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I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres. For free, it provides a cleaner data structure, DDL transactions, better performance, closer to

by tajen 8y ago

I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres. For free, it provides a cleaner data structure, DDL transactions, better performance, closer to SQL standards... Of course Oracle does sales better.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres Compatibility with established Oracle apps, and a whole lot of database-peripheral stuff (much of which has better alternatives, but those are often newer, and we're back to legacy compatibility.) Some of this (more on the DB than peripheral part) you can mitigate by buying Postgres Plus, which is a proprietary enterprise version with, among other things, extensions for Oracle compatibility, and it's still vastly cheaper than Oracle. But no one (well, except maybe MS, who can leverage Windows and .NET to sell SQL Server) is close to Oracle when it comes to selling RDBMS software to enterprises.
- sofaofthedamned 8y ago
  Plus, they have a lot of vertical market apps (POS systems for a start) that only work with their database, which is where the shakedown begins.
mulmen 8y ago
Partitioning for one. Postgres is getting closer but Oracle blows it out of the water and has had the feature for many years. Oracle also does clustering out of the box, again for years. Those are the big ones off the top of my head but I'm sure there are more. These features are very expensive and full of pitfalls but they exist and Postgres isn't really even close to feature parity. I say this as a huge fan of Postgres.
kentosi 8y ago
I don't know why you got downvoted, because it's a valid question. But apart from what mulmen mentioned regarding partitioning and clustering out of the box, I have my opinion. Having worked in large finance institutions, there's (unfortunately) the mentality that if your software is backed by a large organisation (Microsoft, Oracle) then it is somehow more credible.
- peapicker 8y ago
  There is also someone to sue if things go badly wrong.
  - gowld 8y ago
    That's the old saw, but has anyone every successfully sued over an Oracle problem?
pjmlp 8y ago
- PL/SQL - Graphical development environment for stored procedures, data modelling, database management - Distributed transactions and cluster management tooling - Their Java, .NET, C++ drivers (yes actual C++, not plain C) quality, including IDE tooling - Integration with other enterprise stacks that speak Oracle
- hyperman1 8y ago
  Actually, none of these matter: - PL/SQL is a horrible programming language. It consistently scores bad on e.g. stack overflow. I know about 4 non-oracle-DBA people who say something positive about it, and just about anybody else hates it with a passion. PL/SQL is a reason for lock-in when you have a few million lines of it, but that's about it. - Graphical thing - nobody cares. An SQL database needs reasonable textual tools for the pros to do SQL editing. I would love an IPython for Oracle. But what you describe is tooling in the hand-holding, for dummies world. And I don't mean that negatively, we all started there and most people don't want to be IT-er just to solve their problem. But dummies is also a market segment where oracle is easily worst in class. I don't know why, but every oracle GUI seems inspired by that GoT Iron throne which cuts whoever tries to touch it. - I worked with their Java and their C/C++ OCI driver. Both had crippling bugs, and caused serious migration issues or data corruption when upgrading oracle or even patching windows. The guys admitted some of them should have been documented in their migration guide, even if Oracle was internally aware of them. Yeah, thanks a lot. - Integration with other stacks: Integration in the Microsoft world with mssql is a lot better if you want a good integrated stack. Integration within the oracle stack, there you might be right. And that stack is huge. But it is also very low-quality and hated by most of its users (oracle financials is an example where I never heard an end user tell anything remotely positive) There are good reasons for using oracle. mulmen's post here above lists a few technical ones. It is very hard to make oracle lose data after successfull commit. There is also the management fallacy that oracle=enterprise class and open source=toy, and you can use that very well to sell your program by making it require oracle. So yeah, oracle has good sides. But please not these.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    You might not care, millions of Oracle customers, me included do. The only database that tops Oracle in this regard is Microsoft SQL Server. PL/SQL is so bad that the beloved PostgreSQL copied it. Many of us prefer living in the Xerox PARC world, not AT&T. If I miss playing around with awk, sed, perl, sqlplus, troff, tex, graphviz, ... I know where to find them. All software has bugs, I just found out more in PostgreSQL than Oracle or SQL Server together, specially in EF bindings.
zmyrgel 8y ago
I have a bit opposite experience having worked with both. Oracle has tons of features and docs out of the box which aid you get going. Postgresql has good amount but they just don't compare. Though to get access to all of the Oracle's features you need a spent a lot on licensing which evens the odds quite a lot.
hyperman1 8y ago
Sometimes I wonder if it's just not some kind of stockholm syndrome. You're an enterprise class CxO and negotiating with Oracle is playing with the big boys. All CxOs around you sing praise for Oracle. You can reasonably well get Oracle to drop their prices with 40% at a new sale, so now you feel like an ace in negotiating. Things are looking great. Then you have to pay. And again. And again. Meanwhile, the support is bad, the quality is low, and people start to grumble. It turns out that 60% of a lot of money is still a lot of money, and you're in a position where you have to defend what you've bought to your peers. Oracle is very helpfull here, it has an enterprise aura that rivals Steve Jobs' reality distortion field. Oracle makes sure the other CxOs you meet are very pro Oracle and very enterprisy. So you either drown or learn to sing the qualities of oracle. At that point, you're ready to be one of those peer CxOs that will lure the next generation of CxOs into oracle's traps. Add to all this that at the end of the 1990's, oracle was the best database, no discussion. It coasted along on that reputation until now. Postgres is mostly there today, but this is 20 years later
- Annatar 8y ago
  PostgreSQL, however good, has nothing even remotely comparable to Oracle ASM and real application cluster. Not even Citus comes close.
Annatar 8y ago
I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres. Clustering: synchronous multimaster replication.

by tajen 8y ago

dragonwriter 8y ago

> I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres Compatibility with established Oracle apps, and a whole lot of database-peripheral stuff (much of which has better alternatives, but those are often newer, and we're back to legacy compatibility.) Some of this (more on the DB than peripheral part) you can mitigate by buying Postgres Plus, which is a proprietary enterprise version with, among other things, extensions for Oracle compatibility, and it's still vastly cheaper than Oracle. But no one (well, except maybe MS, who can leverage Windows and .NET to sell SQL Server) is close to Oracle when it comes to selling RDBMS software to enterprises.

sofaofthedamned 8y ago
Plus, they have a lot of vertical market apps (POS systems for a start) that only work with their database, which is where the shakedown begins.

mulmen 8y ago

Partitioning for one. Postgres is getting closer but Oracle blows it out of the water and has had the feature for many years. Oracle also does clustering out of the box, again for years. Those are the big ones off the top of my head but I'm sure there are more. These features are very expensive and full of pitfalls but they exist and Postgres isn't really even close to feature parity. I say this as a huge fan of Postgres.

kentosi 8y ago

I don't know why you got downvoted, because it's a valid question. But apart from what mulmen mentioned regarding partitioning and clustering out of the box, I have my opinion. Having worked in large finance institutions, there's (unfortunately) the mentality that if your software is backed by a large organisation (Microsoft, Oracle) then it is somehow more credible.

peapicker 8y ago
There is also someone to sue if things go badly wrong.
- gowld 8y ago
  That's the old saw, but has anyone every successfully sued over an Oracle problem?

pjmlp 8y ago

- PL/SQL - Graphical development environment for stored procedures, data modelling, database management - Distributed transactions and cluster management tooling - Their Java, .NET, C++ drivers (yes actual C++, not plain C) quality, including IDE tooling - Integration with other enterprise stacks that speak Oracle

hyperman1 8y ago
Actually, none of these matter: - PL/SQL is a horrible programming language. It consistently scores bad on e.g. stack overflow. I know about 4 non-oracle-DBA people who say something positive about it, and just about anybody else hates it with a passion. PL/SQL is a reason for lock-in when you have a few million lines of it, but that's about it. - Graphical thing - nobody cares. An SQL database needs reasonable textual tools for the pros to do SQL editing. I would love an IPython for Oracle. But what you describe is tooling in the hand-holding, for dummies world. And I don't mean that negatively, we all started there and most people don't want to be IT-er just to solve their problem. But dummies is also a market segment where oracle is easily worst in class. I don't know why, but every oracle GUI seems inspired by that GoT Iron throne which cuts whoever tries to touch it. - I worked with their Java and their C/C++ OCI driver. Both had crippling bugs, and caused serious migration issues or data corruption when upgrading oracle or even patching windows. The guys admitted some of them should have been documented in their migration guide, even if Oracle was internally aware of them. Yeah, thanks a lot. - Integration with other stacks: Integration in the Microsoft world with mssql is a lot better if you want a good integrated stack. Integration within the oracle stack, there you might be right. And that stack is huge. But it is also very low-quality and hated by most of its users (oracle financials is an example where I never heard an end user tell anything remotely positive) There are good reasons for using oracle. mulmen's post here above lists a few technical ones. It is very hard to make oracle lose data after successfull commit. There is also the management fallacy that oracle=enterprise class and open source=toy, and you can use that very well to sell your program by making it require oracle. So yeah, oracle has good sides. But please not these.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  You might not care, millions of Oracle customers, me included do. The only database that tops Oracle in this regard is Microsoft SQL Server. PL/SQL is so bad that the beloved PostgreSQL copied it. Many of us prefer living in the Xerox PARC world, not AT&T. If I miss playing around with awk, sed, perl, sqlplus, troff, tex, graphviz, ... I know where to find them. All software has bugs, I just found out more in PostgreSQL than Oracle or SQL Server together, specially in EF bindings.

zmyrgel 8y ago

I have a bit opposite experience having worked with both. Oracle has tons of features and docs out of the box which aid you get going. Postgresql has good amount but they just don't compare. Though to get access to all of the Oracle's features you need a spent a lot on licensing which evens the odds quite a lot.

hyperman1 8y ago

Sometimes I wonder if it's just not some kind of stockholm syndrome. You're an enterprise class CxO and negotiating with Oracle is playing with the big boys. All CxOs around you sing praise for Oracle. You can reasonably well get Oracle to drop their prices with 40% at a new sale, so now you feel like an ace in negotiating. Things are looking great. Then you have to pay. And again. And again. Meanwhile, the support is bad, the quality is low, and people start to grumble. It turns out that 60% of a lot of money is still a lot of money, and you're in a position where you have to defend what you've bought to your peers. Oracle is very helpfull here, it has an enterprise aura that rivals Steve Jobs' reality distortion field. Oracle makes sure the other CxOs you meet are very pro Oracle and very enterprisy. So you either drown or learn to sing the qualities of oracle. At that point, you're ready to be one of those peer CxOs that will lure the next generation of CxOs into oracle's traps. Add to all this that at the end of the 1990's, oracle was the best database, no discussion. It coasted along on that reputation until now. Postgres is mostly there today, but this is 20 years later

Annatar 8y ago
PostgreSQL, however good, has nothing even remotely comparable to Oracle ASM and real application cluster. Not even Citus comes close.

Annatar 8y ago

I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres. Clustering: synchronous multimaster replication.