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Most banks, telcos, insurances, many private and government sectors are using it, and will keep using it for decades to come. The people who think otherwise don

Most banks, telcos, insurances, many private and government sectors are using it, and will keep using it for decades to come. The people who think otherwise don't have much experience in real world (TM) outside of startups and small shops. I don't think that ie Postgres has immediate onsite 24/7 support globally, which is much more important for business than pure performance per dollar or similar metrics and they are happy to pay for it. Also trying to find top notch DBAs in Oracle vs Postgres gives, at least here in Switzerland, very different numbers of resources available. Ie for banks its usually part of their core banking packages and performance-wise not much can replace that (but you need a small army of plsql experts to tame it, although there are plenty of those in the industry).

bayindirh 4y ago
Also, I'm not sure that you can buy off the shelf hardware from top vendors which guarantees transaction performance and reliability for PostgreSQL either. HPE, Dell, IBM, Oracle itself is building and selling systems designed and optimized for running Oracle databases, for at least a decade now?
throwawaylinux 4y ago
Allegedly 90% of the world's biggest banks run their core systems on mainframes. Oracle did offer their database on mainframe but stopped and the last supported release went EOL in 2013. There's still possibly extended support being paid for, but sounds like they possibly don't have a lot of the bank-on-mainframe market. I wonder what those banks use for their databases. IMS or DB2 maybe? Not so say your comment is wrong, there are thousands of banks and average assets of few hundred million. Unlikely they would fork out millions for mainframe setups. Majority of those could be on Oracle as you say.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  I know that one of our biggest national banks still run on mainframes for their core banking infrastructure, but there's so many satellite systems which are way more modern and use separate systems and servers. In these cases generally DBs are migrated to external clusters of their own (like HPE Superdome, Exadata or similarly tailored hardware) and connect via IB or IB like low latency, high performance networking. AFAIK, the bank I'm talking of is working with "Don't fix what is not broken" motto, and only move what's necessary to modern or external systems.
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    Huh. You mean the bank running the mainframe has moved database to a cluster of other systems? What does the mainframe run then? Business logic / applications in COBOL or ABAP or whatever?
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      It handles the torrent of banking transactions. Generally money movements, interest rates and such.

bayindirh 4y ago

Also, I'm not sure that you can buy off the shelf hardware from top vendors which guarantees transaction performance and reliability for PostgreSQL either. HPE, Dell, IBM, Oracle itself is building and selling systems designed and optimized for running Oracle databases, for at least a decade now?

throwawaylinux 4y ago

Allegedly 90% of the world's biggest banks run their core systems on mainframes. Oracle did offer their database on mainframe but stopped and the last supported release went EOL in 2013. There's still possibly extended support being paid for, but sounds like they possibly don't have a lot of the bank-on-mainframe market. I wonder what those banks use for their databases. IMS or DB2 maybe? Not so say your comment is wrong, there are thousands of banks and average assets of few hundred million. Unlikely they would fork out millions for mainframe setups. Majority of those could be on Oracle as you say.

bayindirh 4y ago
I know that one of our biggest national banks still run on mainframes for their core banking infrastructure, but there's so many satellite systems which are way more modern and use separate systems and servers. In these cases generally DBs are migrated to external clusters of their own (like HPE Superdome, Exadata or similarly tailored hardware) and connect via IB or IB like low latency, high performance networking. AFAIK, the bank I'm talking of is working with "Don't fix what is not broken" motto, and only move what's necessary to modern or external systems.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  Huh. You mean the bank running the mainframe has moved database to a cluster of other systems? What does the mainframe run then? Business logic / applications in COBOL or ABAP or whatever?
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    It handles the torrent of banking transactions. Generally money movements, interest rates and such.