6 ms·

I think SAP keeps Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise on life support due to it still being used for financial applications.

kchoudhu 9y ago
Both investment banks I worked at were massive Sybase ASE shops. Oracle costs too much for what you get.
- ghshephard 9y ago
  In terms of cost - I've always thought that one reason Oracle can charge the many millions of dollars per Server for a Database License is that, over the total cost of a project (with sometimes many hundreds of engineers), and the value of the project (Driving 100s of millions or more per year) - that the Database License cost would end up being round off error. The corollary to this, of course, is that anybody who isn't involved in projects of that scale, is going to be far better served with Postgres/MySql. It will be interesting to see what the uptake on products that try and fit in the middle - like Amazon Aurora - High scale and affordable.
  - kchoudhu 9y ago
    I've been part of exciting conversations with desk heads attempting to justify database licensing fees in flat/falling trading environments where traders and people are being let go. Given those experiences, I personally stopped optimizing for today's flush tech budget. I now budget for what I know is a realistically shitty future state of affairs where we have to keep the lights on [1] while spending as little as possible. [1] The one worse thing you can tell a trader during a 2008-level crisis than "I need more money for databases" is "you can't trade, we don't have enough capacity to handle the additional market vol".
  - gaius 9y ago
    They can charge it because if you really need Oracle, there really is no substitute. 12c is genuinely state-of-the-art, Exadata does things that only mainframes can otherwise do and a bunch of stuff that they can't. There are far fewer people however that do really need it, than believe that they do... The vast majority of Oracle shops could probably switch to Postgres for less than their annual licenses, then start saving the money from the second year on... My rule of thumb is that Postgres gets you 50% of Oracle for 0% of the price. Most of what most people need is somewhere in that 50%. SQL Server gets you 90% for 25% of the cost. I think Oracle will lose a lot of seats to SQL Server once it's stable on Linux.
    - jorams 9y ago
      > My rule of thumb is that Postgres gets you 50% of Oracle for 0% of the price. Most of what most people need is somewhere in that 50%. SQL Server gets you 90% for 25% of the cost. Can you elaborate on what kinds of things fill the 40% difference between PG and MSSQL? Having used both PostgreSQL and SQL Server, my experience has been pretty much the other way around. When I need to do something with data in a table, PG probably has a feature allowing me to do it easily, and MSSQL probably doesn't. The simplest questions asked on Stack Overflow are answered with functions spanning tens of lines, often with various caveats. The one area where MSSQL is clearly better than PG is GUI tooling, but even there I'm not particularly impressed. More than once have I read that someone absolutely loved SQL Server Management Studio, but the one conclusion I can come to after using it is "it works". For example, "Select Top 1000 Rows" is a fine view with autocompletion and everything, but then "Edit Top 200 Rows" has an SQL panel hidden behind a context menu, without autocompletion, and when you execute your modified query it rewrites it and removes all comments.
      - gaius 9y ago
        Can you elaborate on what kinds of things fill the 40% difference between PG and MSSQL? SQL Server is well ahead of PG in query parallelisation and complex replication topologies, even as of PG 10.1. SQL Server is also ahead in change data capture, but PG 10 narrowed that gap. Managing a large user base is easier on SQL Server. If you have those use cases it is well worth the money. If I need to do something clever with the contents of the table, SQL Server's embedded R is very good. Having used both PostgreSQL and SQL Server, Well indeed, most people only use a subset of their DB's full feature set, but it will be a different subset for each person :-) I don't really use GUI tools so I can't comment on that but I've heard that pgAdmin 4 is awful.
        jorams 9y ago
        Thank you, that's the kind of answer I was looking for. Those are indeed not things I've worked with. > I've heard that pgAdmin 4 is awful. I've heard the same. I wasn't a fan of pgAdmin 3 either, so I've stuck with the psql command line.
  - kakwa_ 9y ago
    Licenses costs are generally quite low compared to the overall price of a project, that's true. But licenses can also be a bit of a nightmare to manage. I've seen many cases where licenses were violated due to needs for testing/development environments. It can be difficult go through the purchase process in big companies, specially if the software in question is not wildly used. Handling licenses can also be hard technically, when your licenses are tied to hardware (a MAC address for example) or configuration (hostname or IP). When migrating some legacy hosts to VMs, I had numerous headaches when dealing with flexlm servers. It can also be really annoying when you don't have perpetual licences and the editor goes down or is not able to generate a new licence for the (obsolete) version you are using. Basically, you must add specific processes and even additional infrastructure (inventory, CMDBs) just to manage it. It can also slow down development. I understand that in many fields, no viable OSS alternatives exist, or even could exist, specially for specialised software. But if I can avoid proprietary, I generally do. I'm not against paying for software, but other for of payments, like a support contract, are generally far less annoying.
  - justonepost 9y ago
    DR, journaling, auditing & security, data integrity - at scale. These are all Oracle mainstays.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  Sybase is pervasive in investment banks. Not sure why. Other popular big databases are Ingres and Informix. At a big airline I worked at, we had three different major databases on our Unix systems: Informix, Ingres and Oracle. The mainframes had a few more. Here's a HN poll on what dbs people use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684620
  - gaius 9y ago
    Sybase is pervasive in investment banks. Not sure why. Sybase were always very willing to customise their product for financial services customers. Someone I knew there told be about the changes they’d made to their DATE datatype to make it easy for one bank to handle bonds from the Napoleonic era for example.
    - gadders 9y ago
      It also used to be quite a bit faster 20 odd years ago.
  - mianos 9y ago
    Sybase was good, ran on Unix and did not cost the earth and had more transparent pricing, as opposed to Oracle. Back in the late 90s some trading systems used Informix but the big exchanges I worked on always chose Sybase over our internal use of Informix. Sybase was pretty good aside from a few gotchas. Does anyone remember the the exploding execution time issues when joining more than three tables?
    - kchoudhu 9y ago
      Was this before 11? I regularly did 10+ table joins on Sybase, and the execution was stellar as long as you had the right indices set up.
      - mianos 9y ago
        Version 10. It has long long been fixed. I was always a fan.

kchoudhu 9y ago

Both investment banks I worked at were massive Sybase ASE shops. Oracle costs too much for what you get.

ghshephard 9y ago
In terms of cost - I've always thought that one reason Oracle can charge the many millions of dollars per Server for a Database License is that, over the total cost of a project (with sometimes many hundreds of engineers), and the value of the project (Driving 100s of millions or more per year) - that the Database License cost would end up being round off error. The corollary to this, of course, is that anybody who isn't involved in projects of that scale, is going to be far better served with Postgres/MySql. It will be interesting to see what the uptake on products that try and fit in the middle - like Amazon Aurora - High scale and affordable.
- kchoudhu 9y ago
  I've been part of exciting conversations with desk heads attempting to justify database licensing fees in flat/falling trading environments where traders and people are being let go. Given those experiences, I personally stopped optimizing for today's flush tech budget. I now budget for what I know is a realistically shitty future state of affairs where we have to keep the lights on [1] while spending as little as possible. [1] The one worse thing you can tell a trader during a 2008-level crisis than "I need more money for databases" is "you can't trade, we don't have enough capacity to handle the additional market vol".
- gaius 9y ago
  They can charge it because if you really need Oracle, there really is no substitute. 12c is genuinely state-of-the-art, Exadata does things that only mainframes can otherwise do and a bunch of stuff that they can't. There are far fewer people however that do really need it, than believe that they do... The vast majority of Oracle shops could probably switch to Postgres for less than their annual licenses, then start saving the money from the second year on... My rule of thumb is that Postgres gets you 50% of Oracle for 0% of the price. Most of what most people need is somewhere in that 50%. SQL Server gets you 90% for 25% of the cost. I think Oracle will lose a lot of seats to SQL Server once it's stable on Linux.
  - jorams 9y ago
    > My rule of thumb is that Postgres gets you 50% of Oracle for 0% of the price. Most of what most people need is somewhere in that 50%. SQL Server gets you 90% for 25% of the cost. Can you elaborate on what kinds of things fill the 40% difference between PG and MSSQL? Having used both PostgreSQL and SQL Server, my experience has been pretty much the other way around. When I need to do something with data in a table, PG probably has a feature allowing me to do it easily, and MSSQL probably doesn't. The simplest questions asked on Stack Overflow are answered with functions spanning tens of lines, often with various caveats. The one area where MSSQL is clearly better than PG is GUI tooling, but even there I'm not particularly impressed. More than once have I read that someone absolutely loved SQL Server Management Studio, but the one conclusion I can come to after using it is "it works". For example, "Select Top 1000 Rows" is a fine view with autocompletion and everything, but then "Edit Top 200 Rows" has an SQL panel hidden behind a context menu, without autocompletion, and when you execute your modified query it rewrites it and removes all comments.
    - gaius 9y ago
      Can you elaborate on what kinds of things fill the 40% difference between PG and MSSQL? SQL Server is well ahead of PG in query parallelisation and complex replication topologies, even as of PG 10.1. SQL Server is also ahead in change data capture, but PG 10 narrowed that gap. Managing a large user base is easier on SQL Server. If you have those use cases it is well worth the money. If I need to do something clever with the contents of the table, SQL Server's embedded R is very good. Having used both PostgreSQL and SQL Server, Well indeed, most people only use a subset of their DB's full feature set, but it will be a different subset for each person :-) I don't really use GUI tools so I can't comment on that but I've heard that pgAdmin 4 is awful.
      - jorams 9y ago
        Thank you, that's the kind of answer I was looking for. Those are indeed not things I've worked with. > I've heard that pgAdmin 4 is awful. I've heard the same. I wasn't a fan of pgAdmin 3 either, so I've stuck with the psql command line.
- kakwa_ 9y ago
  Licenses costs are generally quite low compared to the overall price of a project, that's true. But licenses can also be a bit of a nightmare to manage. I've seen many cases where licenses were violated due to needs for testing/development environments. It can be difficult go through the purchase process in big companies, specially if the software in question is not wildly used. Handling licenses can also be hard technically, when your licenses are tied to hardware (a MAC address for example) or configuration (hostname or IP). When migrating some legacy hosts to VMs, I had numerous headaches when dealing with flexlm servers. It can also be really annoying when you don't have perpetual licences and the editor goes down or is not able to generate a new licence for the (obsolete) version you are using. Basically, you must add specific processes and even additional infrastructure (inventory, CMDBs) just to manage it. It can also slow down development. I understand that in many fields, no viable OSS alternatives exist, or even could exist, specially for specialised software. But if I can avoid proprietary, I generally do. I'm not against paying for software, but other for of payments, like a support contract, are generally far less annoying.
- justonepost 9y ago
  DR, journaling, auditing & security, data integrity - at scale. These are all Oracle mainstays.
emmelaich 9y ago
Sybase is pervasive in investment banks. Not sure why. Other popular big databases are Ingres and Informix. At a big airline I worked at, we had three different major databases on our Unix systems: Informix, Ingres and Oracle. The mainframes had a few more. Here's a HN poll on what dbs people use. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684620
- gaius 9y ago
  Sybase is pervasive in investment banks. Not sure why. Sybase were always very willing to customise their product for financial services customers. Someone I knew there told be about the changes they’d made to their DATE datatype to make it easy for one bank to handle bonds from the Napoleonic era for example.
  - gadders 9y ago
    It also used to be quite a bit faster 20 odd years ago.
- mianos 9y ago
  Sybase was good, ran on Unix and did not cost the earth and had more transparent pricing, as opposed to Oracle. Back in the late 90s some trading systems used Informix but the big exchanges I worked on always chose Sybase over our internal use of Informix. Sybase was pretty good aside from a few gotchas. Does anyone remember the the exploding execution time issues when joining more than three tables?
  - kchoudhu 9y ago
    Was this before 11? I regularly did 10+ table joins on Sybase, and the execution was stellar as long as you had the right indices set up.
    - mianos 9y ago
      Version 10. It has long long been fixed. I was always a fan.