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You are confusing consumers facing products( Altavista, MySpace ) with corporate facing customers. The corporations have invested 10s of million or more develop

You are confusing consumers facing products( Altavista, MySpace ) with corporate facing customers. The corporations have invested 10s of million or more developing products based on Oracle products. Changing from Oracle to PostgresSQL is possibly many years of work and multiple projects for a large company.

pgaddict 10y ago
I agree the companies are unlikely to rework the current code from Oracle to PostgreSQL (or some other database), but they'll definitely think twice when starting new stuff.
- philipov 10y ago
  When managers start a new project, they don't want to think twice. They want to grab the ass of someone else in the company who's already done the same thing and leverage their expertise to reduce the cost of the project. My company is still stuck using CVS because when a new project starts up, they want to use the people who are already locked into the old tech and so they end up going with what people already know. Even teams that started with git have downgraded to CVS once the managers starting looking for ways reuse resources.
  - pgaddict 10y ago
    It's always a cost/benefit evaluation. When the costs stay roughly constant, the outcome is usually to use the same stuff as for previous projects. But when the vendor significantly increases the costs, like Oracle does in the recent past, that may have significant impact. It may be easier/cheaper to switch to a different database, for example. I'm not saying all companies will end up doing that, but some certainly will (and already do). They may not be vocal about it, though, because they don't want to piss Oracle.
cm2187 10y ago
And potentially a lot of fuck ups along the way. Don't forget that the average CRUD developper in a corporation is usually not a PhD from MIT.
- horus_the_cat 10y ago
  Speaking as an enterprise CRUD developer wage-slave, if you need a PhD from MIT to figure out how to migrate from Oracle to a sane database like Postgres or SQL Server, you probably should work in a different field or at least a different project. More realistically, it's department politics that are going to prevent any sort of migration.
scriptproof 10y ago
Or less with some tools: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversion https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversi...
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Changing from Oracle to PostgresSQL is possibly many years of work and multiple projects for a large company Enterprise IT is broken enough that those multiple system replacement projects were going to happen anyway because of accumulated technical debt and broken development and maintenance processes, and replacing a backend DB as part of that replacement is a rounding error in expense. Sure, it takes a lot of time for the transition to be complete, but lots of those transitions off Oracle are already underway.

pgaddict 10y ago

I agree the companies are unlikely to rework the current code from Oracle to PostgreSQL (or some other database), but they'll definitely think twice when starting new stuff.

philipov 10y ago
When managers start a new project, they don't want to think twice. They want to grab the ass of someone else in the company who's already done the same thing and leverage their expertise to reduce the cost of the project. My company is still stuck using CVS because when a new project starts up, they want to use the people who are already locked into the old tech and so they end up going with what people already know. Even teams that started with git have downgraded to CVS once the managers starting looking for ways reuse resources.
- pgaddict 10y ago
  It's always a cost/benefit evaluation. When the costs stay roughly constant, the outcome is usually to use the same stuff as for previous projects. But when the vendor significantly increases the costs, like Oracle does in the recent past, that may have significant impact. It may be easier/cheaper to switch to a different database, for example. I'm not saying all companies will end up doing that, but some certainly will (and already do). They may not be vocal about it, though, because they don't want to piss Oracle.

cm2187 10y ago

And potentially a lot of fuck ups along the way. Don't forget that the average CRUD developper in a corporation is usually not a PhD from MIT.

horus_the_cat 10y ago
Speaking as an enterprise CRUD developer wage-slave, if you need a PhD from MIT to figure out how to migrate from Oracle to a sane database like Postgres or SQL Server, you probably should work in a different field or at least a different project. More realistically, it's department politics that are going to prevent any sort of migration.

scriptproof 10y ago

Or less with some tools: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversion https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversi...

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Changing from Oracle to PostgresSQL is possibly many years of work and multiple projects for a large company Enterprise IT is broken enough that those multiple system replacement projects were going to happen anyway because of accumulated technical debt and broken development and maintenance processes, and replacing a backend DB as part of that replacement is a rounding error in expense. Sure, it takes a lot of time for the transition to be complete, but lots of those transitions off Oracle are already underway.