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We were on Oracle for 15 years, but the cost was just too high. We decided to move to Postgres. We thought it wouldn’t be as good as Oracle (you get what you pa

We were on Oracle for 15 years, but the cost was just too high. We decided to move to Postgres. We thought it wouldn’t be as good as Oracle (you get what you pay for, right?), but it ended up being better. Performance is better. Documentation is better (by far). Adherence to SQL standard is better. Many SQL queries are simpler. Null/empty string is sane. Etc. Now I don’t have experience with MySQL, SQLServer, etc., but between Oracle and Postgres, Postgres is definitely the best database.

briffle 7y ago
My last employer was a large Oracle place, although everything was standard edition. I am so much happier now. Everything that used to be a 'that is an enterprise edition feature' is now baked in. concurrent index creation is amazing. The simplicity and speed of pgBarman vs RMAN is mind boggling. RMAN in Oracle Standard Edition can only do full backups. Full read-only access to a standby? That is huge! (enterprise only for the big O) Realtime replication (not log shipping), also enterprise only for the big O. I'm a sysadmin, so that is what I notice right away, but our developers love it too, for many other reasons.
nickpeterson 7y ago
I think a big portion of this isn't a difference in quality, but rather complexity. Postgres is just easier to understand than Oracle. Oracle has insane amounts of settings and configurable parts. The end result is that people who admin postgres servers tend to learn the levers, but many Oracle DBAs simply don't, or have environments where hand tuning is really hard to justify time-wise. I think Postgres success is it's often in environments where DBAs and devs work closely or are the same person.
marcosdumay 7y ago
Oh, God. For everybody there afraid of moving form Oracle to Postgres, I have one fundamental piece of information: Postgres backups work. You can simply backup your database. And you simply restores your backup. And the result is a working database, without errors.

briffle 7y ago

My last employer was a large Oracle place, although everything was standard edition. I am so much happier now. Everything that used to be a 'that is an enterprise edition feature' is now baked in. concurrent index creation is amazing. The simplicity and speed of pgBarman vs RMAN is mind boggling. RMAN in Oracle Standard Edition can only do full backups. Full read-only access to a standby? That is huge! (enterprise only for the big O) Realtime replication (not log shipping), also enterprise only for the big O. I'm a sysadmin, so that is what I notice right away, but our developers love it too, for many other reasons.

nickpeterson 7y ago

I think a big portion of this isn't a difference in quality, but rather complexity. Postgres is just easier to understand than Oracle. Oracle has insane amounts of settings and configurable parts. The end result is that people who admin postgres servers tend to learn the levers, but many Oracle DBAs simply don't, or have environments where hand tuning is really hard to justify time-wise. I think Postgres success is it's often in environments where DBAs and devs work closely or are the same person.

marcosdumay 7y ago

Oh, God. For everybody there afraid of moving form Oracle to Postgres, I have one fundamental piece of information: Postgres backups work. You can simply backup your database. And you simply restores your backup. And the result is a working database, without errors.