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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

postgresql.org

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Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#221

Post by raverbashing »

yxhuvud wrote: post #76
raverbashing wrote: post #31

The real surprising part of this benchmark to me is how quick it was to compile PgSQL from source. Is it pure C? Of course, building a DB is not something you worry too much everyday (unless you're developing it), but it seems an interesting fact.

Depends a lot on what machine you are using and how parallelized the compile script is. Modern CPUs (threadripper 39x0Xs) can compile the Linux kernel in under 30s. With that in mind, does is it really surprising that Postgres can take 3.30m?

The Linux Kernel is probably more paralelizable than PostgreSQL (due to the device drivers)

It would be interesting to know how long does that system that takes 30s for the LK compiles PostgreSQL

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#222

Post by mb4nck »

znpy wrote: post #147
ken wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original comment was about how few packages and how little space Postgres takes. PostGIS is good but it pulls in a lot of extra packages. I hate Oracle as much as anyone but this is no longer a fair comparison. If you’re bragging about how good PostGIS is, you’re no longer anywhere near a 66MB install. More like (IIRC) 5 to 10 times that.

660 mb disk space? I can afford that. And I think that most people can.

For the record, on Debian unstable:

  root@pg1:~# LANG=C apt install postgresql-12 
  Reading package lists... Done
  [...]
  0 upgraded, 32 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  Need to get 59.7 MB of archives.
  After this operation, 240 MB of additional disk space will be used.
  Do you want to continue? [Y/n] ^C
  root@pg1:~# LANG=C apt install postgresql-12 postgresql-12-postgis-3
  Reading package lists... Done
  [...]
  0 upgraded, 105 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  Need to get 104 MB of archives.
  After this operation, 418 MB of additional disk space will be used.
  Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
I think the addition of LLVM for JIT execution of plans added a lot to the Postgres install baseline (at least in distribution packages, you can compile a much leaner postgres yourself).

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#223

Post by OrangeUnicorn12 »

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…

Some points for you, if I may:

- Why are you worried about license fees as a developer? :-) Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap, I would use it everywhere. And if you need those "partitioning", "parallel execution" etc - your business is Enterprise, and you can afford such price tags. (I know, there will be a sh1tst0rm now, but please think about what IO said from business POV)

- Oracle Public Cloud gives you database extremely fast - and you will never have issues with license audit

- The name of "Rollback of DDLs" is "no developer access to production" and "UAT" :-)

- hmmm... $> rman rman> connect target rman> backup database plus archivelog delete input; rman> exit

What can be easier?

Are you a huge fan of Vacuuming, XID Freezing, WAL optimisations etc. etc.?

The MVCC in Postgress, in my view (!) is joke from academia, where they had not a single DBA :-)

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#224

Post by OrangeUnicorn12 »

OrangeUnicorn12 wrote: post #223
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…

Some points for you, if I may: - Why are you worried about license fees as a developer? :-) Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap, I would use it everywhere. And if you need those "partitioning", "parallel execution" etc - your business is Enterprise, and you can afford such price tags. (I know, there will be a sh1tst0rm now, but please think about what IO said from business POV) - Oracle Public C…

Yeah, bring on the downvotes :-), it started already ...

Ok - considering the audience, obviously the best database is JS based KV Store with AI optimisation, controlled by K8s!

You know, "schema on write", "schema as a code", APIs etc.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#225

Post by davidhalter »

OrangeUnicorn12 wrote: post #223
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…

Some points for you, if I may: - Why are you worried about license fees as a developer? :-) Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap, I would use it everywhere. And if you need those "partitioning", "parallel execution" etc - your business is Enterprise, and you can afford such price tags. (I know, there will be a sh1tst0rm now, but please think about what IO said from business POV) - Oracle Public C…

Why is MVCC in Postgres a joke in academia?

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#226

Post by devit »

jdm2212 wrote: post #89
devit wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It might be more time consuming than having query hints The queries in question can't be allowed to get any slower than they already are. They bottleneck certain critical uses.

I meant time consuming in developer time, sorry.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#227

Post by macmac »

dralley wrote: post #150

> What I especially hate about Oracle (despite the license costs, of course) is that it has so many bugs, bugs and even more bugs and one keeps on searching for patches all day, generating lot of downtime. Applying a PSU or RU is mostly not enough. Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

After reading that no serious person could ever dream of having any serious enterprise be based on Oracle DB.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#228

Post by z3t4 »

raphaelj wrote: post #181
z3t4 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should store dates with timezone or you can't make calculations like how old is this post. You could base it off system time, but then the calculation have to take into account summer/winter time.

Some times it does not make sense to associate a time component to a date, just because it happens on a day, not at a certain time. For example, in a lot of countries, Labor Day is on May 1, Christmas on Dec 25. These do not happen at a certain time, and there is no timezone to be associated with these events. If I'm requesting some user's birthday, I'm going to store it as a date. I don't have a time component. I do…

For those born around new year the hour is important as it will decide what year they are born. It will also be important for birthdays, You don't want to send happy birthday on the wrong day - which can be different depending on what timezone they are in.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#229

Post by GordonS »

OrangeUnicorn12 wrote: post #224
OrangeUnicorn12 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some points for you, if I may: - Why are you worried about license fees as a developer? :-) Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap, I would use it everywhere. And if you need those "partitioning", "parallel execution" etc - your business is Enterprise, and you can afford such price tags. (I know, there will be a sh1tst0rm now, but please think about what IO said from business POV) - Oracle Public C…

Yeah, bring on the downvotes :-), it started already ... Ok - considering the audience, obviously the best database is JS based KV Store with AI optimisation, controlled by K8s! You know, "schema on write", "schema as a code", APIs etc.

I guess the negative reactions are because you're making statements without anything to back them up.

> Why are you worried about license fees as a developer?

Lots of developers are involved to some extent in financial decisions. And in any case, I'd be worried about losing my job because Oracle had bankrupted my employer..

> Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap

Postgres is free, and open source too.

> Oracle Public Cloud gives you database extremely fast

It's extremely unlikely that devs will want to host a database in Oracle's cloud, and everything else in AWS/Azure/GCP.

> and you will never have issues with license audit

The very fact you felt the need to throw that in is exactly why people hate Oracle so much - they are absolutely infamous for screwing customers out of every cent.

> The name of "Rollback of DDLs" is "no developer access to production" and "UAT"

As others have said, it's useful for testing changes in pre-prod environments - so you can make sure stuff works before it gets to prod.

> Are you a huge fan of Vacuuming, XID Freezing, WAL optimisations etc. etc.?

This makes no sense; vacuum is automatic, and why would you not want knobs to tweak settings to your workload? Oracle has plenty, so I don't get your beef here.

> The MVCC in Postgress, in my view (!) is joke from academia, where they had not a single DBA

I've never heard a single sole claim such a thing - do you have any sources?

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#230

Post by GordonS »

dwheeler wrote: post #212
GordonS wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may not: > I mean... does anyone here think this is in any way reasonable? Is this even legal?

I think this clause is not reasonable and should not be legal. However, these clauses (they're called "DeWitt clauses") have been around for almost 40 years and they have not gone away. For more, see my essay, "The DeWitt clause’s censorship should be illegal" https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html (I mentioned it in another thread, but you might not have seen it).

A good read that explains the background, thanks!
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