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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 environm

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.
  - dataminded 6y ago
    not sure why a simple joke was worth a downvote -- hope the downvote made you a little bit happier somehow
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
> Rollback of DDLs Oracle can't roll back these (create table/drop index etc)? That really surprises me. Pretty certain MSSQL can, because I've used it. Amazed, actually, that oracle can't.
- atombender 6y ago
  Very few databases support transactional DDL, meaning that you can do something like: BEGIN; DROP TABLE foo; CREATE TABLE bar (t int); ROLLBACK; ...and it will just work as you expect. Oracle doesn't, nor does MSSQL. As far as I know, other than Postgres, only Sybase ASE, Informix, DB2 UDB, and Firebird support transaction DDL.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    Well, https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/4591/ddl-commands-in-transactions-in-sql-server-versus-oracle/ https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/4591/ddl-commands-in-...
  - mayoff 6y ago
    DDL is transactional in SQLite.
  - castorp 6y ago
    > Very few databases support transactional DDL Postgres, SQL Server, Firebird, DB2, SQLite, Ingres, Informix, Teradata, Vertica all support transactional DDL
    - nycdotnet 6y ago
      SQL Server partially supports it - indexes for example are not versioned which causes snapshot transactions to fail if someone rebuilds an index - even if it’s not in scope of the snapshot.
      - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
        That doesn't sound right by my experience, Could you give a link please? I'm concerned I've not heard of this. Probably because it's MVCC/snapshot isolation which I'm not familiar with.
danpalmer 6y ago
We have a database server at work that costs us about $10k a year. It’s bare metal so that gets a nice spec. We’re probably a little over provisioned, but not crazy so. The sticker price of the Oracle licence for this would be about $400k a year. It’s just a complete non-starter for most companies.
msla 6y ago
> No license fees is huge. My company saves tens of thousands on license fees when we can't really afford it. It isn't always about affording it, it's about risk reduction, or the perception thereof: Every single time the company I work for has to renew a license, it has to once again initiate the long, painful process of finding its ass with both hands. "Why are we paying for this? Who exactly is using it? Why are they using it? How much will this cost? Can we make it cost less? Given that it's impossible for us to negotiate this cost, how can we make the company we're licensing it from not charge us as much money as it's inevitably going to? When is this license due? Why hasn't IT, which has no purchasing authority, fixed this yet?" With Postgres and CentOS and other OSS, none of that happens. The C-levels never know, so they never get a chance to do their headless-chicken dance routine. Much more relaxing.
skunkworker 6y ago
Having DDL is nice until you are trying to add indexes to a production system and can’t have it locking the entire table. Then you need to add the index concurrently and Postgres does not support concurrent index creation inside of a DDL transaction.
OrangeUnicorn12 6y ago
Some points for you, if I may: - Why are you worried about license fees as a developer? :-) Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap, I would use it everywhere. And if you need those "partitioning", "parallel execution" etc - your business is Enterprise, and you can afford such price tags. (I know, there will be a sh1tst0rm now, but please think about what IO said from business POV) - Oracle Public Cloud gives you database extremely fast - and you will never have issues with license audit - The name of "Rollback of DDLs" is "no developer access to production" and "UAT" :-) - hmmm... $> rman rman> connect target rman> backup database plus archivelog delete input; rman> exit What can be easier? Are you a huge fan of Vacuuming, XID Freezing, WAL optimisations etc. etc.? The MVCC in Postgress, in my view (!) is joke from academia, where they had not a single DBA :-)
- OrangeUnicorn12 6y ago
  Yeah, bring on the downvotes :-), it started already ... Ok - considering the audience, obviously the best database is JS based KV Store with AI optimisation, controlled by K8s! You know, "schema on write", "schema as a code", APIs etc.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    I guess the negative reactions are because you're making statements without anything to back them up. > Why are you worried about license fees as a developer? Lots of developers are involved to some extent in financial decisions. And in any case, I'd be worried about losing my job because Oracle had bankrupted my employer.. > Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap Postgres is free, and open source too. > Oracle Public Cloud gives you database extremely fast It's extremely unlikely that devs will want to host a database in Oracle's cloud, and everything else in AWS/Azure/GCP. > and you will never have issues with license audit The very fact you felt the need to throw that in is exactly why people hate Oracle so much - they are absolutely infamous for screwing customers out of every cent. > The name of "Rollback of DDLs" is "no developer access to production" and "UAT" As others have said, it's useful for testing changes in pre-prod environments - so you can make sure stuff works before it gets to prod. > Are you a huge fan of Vacuuming, XID Freezing, WAL optimisations etc. etc.? This makes no sense; vacuum is automatic, and why would you not want knobs to tweak settings to your workload? Oracle has plenty, so I don't get your beef here. > The MVCC in Postgress, in my view (!) is joke from academia, where they had not a single DBA I've never heard a single sole claim such a thing - do you have any sources?

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.
- dataminded 6y ago
  not sure why a simple joke was worth a downvote -- hope the downvote made you a little bit happier somehow

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

> Rollback of DDLs Oracle can't roll back these (create table/drop index etc)? That really surprises me. Pretty certain MSSQL can, because I've used it. Amazed, actually, that oracle can't.

atombender 6y ago
Very few databases support transactional DDL, meaning that you can do something like: BEGIN; DROP TABLE foo; CREATE TABLE bar (t int); ROLLBACK; ...and it will just work as you expect. Oracle doesn't, nor does MSSQL. As far as I know, other than Postgres, only Sybase ASE, Informix, DB2 UDB, and Firebird support transaction DDL.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Well, https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/4591/ddl-commands-in-transactions-in-sql-server-versus-oracle/ https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/4591/ddl-commands-in-...
- mayoff 6y ago
  DDL is transactional in SQLite.
- castorp 6y ago
  > Very few databases support transactional DDL Postgres, SQL Server, Firebird, DB2, SQLite, Ingres, Informix, Teradata, Vertica all support transactional DDL
  - nycdotnet 6y ago
    SQL Server partially supports it - indexes for example are not versioned which causes snapshot transactions to fail if someone rebuilds an index - even if it’s not in scope of the snapshot.
    - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
      That doesn't sound right by my experience, Could you give a link please? I'm concerned I've not heard of this. Probably because it's MVCC/snapshot isolation which I'm not familiar with.

danpalmer 6y ago

We have a database server at work that costs us about $10k a year. It’s bare metal so that gets a nice spec. We’re probably a little over provisioned, but not crazy so. The sticker price of the Oracle licence for this would be about $400k a year. It’s just a complete non-starter for most companies.

msla 6y ago

> No license fees is huge. My company saves tens of thousands on license fees when we can't really afford it. It isn't always about affording it, it's about risk reduction, or the perception thereof: Every single time the company I work for has to renew a license, it has to once again initiate the long, painful process of finding its ass with both hands. "Why are we paying for this? Who exactly is using it? Why are they using it? How much will this cost? Can we make it cost less? Given that it's impossible for us to negotiate this cost, how can we make the company we're licensing it from not charge us as much money as it's inevitably going to? When is this license due? Why hasn't IT, which has no purchasing authority, fixed this yet?" With Postgres and CentOS and other OSS, none of that happens. The C-levels never know, so they never get a chance to do their headless-chicken dance routine. Much more relaxing.

skunkworker 6y ago

Having DDL is nice until you are trying to add indexes to a production system and can’t have it locking the entire table. Then you need to add the index concurrently and Postgres does not support concurrent index creation inside of a DDL transaction.

OrangeUnicorn12 6y ago

Some points for you, if I may: - Why are you worried about license fees as a developer? :-) Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap, I would use it everywhere. And if you need those "partitioning", "parallel execution" etc - your business is Enterprise, and you can afford such price tags. (I know, there will be a sh1tst0rm now, but please think about what IO said from business POV) - Oracle Public Cloud gives you database extremely fast - and you will never have issues with license audit - The name of "Rollback of DDLs" is "no developer access to production" and "UAT" :-) - hmmm... $> rman rman> connect target rman> backup database plus archivelog delete input; rman> exit What can be easier? Are you a huge fan of Vacuuming, XID Freezing, WAL optimisations etc. etc.? The MVCC in Postgress, in my view (!) is joke from academia, where they had not a single DBA :-)

OrangeUnicorn12 6y ago
Yeah, bring on the downvotes :-), it started already ... Ok - considering the audience, obviously the best database is JS based KV Store with AI optimisation, controlled by K8s! You know, "schema on write", "schema as a code", APIs etc.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I guess the negative reactions are because you're making statements without anything to back them up. > Why are you worried about license fees as a developer? Lots of developers are involved to some extent in financial decisions. And in any case, I'd be worried about losing my job because Oracle had bankrupted my employer.. > Seriously speaking, start with Oracle SE2. It is so cheap Postgres is free, and open source too. > Oracle Public Cloud gives you database extremely fast It's extremely unlikely that devs will want to host a database in Oracle's cloud, and everything else in AWS/Azure/GCP. > and you will never have issues with license audit The very fact you felt the need to throw that in is exactly why people hate Oracle so much - they are absolutely infamous for screwing customers out of every cent. > The name of "Rollback of DDLs" is "no developer access to production" and "UAT" As others have said, it's useful for testing changes in pre-prod environments - so you can make sure stuff works before it gets to prod. > Are you a huge fan of Vacuuming, XID Freezing, WAL optimisations etc. etc.? This makes no sense; vacuum is automatic, and why would you not want knobs to tweak settings to your workload? Oracle has plenty, so I don't get your beef here. > The MVCC in Postgress, in my view (!) is joke from academia, where they had not a single DBA I've never heard a single sole claim such a thing - do you have any sources?