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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

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Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#231
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…

Maybe one justified reason is that proper benchmarking can be hard. Especially running fair benchmarks between competing complex products. At some point some big database vendors were showing full-page ads in prominent industry publications comparing database X to Y. This kind of clause in license may make publishing misleading performance figures a bit harder.

I do agree that benchmarking is hard, especially for databases that have so many knobs and buttons to tweak things to suit particular workloads.

I think DB makers should take it as an opportunity to make inroads into developer communities, explaining how to configure and optimise, maybe even work together to create a standard test harness. Rather threatening to bankrupt anyone that talks about their database...

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#232
post #219

Meh. We use Oracle's (newish) autonomous database offering, and haven't really experienced any bugs at all. No worries about backups, very little DBA time, and the on-demand licensing makes it quite economical. We just get on with it, and couldn't be happier. Of course, YRMV.

Have fun when Larry decides he want another yacht and his license goons come by to exploit the lock in you gave created for yourself.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#233
post #232
post #219

Meh. We use Oracle's (newish) autonomous database offering, and haven't really experienced any bugs at all. No worries about backups, very little DBA time, and the on-demand licensing makes it quite economical. We just get on with it, and couldn't be happier. Of course, YRMV.

Have fun when Larry decides he want another yacht and his license goons come by to exploit the lock in you gave created for yourself.

[deleted]

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#234
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the reply. #1 is absolutely understandable. The others I'd be happy to argue but there's no point in that :-)

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#235
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…

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 in…

A query hint is a clause you put into the query to make the planner execute the query in a certain way. Planner hint might not be the right term, Oracle has tools to show you different execution plans and to force a plan without touching the query on the application side.

I'm not sure why shared storage would be a problem, the world runs on SANs and making them redundant is pretty much a solved problem. For running a RAC cluster you are required to have at least two network paths for each cluster node. Furthermore cluster communication is separated from storage communication.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#236
post #222
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 [...]…

Due to the way that the LLVM dependency in postgres works, it could be packaged separately from the base postgres server package. The LLVM interfacing code is runtime loaded, and there's no error if "llvmjit.so" is not on the system, even when the server was built with LLVM support. It's basically a packager's choice whether to do so, or not.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#237
post #232
post #219

Meh. We use Oracle's (newish) autonomous database offering, and haven't really experienced any bugs at all. No worries about backups, very little DBA time, and the on-demand licensing makes it quite economical. We just get on with it, and couldn't be happier. Of course, YRMV.

Have fun when Larry decides he want another yacht and his license goons come by to exploit the lock in you gave created for yourself.

Yes, I was expecting this comment. A tired cliche I've been hearing for years...

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#238
post #237
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have fun when Larry decides he want another yacht and his license goons come by to exploit the lock in you gave created for yourself.

Yes, I was expecting this comment. A tired cliche I've been hearing for years...

It is based on practical experience from multiple companies who ended up in precisely this situation.
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