The two biggest disadvantages of Postgres is that the options for clustering/HA/failover are no-where near as straightforward, and that there's much less toolin

The two biggest disadvantages of Postgres is that the options for clustering/HA/failover are no-where near as straightforward, and that there's much less tooling and information to acclimatise DBAs to working with it. I offer both those from working in shops which have adopted both at one time or another For advantages I would cite: 1. As with Linux vendors, you have a number of options for support. You can go with a Red Hat style model from EnterpriseDB (annual fee, helpdesks and consultancy, and so on), consultancies such as LisaSoft, through to downloads and following mailing lists. While Oracle have a wide partner network, ultimately you're stuck with what Oracle decide to provide. 2. Postgres doesn't care about your platform. This is huge, huge, huge. Any conversation around Oracle DB will turn into a sales opportunity for Exa* products, OracleVM, and OEL. The Oracle DB pricing and support are hugely worse off (more expensive, less supported) on any non-Oracle product OS or hypervisor. You will either have to drag a bunch of hardware and software that wouldn't already be price/feature competitive into your life, or spend a lot of time fighting and micromanaging your DB footprint, both of which are terrible choices. 3. IME for most things Postgresql is a lot easier to use than Oracle. Per my first comment there are some cases where it isn't, much much of the set up/deploy/upgrade is much more straightforward and amenable to automation tooling (ansible/puppet/chef/etc) than Oracle. 4. Postgresql features are there or not. Folks will make a lot of the partitioning not being quite as easy as Oracle's to set up and run, but those same people are unlikely to mention how much extra $$$ Oracle partitioning costs. Or the management packs. Or the encryption packs. Or... you get the picture. I can't really go into more detail than that, I'm afraid, since Oracle, like IBM with DB2, have fishhooks in their licenses which limit the amount of real-world information users of the product can share. Personally, if I were starting a thing from scratch, I'd be inclined to use Postgres as a baseline and DB2 or SQLServer for anything it can't handle.