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Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

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Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#71
post #62
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't argue with that. I suppose regardless of how ridiculous it is, Oracle has very deep pockets and is infamously litigious, and the US legal system doesn't help - given that, I doubt legality really matters...

You can't sue someone for violating ToS... right? At worst, you can refuse to do business with them and revoke any current contracts. You'd have to sue under actual law, which would presumably be libel, which is (in)famously hard to prove in the US [1]. If he had a good faith belief that what he reported was true, that case goes nowhere. Indeed, in lieu of a signed and dated note declaring his knowledge that his benc…

You could sue for damages arising from breach of contract I guess. And in the US you don't always have to substantiate your damages.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#73
post #66
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about making it reasonable, it's an open threat to punish anyone who does decide to benchmark Oracle. Nobody's going to win the case, but whoever violates the term will surely wind up bankrupt defending themselves.

Publish benchmarks as an LLC, then just go ahead and declare bankruptcy.

Better yet, publish as a Russian or Chinese resident. Disclose results to a (preferably not Oracle-using) tech newspaper on the condition of anonymity.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#74

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…

License cost tend to be negligeable compared to the cost of devs, dbas,sysadmins, etc, that's true.

But at the same time, it's a can be a huge speed bump in term of procurement. Waiting several weeks for accounting to accept the procurement of a license can really damage business or development speed.

It also adds significant admin load to track the license pool correctly and can represent a legal risk when inevitably, someone starts exceeding the terms of license (db size or db clones, or increase in hardware).

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#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?" comments. Give the cto's more credit. Just because you write JavaScript and used mongodb once does not make you an expert on Oracle or running a very large business.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#76

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?

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#77

Anyone here use Patroni for automated high availability with postgres? Does it “just work” or do you need a lot of housekeeping?

We recently rolled out Patroni on k8s and it definitely does not “just work”. I suppose once you get it up and running, there’s some truth to that, but it’s one of the most hostile pieces of software I’ve come across. This isn’t a complaint, after all, Zalando don’t owe me anything. But the documentation, the project structure, the contributors...it all reveals very clearly that this is really just some internal tool…

I'm curious, did you use Patroni directly on Kubernetes or use Zalando's Postgres Operator [1] (based on Patroni)? [1] https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#78
post #22
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…

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

VMware does it too. It's in the Eula.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#79
post #20

Is vacuumin postgres still basically means that you need downtime?

Vacuuming is online, with some performance hit while it's underway.

Vacuum is online, but with a caveat iirc, it locks the table with a lock that does not block inserts/updates/reads. But if your application use exclusive locks, things can get blocked.

Re: Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

#80
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about making it reasonable, it's an open threat to punish anyone who does decide to benchmark Oracle. Nobody's going to win the case, but whoever violates the term will surely wind up bankrupt defending themselves.

That is very wrong with the US system. It should be "loser pays"

Sometimes it is, but you still have to get to that point, and it can take years.
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