15 ms·

Oracle vs. PostgreSQL – A Comment

304 points by jkatz05 6y ago

devit 6y ago
"create stand alone database: ~30m" If creating a database takes 30 minutes, there is something extremely wrong either in the procedure the person used to do so, or in the Oracle software itself.
- daniel-levin 6y ago
  Well, if the database has the number of tables, triggers, stored procedures, etc that SAP or Oracle’s ERP has then this seems less unreasonable. We’re talking thousands
  - miahi 6y ago
    It's not about an application DB, it's just for the system dictionaries and metadata, the file structure and so on.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    It was stated the db is empty.
- miahi 6y ago
  In the Oracle world, creating a DB is not something you do often. In most cases you only have a database on the whole server/cluster and all the applications will use that database instance, being isolated at user/schema level. So that 30 minutes time is not that important actually. Creating pluggable databases (containers) is fast.
thePunisher 6y ago
It has been known for DECADES that Oracle is outrageously expensive compared to the competition. But the unwillingness of larger companies to go with open-source databases which have no multi-billion dollar company behind them has kept Oracle in the saddle all these years.
- qeternity 6y ago
  I think that mission critical, legacy systems from a time before there was big OSS acceptance at the CTO level is the main reason. I’m not sure how many greenfield projects are using Oracle, but I’d expect that is rapidly decreasing over time. However, if you’ve had an Oracle db running for 20 years, and the cost of screwing up a migration starts at 9 figures, and runs into the 10 figures, then Oracle have you by the cost-benefit balls.
  - swarnie_ 6y ago
    Oracle consultant here -> The Oracle world is shrinking admittedly and its shrinking from the smaller end up. I almost never get called by a company with less then 500 users or $100k a year of licence obligations. Oracle is a tried and tested safe bet when implementing corp wide, multi year projects. The HN crowd won't like it (and for good reason) but CTOs will always bet on name recognition when millions or billions are on the line.
    - miahi 6y ago
      As a fellow Oracle consultant, I see the same. Most of the small clients only involve me in migration projects to other DBs now (postgres or mysql), but the ones with >$1M licenses continue to pay their support and migrate to 19c. But that's also because it's way harder to migrate a huge project/organization to a completely different DB - it's just cheaper and less risky to continue with the current one.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  That, and a huge ERP thing.
- snarfy 6y ago
  Also, government lobbying. How many large government databases do you think are oracle? I suspect quite a lot.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  I am a platform architect in a large company that has a few hundreds TB database servers that are not on open-source software; we do use Postgres in about the same number of instances, but not for the core databases. There are several reasons for that, from tooling (SSMS has no competition) or simplicity to manufacturer support; for example, using MS SQL setting up high availability or replication is a matter of a few clicks (or a page of code) with no extra add-ons, packages etc. and these features are perfectly integrated in the database engine, supported by the same company, come in the same installer. Even for smaller databases we prefer the free edition of MS SQL, for development, testing or validation we use the free developer edition, so the cost is not that bad, while the product is much more simple, coherent and better supported and this matters when you do the math. The day Postgress will have an integrated tool as good as SSMS, high availability and replication seamlessly integrated and the ease of use for the operations team to keep it in good shape without highly skilled DBA's, I am the first in line to evaluate and deploy it. Until then, it is not good enough, even for free.
phoe-krk 6y ago
Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-license-to-publish-oracle-and-sql-server-performance-test https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l...: The standard license (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-152015.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-...) you agree to when you download software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) does state that you're not allowed to disclose benchmarks. You may not: <<list of things you cannot do>> - disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent. I sadly suspect that Paul Förster might need a lawyer if anyone from Oracle finds out about that post. Which, given that this is trending on Hacker News, they easily might.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- parhamn 6y ago
  What are the damage claims for something like this, if any? Surely neither side would want to litigate this.
  - mothsonasloth 6y ago
    Not damage claims. You are going against Larry Ellison, who is the boogey man of enterprise software. The guy can spend money on a buying a Russian Mig29 fighter plane. I am sure he can throw some money to make someones life a misery because he can.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    I'd love EFF to take this on and publish all the discovery findings.
  - dwheeler 6y ago
    Oracle may very well want to litigate it. I doubt they care about the optics. This is the well-known DeWitt clause, so named because Oracle crafted it to squelch database research being performed by Dr. David DeWitt. I believe these clauses should be clearly ruled as illegal, but to my knowledge they still persist. Details here: https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html
craigkerstiens 6y ago
I'm a big fan of Postgres, and it's got plenty going for it. That's not to say Oracle isn't a good database in its own right. The knocks against Oracle tend to be lock-in, complexity, price, but rather than go in a checklist comparison I'd rather say what's unique about Postgres: - Based on its license it's very hard for any one company or individual to "own" Postgres, this makes risk of a company as a bad actor being minimized pretty appealing - Its geospatial capabilities put it as the most advanced geospatial database, only ESRI software really stands to beat it here - The improvements for app devs from things like JSON, to a variety of index types put it in unique territory among relational databases - The extension framework is truly unique and stands to be where a lot of future innovation happens.
- justinvh 6y ago
  > Its geospatial capabilities put it as the most advanced geospatial database, only ESRI software really stands to beat it here Where does PostGIS stand in comparison?
  - phoe-krk 6y ago
    Likely the OP means PostGIS where they say Postgres. PostGIS is the set of geospatial extensions for Postgres.
    - craigkerstiens 6y ago
      Correct, my intention was fully PostGIS == Postgres geospatial.
  - ken 6y ago
    The original comment was about how few packages and how little space Postgres takes. PostGIS is good but it pulls in a lot of extra packages. I hate Oracle as much as anyone but this is no longer a fair comparison. If you’re bragging about how good PostGIS is, you’re no longer anywhere near a 66MB install. More like (IIRC) 5 to 10 times that.
yardstick 6y ago
Anyone here use Patroni for automated high availability with postgres? Does it “just work” or do you need a lot of housekeeping?
- jonathanoliver 6y ago
  Oh! This looks like a very interesting project. When I finished reading the headline description I was immediately turned off by the mention of Zookeeper. But it then goes on to say "OR etcd OR consul". If this project does what it claims, that's pretty awesome. I'm definitely going to be looking at this a lot more.
- qeternity 6y ago
  We recently rolled out Patroni on k8s and it definitely does not “just work”. I suppose once you get it up and running, there’s some truth to that, but it’s one of the most hostile pieces of software I’ve come across. This isn’t a complaint, after all, Zalando don’t owe me anything. But the documentation, the project structure, the contributors...it all reveals very clearly that this is really just some internal tooling that they happen to make public, as opposed to a first-class OSS project. Unfortunately it’s also the best Postgres HA system out there, but it’s truly a massive PITA to get setup and it’s extremely opinionated about things that it doesn’t need to be.
  - hjacobs 6y ago
    I'm curious, did you use Patroni directly on Kubernetes or use Zalando's Postgres Operator [1] (based on Patroni)? [1] https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator
    - qeternity 6y ago
      After spending quite a bit of time with the operator early on, along with the KubeDB operator (super easy to use, but definitely not production ready) we settled on some patroni helm charts.
  - CyberDem0n 6y ago
Justsignedup 6y ago
As a developer: - No license fees is huge. My company saves tens of thousands on license fees when we can't really afford it. - The ability to set up environments super quickly is amazing. - Rollback of DDLs is huge for testing migrations - The backup features aren't broken by default. I've spent hours researching how to back up an oracle db and transfer it to another. And at that point versions matter. With postures I think I spent 30 minutes total figuring it out over the years. Overall I am a huge fan of Postgres having used it for about half of my career and oracle for the other half. I genuinely hope I never use oracle again.
- jcriddle4 6y ago
  Obviously you don't have experience with Oracle or you would have written hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees... /s
  - dataminded 6y ago
    Obviously you don't have experience with Oracle or you would have written millions of dollars in license fees... /s
    - acdha 6y ago
      Funny story: I worked at a place which spent millions annually with Oracle. They had a couple hours downtime every day because they couldn’t afford the online backup product. This was an Ivy League university with an endowment in the tens of billions.
      - miahi 6y ago
        This is not true. There is no separate licensing for archivelog mode (the single thing that is needed for online backups).
        acdha 6y ago
        That may be the case now but it was either different back then or neither their Oracle-trained DBAs nor their Oracle consultants was aware of it. I was working with an even worse Oracle product (Hyperion) which had a convoluted homegrown script restarting all of the services on a number of servers to work around their inability to reliably handle database connection failures lasting more than a short interval. Before do that, they’d tried to get rid of the backup window but were told that wasn’t possible unless they could come up with a large amount of money for the license.
978e4721a 6y ago
Is vacuumin postgres still basically means that you need downtime?
- jojobas 6y ago
  Vacuuming is online, with some performance hit while it's underway.
  - tankenmate 6y ago
    The latest release has multi-threaded vacuuming so it goes much quicker these days.
    - hrpnk 6y ago
      Aside of auto vacuuming, there is also VACUUM FULL [1] which does an exclusive lock on the table. If you look for an alternative option for reorganizing tables in online mode, try the pg_repack extension [2]. [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-vacuum.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-vacuum.html [2] https://reorg.github.io/pg_repack/ https://reorg.github.io/pg_repack/
  - kakwa_ 6y ago
    Vacuum is online, but with a caveat iirc, it locks the table with a lock that does not block inserts/updates/reads. But if your application use exclusive locks, things can get blocked.
vbezhenar 6y ago
That's not a very useful comparison. Databases are made to execute queries, not to install them. The only useful metric is performance and features (and price, of course). Sure, Oracle is bloated and pain to manage, but if it works faster, provides unique features and costs less in the end, people will use it.
- NOGDP 6y ago
  > Sure, Oracle is bloated and pain to manage, but if it works faster, provides unique features and costs less in the end, people will use it. _if_ Of course, those aren't the only reasons, and probably not the the main reasons, why big orgs use bloated proprietary crapware.
- koolba 6y ago
  > That's not a very useful comparison. Databases are made to execute queries, not to install them. The only useful metric is performance and features (and price, of course). Sure, Oracle is bloated and pain to manage, but if it works faster, provides unique features and costs less in the end, people will use it. Initial installation may not matter much but long maintenance windows directly lead to higher costs. If every patch requires a 60-90 minute downtime, you're going to pay for that in production deploy time.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    That depends on a service. For example I'm working on a service which is used by people at working hours (something like 8AM - 19PM, Mon-Fri). I can do anything outside of that window (well, +-30 minutes just to be sure) and nobody's going to pay for it, most likely nobody would even notice. And for service that's expected to work without interruptions, I think, there should be a way to switch to a secondary database, otherwise those promises are futile. And if there's a way to switch to a secondary database, long patch install time is not a big deal. Because whether it's 1 minute or 60 minutes, it's interruption nonetheless.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  Right but by that metric Oracle is archaic. Just look at Postgres[0] supported column data types and then look at Oracle[1]. Better data types means more tightly defined columns, which means fewer bugs/less defensive programming/reduced maintenance/reduced code complexity. No doubt someone will be along shortly to tell me "you don't NEED it!" and then tell me how to hack constraints into making it act like something it is not, but I don't care. I have no interest in "forcing" Oracle to act like a modern database through repeatedly having to re-define 30+ year old common data types (e.g. Int32, Int64, Long, Bool, etc). As a developer I /hate/ working with Oracle. It is just cludgy. I don't care how many times people point to vague indefinables for why it is "superior," it sucks to work with. Microsoft Sql Server is better, and Postgres/Sqlite are superb. Just the fact Postgres has a date (with no-time) column means it outright wins. In Oracle, we stored them as <Date> 12:00 but that's a gotcha since it can get timezone adjusted in the pipeline (e.g. <Date> 12:00 becomes <Date> 08:00) and the result be subtly broken. Cannot time-zone adjust a real date type. [0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/datatype.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/datatype.html [1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/datatype.htm#CNCPT012 https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/datat...
tiffanyh 6y ago
>” create stand alone database: ~30m” Something is oddly wrong in his tests if it took him 30 minutes to create an oracle database.
- swarnie_ 6y ago
  Go deploy a standard Oracle 19c multitenant database on windows server 2016, time it, then come back and post results. I bet its pretty close to 30m based on experience.
- orf 6y ago
  It can really take that long. Initial bootstrapping of the Oracle database docker containers can take upwards of an hour.
kumarvvr 6y ago
With the amount of hype and mind share micro-services attract, I hope the era of large database clusters like Oracle comes to an end. At the system level, even Oracle has to do some sort of message passing stuff to be able to distributed databases. With the availability of streaming services, resilient distributed computation and data storage architectures, I hope companies like Oracle die a slow, but graceful death. PostgreSQL and advanced database systems like FoundationDB, with help of stream / event processing systems, should be able to replace large Oracle clusters. The problem of "lock-in" is a business problem and ought to be solved my the MBA's in my view.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  There will always be a lot of use for large databases. PostgreSQL does provide some under-the-hood features for doing distributed db's (such as the PREPARE TRANSACTION extension) but the actual implementation work is left to the user - there's no such thing as a "one size fits all" solution in this domain.
  - kumarvvr 6y ago
    Exactly, so, what use cases is Oracle best suited for, situations where Postgres cannot be a good fit?
    - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
      When you have a sore back from lugging around your wallet, and it needs lightening for your own good. Not that MSSQL isn't heading that way, and getting more weird and buggy all the time.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Wouldn't it be great if there was a large system for integrating all those data based microservices, taking care of data coherence, type verification, and schema migration, all of that behind a standardized interface that every language supports?
asldkfja_skdlf 6y ago
Honest question, what is that with former Oracle clients and SUSE LInux? Did the Novell ownership make it similar/alternative to Oracle stuff? Or is it just that it was the first linux with a paid support option and those folks likely used it earlier because of this? Asking for people that actually use openSUSE today, not other pundits with baseless hypothesis like myself :)
- yellowapple 6y ago
  SUSE is reasonably popular (it's to Europe as Red Hat is to the USA, if I understand right), and SLES is (like openSUSE) RPM-compatible, making it reasonably friendly to large enterprise software packages (like, say, Oracle DB). I'd expect most people using Oracle DB to be doing so on either SLES or RHEL (or some derivative of the latter, like Oracle Linux).
falsesense 6y ago
Definitely PostgreSQL
raverbashing 6y ago
The real surprising part of this benchmark to me is how quick it was to compile PgSQL from source. Is it pure C? Of course, building a DB is not something you worry too much everyday (unless you're developing it), but it seems an interesting fact.
- yxhuvud 6y ago
  Depends a lot on what machine you are using and how parallelized the compile script is. Modern CPUs (threadripper 39x0Xs) can compile the Linux kernel in under 30s. With that in mind, does is it really surprising that Postgres can take 3.30m?
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    The Linux Kernel is probably more paralelizable than PostgreSQL (due to the device drivers) It would be interesting to know how long does that system that takes 30s for the LK compiles PostgreSQL
- touisteur 6y ago
  Can confirm it builds very fast, including extensions. And on many-core machines it scales quite a bit (make -j64)...
paulryanrogers 6y ago
For those still on Oracle, why? Is it regulations or executives demanding certified solutions? And if so then with so many bugs at what point does certification become a negative signal?
- jdm2212 6y ago
  Query hints are one reason. I'm not a fan of Oracle as a company, but for certain usage patterns you need query hints and Postgres doesn't support them.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    PostgreSQL provides a variety of options for tuning both the query planner's strategy and the per-table statistical analyses that are used as input to the query planner itself. These tuning methods are actually far more robust than the query hints that are commonly used in other databases, including Oracle.
    - jdm2212 6y ago
      I'm not a DB expert by any means, but the DB experts at my job are pretty insistent that (given the way we deploy our software) it's not practical to do in Postgres what we can do with Oracle query hints.
    - aeyes 6y ago
      You usually have one query that you need to optimize but hundreds more that query the same data, therefore messing with the statistics of a table is hardly ever optimal. Usually it's some three-way join with n:n:n relations which breaks Postgres' neck. I know exactly where the query should start from, statistics can't possibly know because they have no knowledge about the data distribution in adjacent tables. I use CTE to "fix" this but the query would be faster without it. Another issue is that plans can just fall over and you have absolutely no tools available to see what the old plan was, unless you ran explain before and saved the plan. You also have no way to force the old plan while you analyze the issue. This has caused more production outages than I'm willing to admit. With Oracle it would take me one minute to see what the issue is, and I could make the database use the old plan without changing a single line of code.
downvoteme1 6y ago
I seriously doubt that the author has 20 years of Oracle DBA experience yet not know why Oracle takes up more disk space that Postgres. There are so many features in Oracle for which there is no equivalent in Postgres. -Sharding -Java Pool -Oracle Apex -DB containers and pluggable databases Many more that I am too lazy to list . All of these come pre packaged with Oracle. If you are in an Organization that has 1000s of Oracle db’s per org, you quickly understand that license cost are a minute number but dba and developers are much more expensive .
- kakwa_ 6y ago
  License cost tend to be negligeable compared to the cost of devs, dbas,sysadmins, etc, that's true. But at the same time, it's a can be a huge speed bump in term of procurement. Waiting several weeks for accounting to accept the procurement of a license can really damage business or development speed. It also adds significant admin load to track the license pool correctly and can represent a legal risk when inevitably, someone starts exceeding the terms of license (db size or db clones, or increase in hardware).
- leandrod 6y ago
  And vendor lock-in with them. With PostgreSQL, one gets freedom to add your own, also free components, and even to substitute another ISO-compliant DBMS.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  I used ApEx in a previous job. I don't count it as a feature.
dilandau 6y ago
I'm not as familiar with Oracle, but surely it is providing significant benefits or large organizations would be dumping it and running to more reliable alternatives. These time estimates are also not very pertinent to the actual running of a large database. Nor do they speak to the various technical problems one has when running a big db that is mission critical. Lots of the classic hn "how can they be so stupid?" comments. Give the cto's more credit. Just because you write JavaScript and used mongodb once does not make you an expert on Oracle or running a very large business.
- philjohn 6y ago
  It's still used in a lot of places because either some bought in ERP system requires it, or because internal software was developed on it WAY back when, when either Postgres didn't exist, or didn't have as many features and no companies providing paid support. They now have a problem - and it would probably cost more than the yearly cost of Oracle to migrate.
ksec 6y ago
I am sure there are many areas that Oracle is still technically better than Postgre. What I am interested in, is what are those features / problems. And if Postgre has a roadmap for those improvement. I mean not just Oracle. Outside of HN the majority of dev and cooperation still swears by MySQL. I often wished HN instead of constantly hyping a technology, tell me up front what are the Cons. And hopefully everyone will make up their own mind whether the Pros and the Cons are worth trying it out.
- leandrod 6y ago
  PostgreSQL todo. It’s beautiful.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  One reason that I've heard is cluster, Oracle supports clustering while Postgres only provides half-baked solutions. But that was years ago, so I'd like for correction.
jeswin 6y ago
I've used plenty of Oracle; it's a poor choice (probably the worst) for organisations of any size. People buy Oracle in large corporations because that's what their leaders and their team know, and it helps them stay relevant in the company. Especially in places where daily work is more about engaging in office politics than dealing with technology. And the other one is bribing. From mild to criminal, involving payments via vendors to decision makers - http://allthingsd.com/20120816/oracle-settles-sec-bribery-case-for-2-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20120816/oracle-settles-sec-bribery-ca...
- modoc 6y ago
  It's often higher performance and with better HA solutions than any other options. I have a lot of dislike for the company, but it's silly to say it's a poor choice for any organization size..
BossingAround 6y ago
We could sum up the post as: "I don't like Oracle DB because: - "Takes up more space - "Is slower to start/stop/init - "Is not free - "Has bugs" Umm... Sure, Oracle's slower to start/stop. Sure, it takes up more space. So what though? And then, "it has a lot of bugs and that causes downtime." Would be great to list some examples. All software has bugs. Why is this on the front page? Does it have any value what so ever other than "someone found a free alternative to Oracle DB"..?
- pstuart 6y ago
  You took time to criticize the post for being upvoted despite not being deep enough / giving enough examples. It's likely upvoted because most of us in the industry have no love for Oracle and confirmation of that bias feels good. Turnabout is fair play: Why don't you give some examples of why a startup doing a greenfield project should use Oracle today?
  - BossingAround 6y ago
    I am not in favor of Oracle. I don't care about Oracle. That said, the original post is meaningless and yet on front page. That is what I'm writing against. If all it takes for HNews to upvote an article is hatred of a company, that's a sad state to be in. Might as well get my free upvote with a simple isoraclestillshit.com website, eh?
    - pstuart 6y ago
      It's a combination of hate of Oracle and love of Postgres; there were nuggets that validated those feelings. Upvoting is both "I agree" and mark that in my voting history for if I ever want to see that page again. Yes, this instance was not super deep but the fact is that it resonated with enough participants to get there. So the literal answer to your complaint is: it was a collective "because I felt like it". Your complaint is not without some merit but also borders on "get off my lawn!". I've seen plenty of front page posts that I don't think are worthy of being there but, hey, different strokes for different folks.
  - 6y ago
jmull 6y ago
These don't seem like generally useful metrics for judging or comparing a database. Is this how experienced DBAs commonly see the world?
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  Some of these things matter; they are not the main factor, but it something you take in consideration in the bigger picture.
cannabis_sam 6y ago
Using Oracle over PostgreSQL in public company is a breach of fiduciary duty.
th3iedkid 6y ago
Is DB2 dead ?
- Smeevy 6y ago
  My company uses it all the time. It's an absolutely rock-solid database and I've never had any issues with it. They just released their new containerized version a few months back and have recently simplified their licensing rather significantly. One of my favorite features is the "time travel" query. If you enable this feature on one or more tables you can essentially say "give the results of this query as it would have been at time x". I don't know if anyone else provides that, but it's pretty great stuff.
  - amaura 6y ago
    Oracle does since version 10 at least. It’s actually available by default.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    Bitemporalism a la SQL:2011 has been partly or wholly implemented by several RDBMSes at this point. Off the top of my head SQL Server, Oracle and MariaDB have it as well as DB2. I'm looking forward to seeing it in PostgreSQL.
    - phonon 6y ago
      Check out https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables or https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal
      - jacques_chester 6y ago
        I'm familiar with these and they are useful, but I would greatly prefer mainline support using the SQL standard. A mainline implementation is far more likely to lead to optimisations being made to the query planner, indices, disk formats etc.
lambda 6y ago
I had a similar experience to this at an early programming internship while I was in college 20 years ago. I was working on some component and needed to add a new table to our database. I was fairly new to SQL at the time, so I wanted to do some experimentation and prototyping on my own, before submitting the schema changes to our DBA in order to get them into the shared dev database. Oracle did have a free trial version you could download for dev purposes or learning or whatever, but like this mentions, it was slow and cumbersome to set up that I soon decided it would be faster to spin up a PostgresQL database, make any necessary changes to our schema and code to be compatible with Postgres, and do my prototyping there, then submit the schema modification request to our DBA. So that's what I did; it took a single evening to do all of that in Postgres, even for someone who was pretty much brand new to SQL. After I submitted my schema chages for review, rather than emailing review comments back, my DBA made me come down for a meeting to explain the issues. Of course this was intimidating to me as a young itern; had I done something so wrong that it deserved a talking to? After all that, it turns out the issue was that I had ordered a VARCHAR column before some other column of fixed width in the schema of the new table; and apparently, it's preferable to order all fixed width columns before all variable width columns in order to speed up the column accesses. I agreed with the DBA that I could change the order of the columns, though I did have to point out that this particular table was a table of worldwide regions like "North America", "South America", etc, and that there would never be more than 5-10 of these, so any optimization of this particular table was likely premature. After all that experience; the complexity of just getting a dev environment up, the fact that production instances cost somewhere around ~$50,000 per CPU per year, the fact that we had a full time DBA who was spending a substantial fraction of her job letting interns know that they needed to apply some trivial optimization that you would expect such an expensive database to just do for you automatically, I resolved to never touch Oracle again if I could avoid it, and have had good luck in that I've never had to deal with Oracle in any jobs since. Funny thing was that the project I was working on was named "ASAP" which officially had no expansion but unofficially stood for "Another Siebel Avoidance Project", because we were actually using our Oracle database as a place to dump information for which the primary store was Siebel, due to how much more of a pain it was to interact directly with Siebel so doing a periodic dump into Oracle and then building our API on top of Oracle was a better choice.
dralley 6y ago
> What I especially hate about Oracle (despite the license costs, of course) is that it has so many bugs, bugs and even more bugs and one keeps on searching for patches all day, generating lot of downtime. Applying a PSU or RU is mostly not enough. Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
- macmac 6y ago
  After reading that no serious person could ever dream of having any serious enterprise be based on Oracle DB.
ralphc 6y ago
I bookmarked this tweet from 2012 - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."
RivieraKid 6y ago
It must be so depressing to work at Oracle developing the database - I imagine the source code is a monstrosity.
F_J_H 6y ago
Meh. We use Oracle's (newish) autonomous database offering, and haven't really experienced any bugs at all. No worries about backups, very little DBA time, and the on-demand licensing makes it quite economical. We just get on with it, and couldn't be happier. Of course, YRMV.
- macmac 6y ago
  Have fun when Larry decides he want another yacht and his license goons come by to exploit the lock in you gave created for yourself.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - F_J_H 6y ago
    Yes, I was expecting this comment. A tired cliche I've been hearing for years...
    - macmac 6y ago
      It is based on practical experience from multiple companies who ended up in precisely this situation.
redis_mlc 6y ago
1) FYI: Oracle Enterprise is basically dead in Silicon Valley for new projects (because it doesn't scale financially.) Every Oracle DBA I know transitioned to MySQL over a decade ago, and they look at you funny when you ask about Oracle. 2) Oracle Enterprise is free to use for dev/qa, but each prod instance costs money. 3) The contraint on publishing benchmark results is not what devs think. It's to prevent poorly conducted bm efforts, not really to hide anything. A vendor can't run around defending itself against non-DBAs doing benchmarks. Most of the links to results on HN admit, "We tuned our fave database, and used the defaults for the other database." Seriously. Having said that, you can publish benchmark scripts, which is what MySQL did. That script moved the whole industry forward wrt reliability and performance, as MySQL was the only database that could pass initially. :) Source: DBA.

304 points by jkatz05 6y ago

"create stand alone database: ~30m" If creating a database takes 30 minutes, there is something extremely wrong either in the procedure the person used to do so, or in the Oracle software itself.

daniel-levin 6y ago
Well, if the database has the number of tables, triggers, stored procedures, etc that SAP or Oracle’s ERP has then this seems less unreasonable. We’re talking thousands
- miahi 6y ago
  It's not about an application DB, it's just for the system dictionaries and metadata, the file structure and so on.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  It was stated the db is empty.
miahi 6y ago
In the Oracle world, creating a DB is not something you do often. In most cases you only have a database on the whole server/cluster and all the applications will use that database instance, being isolated at user/schema level. So that 30 minutes time is not that important actually. Creating pluggable databases (containers) is fast.

thePunisher 6y ago

It has been known for DECADES that Oracle is outrageously expensive compared to the competition. But the unwillingness of larger companies to go with open-source databases which have no multi-billion dollar company behind them has kept Oracle in the saddle all these years.

qeternity 6y ago
I think that mission critical, legacy systems from a time before there was big OSS acceptance at the CTO level is the main reason. I’m not sure how many greenfield projects are using Oracle, but I’d expect that is rapidly decreasing over time. However, if you’ve had an Oracle db running for 20 years, and the cost of screwing up a migration starts at 9 figures, and runs into the 10 figures, then Oracle have you by the cost-benefit balls.
- swarnie_ 6y ago
  Oracle consultant here -> The Oracle world is shrinking admittedly and its shrinking from the smaller end up. I almost never get called by a company with less then 500 users or $100k a year of licence obligations. Oracle is a tried and tested safe bet when implementing corp wide, multi year projects. The HN crowd won't like it (and for good reason) but CTOs will always bet on name recognition when millions or billions are on the line.
  - miahi 6y ago
    As a fellow Oracle consultant, I see the same. Most of the small clients only involve me in migration projects to other DBs now (postgres or mysql), but the ones with >$1M licenses continue to pay their support and migrate to 19c. But that's also because it's way harder to migrate a huge project/organization to a completely different DB - it's just cheaper and less risky to continue with the current one.
skrebbel 6y ago
That, and a huge ERP thing.
snarfy 6y ago
Also, government lobbying. How many large government databases do you think are oracle? I suspect quite a lot.
AdrianB1 6y ago
I am a platform architect in a large company that has a few hundreds TB database servers that are not on open-source software; we do use Postgres in about the same number of instances, but not for the core databases. There are several reasons for that, from tooling (SSMS has no competition) or simplicity to manufacturer support; for example, using MS SQL setting up high availability or replication is a matter of a few clicks (or a page of code) with no extra add-ons, packages etc. and these features are perfectly integrated in the database engine, supported by the same company, come in the same installer. Even for smaller databases we prefer the free edition of MS SQL, for development, testing or validation we use the free developer edition, so the cost is not that bad, while the product is much more simple, coherent and better supported and this matters when you do the math. The day Postgress will have an integrated tool as good as SSMS, high availability and replication seamlessly integrated and the ease of use for the operations team to keep it in good shape without highly skilled DBA's, I am the first in line to evaluate and deploy it. Until then, it is not good enough, even for free.

phoe-krk 6y ago

Copying from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-license-to-publish-oracle-and-sql-server-performance-test https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12115397/is-it-against-l...: The standard license (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-152015.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/standard-license-...) you agree to when you download software from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) does state that you're not allowed to disclose benchmarks. You may not: <<list of things you cannot do>> - disclose results of any program benchmark tests without our prior consent. I sadly suspect that Paul Förster might need a lawyer if anyone from Oracle finds out about that post. Which, given that this is trending on Hacker News, they easily might.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
parhamn 6y ago
What are the damage claims for something like this, if any? Surely neither side would want to litigate this.
- mothsonasloth 6y ago
  Not damage claims. You are going against Larry Ellison, who is the boogey man of enterprise software. The guy can spend money on a buying a Russian Mig29 fighter plane. I am sure he can throw some money to make someones life a misery because he can.
- jojobas 6y ago
  I'd love EFF to take this on and publish all the discovery findings.
- dwheeler 6y ago
  Oracle may very well want to litigate it. I doubt they care about the optics. This is the well-known DeWitt clause, so named because Oracle crafted it to squelch database research being performed by Dr. David DeWitt. I believe these clauses should be clearly ruled as illegal, but to my knowledge they still persist. Details here: https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html https://dwheeler.com/essays/dewitt-clause.html

craigkerstiens 6y ago

I'm a big fan of Postgres, and it's got plenty going for it. That's not to say Oracle isn't a good database in its own right. The knocks against Oracle tend to be lock-in, complexity, price, but rather than go in a checklist comparison I'd rather say what's unique about Postgres: - Based on its license it's very hard for any one company or individual to "own" Postgres, this makes risk of a company as a bad actor being minimized pretty appealing - Its geospatial capabilities put it as the most advanced geospatial database, only ESRI software really stands to beat it here - The improvements for app devs from things like JSON, to a variety of index types put it in unique territory among relational databases - The extension framework is truly unique and stands to be where a lot of future innovation happens.

justinvh 6y ago
> Its geospatial capabilities put it as the most advanced geospatial database, only ESRI software really stands to beat it here Where does PostGIS stand in comparison?
- phoe-krk 6y ago
  Likely the OP means PostGIS where they say Postgres. PostGIS is the set of geospatial extensions for Postgres.
  - craigkerstiens 6y ago
    Correct, my intention was fully PostGIS == Postgres geospatial.
- ken 6y ago
  The original comment was about how few packages and how little space Postgres takes. PostGIS is good but it pulls in a lot of extra packages. I hate Oracle as much as anyone but this is no longer a fair comparison. If you’re bragging about how good PostGIS is, you’re no longer anywhere near a 66MB install. More like (IIRC) 5 to 10 times that.

yardstick 6y ago

Anyone here use Patroni for automated high availability with postgres? Does it “just work” or do you need a lot of housekeeping?

jonathanoliver 6y ago
Oh! This looks like a very interesting project. When I finished reading the headline description I was immediately turned off by the mention of Zookeeper. But it then goes on to say "OR etcd OR consul". If this project does what it claims, that's pretty awesome. I'm definitely going to be looking at this a lot more.
qeternity 6y ago
We recently rolled out Patroni on k8s and it definitely does not “just work”. I suppose once you get it up and running, there’s some truth to that, but it’s one of the most hostile pieces of software I’ve come across. This isn’t a complaint, after all, Zalando don’t owe me anything. But the documentation, the project structure, the contributors...it all reveals very clearly that this is really just some internal tooling that they happen to make public, as opposed to a first-class OSS project. Unfortunately it’s also the best Postgres HA system out there, but it’s truly a massive PITA to get setup and it’s extremely opinionated about things that it doesn’t need to be.
- hjacobs 6y ago
  I'm curious, did you use Patroni directly on Kubernetes or use Zalando's Postgres Operator [1] (based on Patroni)? [1] https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator
  - qeternity 6y ago
    After spending quite a bit of time with the operator early on, along with the KubeDB operator (super easy to use, but definitely not production ready) we settled on some patroni helm charts.
- CyberDem0n 6y ago

Justsignedup 6y ago

As a developer: - No license fees is huge. My company saves tens of thousands on license fees when we can't really afford it. - The ability to set up environments super quickly is amazing. - Rollback of DDLs is huge for testing migrations - The backup features aren't broken by default. I've spent hours researching how to back up an oracle db and transfer it to another. And at that point versions matter. With postures I think I spent 30 minutes total figuring it out over the years. Overall I am a huge fan of Postgres having used it for about half of my career and oracle for the other half. I genuinely hope I never use oracle again.

jcriddle4 6y ago
Obviously you don't have experience with Oracle or you would have written hundreds of thousands of dollars in license fees... /s
- dataminded 6y ago
  Obviously you don't have experience with Oracle or you would have written millions of dollars in license fees... /s
  - acdha 6y ago
    Funny story: I worked at a place which spent millions annually with Oracle. They had a couple hours downtime every day because they couldn’t afford the online backup product. This was an Ivy League university with an endowment in the tens of billions.
    - miahi 6y ago
      This is not true. There is no separate licensing for archivelog mode (the single thing that is needed for online backups).
      - acdha 6y ago
        That may be the case now but it was either different back then or neither their Oracle-trained DBAs nor their Oracle consultants was aware of it. I was working with an even worse Oracle product (Hyperion) which had a convoluted homegrown script restarting all of the services on a number of servers to work around their inability to reliably handle database connection failures lasting more than a short interval. Before do that, they’d tried to get rid of the backup window but were told that wasn’t possible unless they could come up with a large amount of money for the license.

978e4721a 6y ago

Is vacuumin postgres still basically means that you need downtime?

jojobas 6y ago
Vacuuming is online, with some performance hit while it's underway.
- tankenmate 6y ago
  The latest release has multi-threaded vacuuming so it goes much quicker these days.
  - hrpnk 6y ago
    Aside of auto vacuuming, there is also VACUUM FULL [1] which does an exclusive lock on the table. If you look for an alternative option for reorganizing tables in online mode, try the pg_repack extension [2]. [1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-vacuum.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-vacuum.html [2] https://reorg.github.io/pg_repack/ https://reorg.github.io/pg_repack/
- kakwa_ 6y ago
  Vacuum is online, but with a caveat iirc, it locks the table with a lock that does not block inserts/updates/reads. But if your application use exclusive locks, things can get blocked.

vbezhenar 6y ago

That's not a very useful comparison. Databases are made to execute queries, not to install them. The only useful metric is performance and features (and price, of course). Sure, Oracle is bloated and pain to manage, but if it works faster, provides unique features and costs less in the end, people will use it.

NOGDP 6y ago
> Sure, Oracle is bloated and pain to manage, but if it works faster, provides unique features and costs less in the end, people will use it. _if_ Of course, those aren't the only reasons, and probably not the the main reasons, why big orgs use bloated proprietary crapware.
koolba 6y ago
> That's not a very useful comparison. Databases are made to execute queries, not to install them. The only useful metric is performance and features (and price, of course). Sure, Oracle is bloated and pain to manage, but if it works faster, provides unique features and costs less in the end, people will use it. Initial installation may not matter much but long maintenance windows directly lead to higher costs. If every patch requires a 60-90 minute downtime, you're going to pay for that in production deploy time.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  That depends on a service. For example I'm working on a service which is used by people at working hours (something like 8AM - 19PM, Mon-Fri). I can do anything outside of that window (well, +-30 minutes just to be sure) and nobody's going to pay for it, most likely nobody would even notice. And for service that's expected to work without interruptions, I think, there should be a way to switch to a secondary database, otherwise those promises are futile. And if there's a way to switch to a secondary database, long patch install time is not a big deal. Because whether it's 1 minute or 60 minutes, it's interruption nonetheless.
Someone1234 6y ago
Right but by that metric Oracle is archaic. Just look at Postgres[0] supported column data types and then look at Oracle[1]. Better data types means more tightly defined columns, which means fewer bugs/less defensive programming/reduced maintenance/reduced code complexity. No doubt someone will be along shortly to tell me "you don't NEED it!" and then tell me how to hack constraints into making it act like something it is not, but I don't care. I have no interest in "forcing" Oracle to act like a modern database through repeatedly having to re-define 30+ year old common data types (e.g. Int32, Int64, Long, Bool, etc). As a developer I /hate/ working with Oracle. It is just cludgy. I don't care how many times people point to vague indefinables for why it is "superior," it sucks to work with. Microsoft Sql Server is better, and Postgres/Sqlite are superb. Just the fact Postgres has a date (with no-time) column means it outright wins. In Oracle, we stored them as <Date> 12:00 but that's a gotcha since it can get timezone adjusted in the pipeline (e.g. <Date> 12:00 becomes <Date> 08:00) and the result be subtly broken. Cannot time-zone adjust a real date type. [0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/datatype.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/datatype.html [1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/datatype.htm#CNCPT012 https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/datat...

tiffanyh 6y ago

>” create stand alone database: ~30m” Something is oddly wrong in his tests if it took him 30 minutes to create an oracle database.

swarnie_ 6y ago
Go deploy a standard Oracle 19c multitenant database on windows server 2016, time it, then come back and post results. I bet its pretty close to 30m based on experience.
orf 6y ago
It can really take that long. Initial bootstrapping of the Oracle database docker containers can take upwards of an hour.

kumarvvr 6y ago

With the amount of hype and mind share micro-services attract, I hope the era of large database clusters like Oracle comes to an end. At the system level, even Oracle has to do some sort of message passing stuff to be able to distributed databases. With the availability of streaming services, resilient distributed computation and data storage architectures, I hope companies like Oracle die a slow, but graceful death. PostgreSQL and advanced database systems like FoundationDB, with help of stream / event processing systems, should be able to replace large Oracle clusters. The problem of "lock-in" is a business problem and ought to be solved my the MBA's in my view.

zozbot234 6y ago
There will always be a lot of use for large databases. PostgreSQL does provide some under-the-hood features for doing distributed db's (such as the PREPARE TRANSACTION extension) but the actual implementation work is left to the user - there's no such thing as a "one size fits all" solution in this domain.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  Exactly, so, what use cases is Oracle best suited for, situations where Postgres cannot be a good fit?
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    When you have a sore back from lugging around your wallet, and it needs lightening for your own good. Not that MSSQL isn't heading that way, and getting more weird and buggy all the time.
marcosdumay 6y ago
Wouldn't it be great if there was a large system for integrating all those data based microservices, taking care of data coherence, type verification, and schema migration, all of that behind a standardized interface that every language supports?

asldkfja_skdlf 6y ago

Honest question, what is that with former Oracle clients and SUSE LInux? Did the Novell ownership make it similar/alternative to Oracle stuff? Or is it just that it was the first linux with a paid support option and those folks likely used it earlier because of this? Asking for people that actually use openSUSE today, not other pundits with baseless hypothesis like myself :)

yellowapple 6y ago
SUSE is reasonably popular (it's to Europe as Red Hat is to the USA, if I understand right), and SLES is (like openSUSE) RPM-compatible, making it reasonably friendly to large enterprise software packages (like, say, Oracle DB). I'd expect most people using Oracle DB to be doing so on either SLES or RHEL (or some derivative of the latter, like Oracle Linux).

falsesense 6y ago

Definitely PostgreSQL

raverbashing 6y ago

The real surprising part of this benchmark to me is how quick it was to compile PgSQL from source. Is it pure C? Of course, building a DB is not something you worry too much everyday (unless you're developing it), but it seems an interesting fact.

yxhuvud 6y ago
Depends a lot on what machine you are using and how parallelized the compile script is. Modern CPUs (threadripper 39x0Xs) can compile the Linux kernel in under 30s. With that in mind, does is it really surprising that Postgres can take 3.30m?
- raverbashing 6y ago
  The Linux Kernel is probably more paralelizable than PostgreSQL (due to the device drivers) It would be interesting to know how long does that system that takes 30s for the LK compiles PostgreSQL
touisteur 6y ago
Can confirm it builds very fast, including extensions. And on many-core machines it scales quite a bit (make -j64)...

paulryanrogers 6y ago

For those still on Oracle, why? Is it regulations or executives demanding certified solutions? And if so then with so many bugs at what point does certification become a negative signal?

jdm2212 6y ago
Query hints are one reason. I'm not a fan of Oracle as a company, but for certain usage patterns you need query hints and Postgres doesn't support them.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  PostgreSQL provides a variety of options for tuning both the query planner's strategy and the per-table statistical analyses that are used as input to the query planner itself. These tuning methods are actually far more robust than the query hints that are commonly used in other databases, including Oracle.
  - jdm2212 6y ago
    I'm not a DB expert by any means, but the DB experts at my job are pretty insistent that (given the way we deploy our software) it's not practical to do in Postgres what we can do with Oracle query hints.
  - aeyes 6y ago
    You usually have one query that you need to optimize but hundreds more that query the same data, therefore messing with the statistics of a table is hardly ever optimal. Usually it's some three-way join with n:n:n relations which breaks Postgres' neck. I know exactly where the query should start from, statistics can't possibly know because they have no knowledge about the data distribution in adjacent tables. I use CTE to "fix" this but the query would be faster without it. Another issue is that plans can just fall over and you have absolutely no tools available to see what the old plan was, unless you ran explain before and saved the plan. You also have no way to force the old plan while you analyze the issue. This has caused more production outages than I'm willing to admit. With Oracle it would take me one minute to see what the issue is, and I could make the database use the old plan without changing a single line of code.

downvoteme1 6y ago

I seriously doubt that the author has 20 years of Oracle DBA experience yet not know why Oracle takes up more disk space that Postgres. There are so many features in Oracle for which there is no equivalent in Postgres. -Sharding -Java Pool -Oracle Apex -DB containers and pluggable databases Many more that I am too lazy to list . All of these come pre packaged with Oracle. If you are in an Organization that has 1000s of Oracle db’s per org, you quickly understand that license cost are a minute number but dba and developers are much more expensive .

kakwa_ 6y ago
License cost tend to be negligeable compared to the cost of devs, dbas,sysadmins, etc, that's true. But at the same time, it's a can be a huge speed bump in term of procurement. Waiting several weeks for accounting to accept the procurement of a license can really damage business or development speed. It also adds significant admin load to track the license pool correctly and can represent a legal risk when inevitably, someone starts exceeding the terms of license (db size or db clones, or increase in hardware).
leandrod 6y ago
And vendor lock-in with them. With PostgreSQL, one gets freedom to add your own, also free components, and even to substitute another ISO-compliant DBMS.
jacques_chester 6y ago
I used ApEx in a previous job. I don't count it as a feature.

dilandau 6y ago

I'm not as familiar with Oracle, but surely it is providing significant benefits or large organizations would be dumping it and running to more reliable alternatives. These time estimates are also not very pertinent to the actual running of a large database. Nor do they speak to the various technical problems one has when running a big db that is mission critical. Lots of the classic hn "how can they be so stupid?" comments. Give the cto's more credit. Just because you write JavaScript and used mongodb once does not make you an expert on Oracle or running a very large business.

philjohn 6y ago
It's still used in a lot of places because either some bought in ERP system requires it, or because internal software was developed on it WAY back when, when either Postgres didn't exist, or didn't have as many features and no companies providing paid support. They now have a problem - and it would probably cost more than the yearly cost of Oracle to migrate.

ksec 6y ago

I am sure there are many areas that Oracle is still technically better than Postgre. What I am interested in, is what are those features / problems. And if Postgre has a roadmap for those improvement. I mean not just Oracle. Outside of HN the majority of dev and cooperation still swears by MySQL. I often wished HN instead of constantly hyping a technology, tell me up front what are the Cons. And hopefully everyone will make up their own mind whether the Pros and the Cons are worth trying it out.

leandrod 6y ago
PostgreSQL todo. It’s beautiful.
vbezhenar 6y ago
One reason that I've heard is cluster, Oracle supports clustering while Postgres only provides half-baked solutions. But that was years ago, so I'd like for correction.

jeswin 6y ago

I've used plenty of Oracle; it's a poor choice (probably the worst) for organisations of any size. People buy Oracle in large corporations because that's what their leaders and their team know, and it helps them stay relevant in the company. Especially in places where daily work is more about engaging in office politics than dealing with technology. And the other one is bribing. From mild to criminal, involving payments via vendors to decision makers - http://allthingsd.com/20120816/oracle-settles-sec-bribery-case-for-2-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20120816/oracle-settles-sec-bribery-ca...

modoc 6y ago
It's often higher performance and with better HA solutions than any other options. I have a lot of dislike for the company, but it's silly to say it's a poor choice for any organization size..

BossingAround 6y ago

We could sum up the post as: "I don't like Oracle DB because: - "Takes up more space - "Is slower to start/stop/init - "Is not free - "Has bugs" Umm... Sure, Oracle's slower to start/stop. Sure, it takes up more space. So what though? And then, "it has a lot of bugs and that causes downtime." Would be great to list some examples. All software has bugs. Why is this on the front page? Does it have any value what so ever other than "someone found a free alternative to Oracle DB"..?

pstuart 6y ago
You took time to criticize the post for being upvoted despite not being deep enough / giving enough examples. It's likely upvoted because most of us in the industry have no love for Oracle and confirmation of that bias feels good. Turnabout is fair play: Why don't you give some examples of why a startup doing a greenfield project should use Oracle today?
- BossingAround 6y ago
  I am not in favor of Oracle. I don't care about Oracle. That said, the original post is meaningless and yet on front page. That is what I'm writing against. If all it takes for HNews to upvote an article is hatred of a company, that's a sad state to be in. Might as well get my free upvote with a simple isoraclestillshit.com website, eh?
  - pstuart 6y ago
    It's a combination of hate of Oracle and love of Postgres; there were nuggets that validated those feelings. Upvoting is both "I agree" and mark that in my voting history for if I ever want to see that page again. Yes, this instance was not super deep but the fact is that it resonated with enough participants to get there. So the literal answer to your complaint is: it was a collective "because I felt like it". Your complaint is not without some merit but also borders on "get off my lawn!". I've seen plenty of front page posts that I don't think are worthy of being there but, hey, different strokes for different folks.
- 6y ago

jmull 6y ago

These don't seem like generally useful metrics for judging or comparing a database. Is this how experienced DBAs commonly see the world?

AdrianB1 6y ago
Some of these things matter; they are not the main factor, but it something you take in consideration in the bigger picture.

cannabis_sam 6y ago

Using Oracle over PostgreSQL in public company is a breach of fiduciary duty.

th3iedkid 6y ago

Is DB2 dead ?

Smeevy 6y ago
My company uses it all the time. It's an absolutely rock-solid database and I've never had any issues with it. They just released their new containerized version a few months back and have recently simplified their licensing rather significantly. One of my favorite features is the "time travel" query. If you enable this feature on one or more tables you can essentially say "give the results of this query as it would have been at time x". I don't know if anyone else provides that, but it's pretty great stuff.
- amaura 6y ago
  Oracle does since version 10 at least. It’s actually available by default.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  Bitemporalism a la SQL:2011 has been partly or wholly implemented by several RDBMSes at this point. Off the top of my head SQL Server, Oracle and MariaDB have it as well as DB2. I'm looking forward to seeing it in PostgreSQL.
  - phonon 6y ago
    Check out https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables or https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal https://github.com/scalegenius/pg_bitemporal
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      I'm familiar with these and they are useful, but I would greatly prefer mainline support using the SQL standard. A mainline implementation is far more likely to lead to optimisations being made to the query planner, indices, disk formats etc.

lambda 6y ago

I had a similar experience to this at an early programming internship while I was in college 20 years ago. I was working on some component and needed to add a new table to our database. I was fairly new to SQL at the time, so I wanted to do some experimentation and prototyping on my own, before submitting the schema changes to our DBA in order to get them into the shared dev database. Oracle did have a free trial version you could download for dev purposes or learning or whatever, but like this mentions, it was slow and cumbersome to set up that I soon decided it would be faster to spin up a PostgresQL database, make any necessary changes to our schema and code to be compatible with Postgres, and do my prototyping there, then submit the schema modification request to our DBA. So that's what I did; it took a single evening to do all of that in Postgres, even for someone who was pretty much brand new to SQL. After I submitted my schema chages for review, rather than emailing review comments back, my DBA made me come down for a meeting to explain the issues. Of course this was intimidating to me as a young itern; had I done something so wrong that it deserved a talking to? After all that, it turns out the issue was that I had ordered a VARCHAR column before some other column of fixed width in the schema of the new table; and apparently, it's preferable to order all fixed width columns before all variable width columns in order to speed up the column accesses. I agreed with the DBA that I could change the order of the columns, though I did have to point out that this particular table was a table of worldwide regions like "North America", "South America", etc, and that there would never be more than 5-10 of these, so any optimization of this particular table was likely premature. After all that experience; the complexity of just getting a dev environment up, the fact that production instances cost somewhere around ~$50,000 per CPU per year, the fact that we had a full time DBA who was spending a substantial fraction of her job letting interns know that they needed to apply some trivial optimization that you would expect such an expensive database to just do for you automatically, I resolved to never touch Oracle again if I could avoid it, and have had good luck in that I've never had to deal with Oracle in any jobs since. Funny thing was that the project I was working on was named "ASAP" which officially had no expansion but unofficially stood for "Another Siebel Avoidance Project", because we were actually using our Oracle database as a place to dump information for which the primary store was Siebel, due to how much more of a pain it was to interact directly with Siebel so doing a periodic dump into Oracle and then building our API on top of Oracle was a better choice.

dralley 6y ago

> What I especially hate about Oracle (despite the license costs, of course) is that it has so many bugs, bugs and even more bugs and one keeps on searching for patches all day, generating lot of downtime. Applying a PSU or RU is mostly not enough. Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

macmac 6y ago
After reading that no serious person could ever dream of having any serious enterprise be based on Oracle DB.

ralphc 6y ago

I bookmarked this tweet from 2012 - "I wish I had enough money to run Oracle instead of Postgres." "Why do you want to do that?" "I don't, I just wish I had enough money to."

RivieraKid 6y ago

It must be so depressing to work at Oracle developing the database - I imagine the source code is a monstrosity.

F_J_H 6y ago

Meh. We use Oracle's (newish) autonomous database offering, and haven't really experienced any bugs at all. No worries about backups, very little DBA time, and the on-demand licensing makes it quite economical. We just get on with it, and couldn't be happier. Of course, YRMV.

macmac 6y ago
Have fun when Larry decides he want another yacht and his license goons come by to exploit the lock in you gave created for yourself.
- deleted 6y ago
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- F_J_H 6y ago
  Yes, I was expecting this comment. A tired cliche I've been hearing for years...
  - macmac 6y ago
    It is based on practical experience from multiple companies who ended up in precisely this situation.

redis_mlc 6y ago

1) FYI: Oracle Enterprise is basically dead in Silicon Valley for new projects (because it doesn't scale financially.) Every Oracle DBA I know transitioned to MySQL over a decade ago, and they look at you funny when you ask about Oracle. 2) Oracle Enterprise is free to use for dev/qa, but each prod instance costs money. 3) The contraint on publishing benchmark results is not what devs think. It's to prevent poorly conducted bm efforts, not really to hide anything. A vendor can't run around defending itself against non-DBAs doing benchmarks. Most of the links to results on HN admit, "We tuned our fave database, and used the defaults for the other database." Seriously. Having said that, you can publish benchmark scripts, which is what MySQL did. That script moved the whole industry forward wrt reliability and performance, as MySQL was the only database that could pass initially. :) Source: DBA.