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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

postgresql.org

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Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#171

Post by modoc »

jeswin wrote: post #106

I've used plenty of Oracle; it's a poor choice (probably the worst) for organisations of any size. People buy Oracle in large corporations because that's what their leaders and their team know, and it helps them stay relevant in the company. Especially in places where daily work is more about engaging in office politics than dealing with technology. And the other one is bribing. From mild to criminal, involving payme…

It's often higher performance and with better HA solutions than any other options. I have a lot of dislike for the company, but it's silly to say it's a poor choice for any organization size..

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#172

Post by castorp »

aeyes wrote: post #92
paulryanrogers wrote: post #42

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…

What's the difference between a query hint and a planner hint?

> automatic planner adjustment when true cost was off

More often than not, this "automatic adjustment" makes things worse.

> active-active clustering with RAC

But it's still shared storage, which doesn't really make it a true cluster in my opinion

> out of the box backup tooling

While this is true, there are several (free) backup tools that are easy to install and use and can rival rman's features.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#174

Post by modoc »

leandrod wrote: post #169
aeyes wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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.

What DB has a better active-active HA cluster option than RAC? I love me some Postgres and MariaDB but I've never seen anything come close to RAC for making high volume queries against active-active just work.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#175

Post by nycdotnet »

castorp wrote: post #170
atombender wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

SQL Server partially supports it - indexes for example are not versioned which causes snapshot transactions to fail if someone rebuilds an index - even if it’s not in scope of the snapshot.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#176

Post by marcosdumay »

josephcsible wrote: post #142
rantwasp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you think this is ridiculous you should see how it’s licensed for cloud instances and the shenanigans played around “virtual” cores.

For anyone unaware of the details of this, here's the gist of it: if you run Oracle in a VM, you need to pay for Oracle licenses for every CPU of every host in the entire VM cluster, even if you know for sure it will never run on most of them.

Oracle has an entire VM suite, mostly incompatible with anything else and full of bugs, made with the only purpose of enforcing a core restriction so they won't bill you for the all cores on the real machines.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#177

Post by danpalmer »

Justsignedup wrote: post #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…

We have a database server at work that costs us about $10k a year. It’s bare metal so that gets a nice spec. We’re probably a little over provisioned, but not crazy so.

The sticker price of the Oracle licence for this would be about $400k a year.

It’s just a complete non-starter for most companies.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#178

Post by ric2b »

rantwasp wrote: post #16
phoe-krk wrote: 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…

people have known this things for quite a while (ie as as far as perf goes oracle is not worth it) and there is a reason why oracle includes that in the license. also, this comparison would not register as a proper “benchmark” as it’s not even close to how you would perform a proper benchmark. it’s more of a data point. on top of that there is the optics of suing a guy that wrote an email over some insane provision i…

> also, this comparison would not register as a proper “benchmark” as it’s not even close to how you would perform a proper benchmark. it’s more of a data point.

I would prefer to not have to argue about that in court...

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#179

Post by int_19h »

aidos wrote: post #113
pas wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's about right. Oracle DB is seriously that bad.

But 2hrs to install!?! What world are we living in? Actually, I seem to recall it taking an age to install last time I dealt with it (2008).

This is "enterprise".

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#180

Post by int_19h »

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…

> 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 wrong.

It is not wrong. When timezones change, the database that contains that info is updated - but it still retains information about historical rules, precisely so that earlier dates can still be converted reliably.

On the other hand, if you use local times, then you are not able to distinguish between pre- and post-clock change, when the same time repeats twice.

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