a platform architect in a large company that has a few hundreds TB database servers that are not on open-source software; we do use Postgres in about the same number of instances, but not for the core databases. There are several reasons for that, from tooling (SSMS has no competition) or simplicity to manufacturer support; for example, using MS SQL setting up high availability or replication is a matter of a few clicks (or a page of code) with no extra add-ons, packages etc. and these features are perfectly integrated in the database engine, supported by the same company, come in the same installer. Even for smaller databases we prefer the free edition of MS SQL, for development, testing or validation we use the free developer edition, so the cost is not that bad, while the product is much more simple, coherent and better supported and this matters when you do the math. The day Postgress will have an integrated tool as good as SSMS, high availability and replication seamlessly integrated and the ease of use for the operations team to keep it in good shape without highly skilled DBA's, I am the first in line to evaluate and deploy it. Until then, it is not good enough, even for free.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#167

I seriously doubt that the author has 20 years of Oracle DBA experience yet not know why Oracle takes up more disk space that Postgres. There are so many features in Oracle for which there is no equivalent in Postgres. -Sharding -Java Pool -Oracle Apex -DB containers and pluggable databases Many more that I am too lazy to list . All of these come pre packaged with Oracle. If you are in an Organization that has 1000s…

And vendor lock-in with them. With PostgreSQL, one gets freedom to add your own, also free components, and even to substitute another ISO-compliant DBMS.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#168
post #100

I am sure there are many areas that Oracle is still technically better than Postgre. What I am interested in, is what are those features / problems. And if Postgre has a roadmap for those improvement. I mean not just Oracle. Outside of HN the majority of dev and cooperation still swears by MySQL. I often wished HN instead of constantly hyping a technology, tell me up front what are the Cons. And hopefully everyone wi…

PostgreSQL todo. It’s beautiful.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#169
post #92

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 - planner hints - better statistics (including ways to manually create statistics) - no vacuum - automatic planner adjustment when true cost was off - better planning for prepared statements - active-active clustering with RAC - vendor support for running on SAN including snapshots - usable query analysis tools provided by the vendor (pg_stat_statements alone doesn't cut it) - datapump much faster than…

RAC and hints are antifeatures.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rollback of DDLs Oracle can't roll back these (create table/drop index etc)? That really surprises me. Pretty certain MSSQL can, because I've used it. Amazed, actually, that oracle can't.

Very few databases support transactional DDL, meaning that you can do something like: BEGIN; DROP TABLE foo; CREATE TABLE bar (t int); ROLLBACK; ...and it will just work as you expect. Oracle doesn't, nor does MSSQL. As far as I know, other than Postgres, only Sybase ASE, Informix, DB2 UDB, and Firebird support transaction DDL.

> Very few databases support transactional DDL

Postgres, SQL Server, Firebird, DB2, SQLite, Ingres, Informix, Teradata, Vertica all support transactional DDL

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