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Serious question: Can someone explain to me why would someone still be using Oracle in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open source alternativ

by fb03 4y ago

Serious question: Can someone explain to me why would someone still be using Oracle in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open source alternatives like PostgreSQL, which have none of these shenanigans? Maybe legacy software that would be expensive to rewrite? I'm a backend developer and I regularly kickstart systems (and get to choose which components we are going to use in the stack) and I fail to grasp in what kind of project I'd need to be to even consider "this might need us to bring Oracle to the table". Again, honest to goodness question, looking to learn. Is there some edge to Oracle compared to the FOSS stuff that I'm not aware?

plantain 4y ago
Oracle has a much more effective sales team than PostgreSQL. A few basketball tickets to the right managers makes all the difference.
- fb03 4y ago
  I see. I guess you are right. The endless Samsara of people with a MBA and their churn to keep plates spinning.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  I know why Oracle does this, but I can't comprehend why the customer's senior leadership and the owners tolerate this embezzlement, which hurts the company and is criminal.
- lazyfanatic 4y ago
  This answer contains more truth in it than any technical answer ever will.
- sprayk 4y ago
  We can all be so blind sometimes to the 8th layer of the OSI model.
ch_123 4y ago
While there may be reasons to pick Oracle for greenfield projects in 2022, I suspect most of the business comes from companies which have been on Oracle for a very long time and have huge amounts of critical data in it. Oracle has likely calibrated their pricing so that it's always slightly cheaper to stay on Oracle than to move elsewhere.
- homeland221 4y ago
  Doubt that calibration is the impetus to stay with Oracle. Most C-suites are quite dumb when it comes to technical stuff. They also don't value technical people more than it is just a replaceable organic "machinery". I have seen many instances IT advising moving away from Oracle but every additional budget to do so (even if it is just time and no direct dollars involve) even if just to test feasibility is shotdown. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of dollars they gladly pay as long as they freely grumble that their staff too dependent on Oracle tech.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    "Hundreds of thousands of dollars" is cheap compared to "staff", and staff time costs direct dollars.
  - cduzz 4y ago
    Oracle and AWS offer the same offerings at different points in the product maturity lifecycle. Oracle absolutely solves very hard problems, provides stability and continuity and is 100% the right solution (cost inclusive) for some hard problems. I'd recommend you recalibrate your judgement of "all thems"
    - iwillbenice 4y ago
    - alfalfasprout 4y ago
      > provides stability and continuity and is 100% the right solution (cost inclusive) for some hard problems. What kinds of hard problems? I think a big part of the discussion here is centered around the fact that aside from legacy software that's exclusively compatible with oracle (in which case you're stuck with it) there isn't yet a compelling reason to use it otherwise vs. eg; postgres w/ a support contract or even something hosted. FWIW a lot of things people have tried to shoehorn into a traditional RDBMS can be accomplished other ways too.
cdogl 4y ago
A large part of the workforce makes a living maintaining and extending systems, not building them. In fact, I call that success.
adrr 4y ago
It’s not for new development but ERPs which require it. Oracle also makes a bunch of ERP platforms.
ngcc_hk 4y ago
You may expand to DB2, IMS etc. The question as usual IT is not everything. It is everything to us. But not to business. For new business. But most big business started long time ago. If it makes business sense to migrate they would. Business sense. Of course in some it does make sense but it did not. USA tax ?
_visgean 4y ago
I had a friend working as a project manager for company using oracle, i asked him the same question, he said they looked into it - if they could get rid of 100m bill they would be happy to use anything else but some functionality was not really there.
- eliaspro 4y ago
  It'd be probably a fraction of the costs to hire competent developers to implement the missing features in PostgreSQL.
  - xmcqdpt2 4y ago
    Given this is the platform we interact on, you are likely a competent developer right? Would you apply for that job? Non-tech company seeking competent developers to move 100s of thousands of lines of code and sql scripts written by juniors over twenty years from Oracle to Postgres. Must have plenty of Oracle experience but also Postgres experience. Will have to coordinate with DBAs across business units and coerce them to help you in (eventually) axing them. There is no amount of money that would get me to sign up! And also I wouldn't trust the current team to interview and recruit competent developers!
    - twodave 4y ago
      Heck yeah I'd sign up for that! Honestly, this is the kind of work that can sustain an entire consulting firm. - It's specialized, so you can charge more for it. And I mean come on, we're saving you millions of dollars. I can charge you a LOT and everyone still wins. - It's repetitive, so you can train people to do it and then start earning margins as they replicate the process across the organization. - It's even fulfilling. Yeah, I said it. Would you rather go work on another to-do app in [pick an obscure fruit or animal]-framework for your blog? Count me out of _that_ crap. Any Oracle DB you work on in the wild is going to have an impact on thousands of people--a positive one if you do your job well.
    - jeltz 4y ago
      Yes, I would sign up! That sounds like a fun job which pays well. I love that kind of jobs.
mickeyp 4y ago
Because despite its predatory pricing and quirks, it's actually a pretty good database? There's an enormous amount of larger businesses for whom the database _is_ the business. (Well, databases plural, they'll inevitably have many.) I've worked for places where the vendor of the software that sits on top of the DB is either defunct, gone AWOL or too pricey to consider upgrading what ever version of software we were using. I worked one place where we had to large hadron collide data from Sybase and Oracle together. Live. No batching. The whole thing had to plug into some decades old Delphi crud apps + some financial software somewhere else. Oracle + dblink made that possible. It even, as I recall, did proper two-phase across the dblink. I merely queried -- yes, I know PG kinda has the same feature nowadays -- across the database boundaries and wrote some pg/Sql to make things work. 10 minutes and $10k (or w/e the Sybase connector cost) later and we had a POC, and later that month, a working system. Pretty? No. But it worked well, and two disparate software products written in different eras that were never meant to talk to one another now did. And it saves us millions in licencing + bespoke software and expensive consultants. There are few limits to what you can do with Oracle, and that is its strength. When you have weirdo requirements, you can probably do it with Oracle + some skilled DBAs and be assured it'll still run in 20 years. As for PG: I love PG, and use it for everything greenfield. But its replication is still a planet-sized joke. There are more competing methods and processes than there are JS frameworks. With Oracle, you've got DBAs who know this stuff inside out, and it works, and it has a million-billion ways of matching the needs of your business. With PG? I don't even know who to call if things are up the creek.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  It's not really a good database. By most actual database-related metrics, it's worse than most of its competitors on durability, performance, cost, etc. It's just one that has people to call when it breaks.
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    > it's worse than most of its competitors on durability, performance, cost, etc. When you say competitors, do you mean: 1. paid competitors like DB2/MSSQL 2. free competitors like Postgres/MariaDB 3. both
helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Existing systems. Migrating large mission critical systems with lots of SQL is surprisingly complex and expensive. Not only will they be tied to Oracle they are probably tied to a specific version that costs a fortune to be maintained.
- narrator 4y ago
  I did a migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL and saved a ton of money. I'm happy to say that automated integration tests for everything made cutting over not too bad. The other thing that helped was PostgreSQL consultants to plan and execute the data migration.
jrumbut 4y ago
It speaks to a marketing failure anyway. Shouldn't we be getting reminded of whatever that situation is where an Oracle database would be useful? Even if it's just compliance or political ("if you want a military contract, you'd better say you're using Oracle"). I remember years ago certain features (materialized views, maybe?) were Oracle-only, but Postgres has more of those now and I'm not sure what's left.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
username_my1 4y ago
The answer I got from a head of IT of a medium size traditional company is that they have shitloads of processes, scripts, server calls all running without anyone of the people who wrote them on board anymore… they all work perfectly together, transactions are always guaranteed. Their job is simply to understand the machine itself rather than the software and make sure they keep it running
friendzis 4y ago
1. Sales. Oracle will sell you not only the database engine, but also spec hardware, Cloud Control and similar things. Essentially they sell consulting and appliance in one package. This can sound like a good deal to management, detached from boots on the ground, in larger companies. 2. Support and guarantees. Postgres comes with no exrpress liabilities while Oracle offers some guarantees. Data loss being "their problem" can be a nice clause for business people. 3. Legacy projects. Migrating schemas between engines is usually doable exercise. Migrating application logic can be multi-year project for a decently sized, capable team. 3.1. Cross-project dependencies. Exchanging data via database rather than APIs is more common than one might think. Changing database engine in such circumstances becomes exponentially harder the more projects are involved.
- sinuhe69 4y ago
  AFAIK, Oracle also offers large discount/kickbacks for the chief, who knows to negotiate.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > Exchanging data via database rather than APIs is more common than one might think. I heard Kevlin Henney call databases "one huge global variable"
cerved 4y ago
Large companies typically run ERP and related systems on Oracle. Supply chain, finance, hr etc. These system were often implemented decades ago and companies are reluctant to poke around that. It's also very likely implemented by some consultants and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of weird Oracle specific functionality used. Convoluted stored procedures that nobody understands and nobody touches because then it probably breaks. Oracle also has a very aggressive sales organization. They will defend their accounts. That might be with carrots like discounts. It may also be with sticks, like licensing audits.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  Often the consulting was done... by Oracle itself!
- 4RealFreedom 4y ago
  I've seen Oracle 1000 times for ERP.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Anyone who hasn’t used an ERP would be amazed in good and bad ways by it. We think people using the slightly older version of HTTPS is weird - ERP systems are often so old that the grandkids of whoever started writing it are retiring. Oracle has things like “pretend to be a version of the database from 20 years ago so this weird load-bearing piece of software doesn’t break.” The only thing I know of that comes close is Windows itself with its shins and Linus’s absolute refusal to break userspace.
cduzz 4y ago
There's a business model of "Give us enough money and we will solve all your Foo related problems." Oracle has a widget to solve any IT / Data related problem for a naive enterprise who's core business is not IT. One vendor, one bill, one support contract, assurance that if your board asks you to do some other thing (we need a thingawidgit for compliance for our peoplethinger! Oracle's got peoplethingerwidget !). Amazon's AWS is the same for IT these days. Need a queue? We've got 3! Interestingly, oracle where I work, where we have a lot of oracle, was only 2-3x the cost of our slack license. So either slack was absurdly expensive or oracle isn't actually that expensive, or possibly both. But we only use oracle DB + some support oracle DB widgets, not the whole oracle ecosystem. And for us, the oracle DB and the widgets have been actual facilitators in our enterprise. Need a CDC system? They've got 3!
- sidlls 4y ago
  Or you just haven't undergone an Oracle audit yet. From what I saw, their business model is entirely predatory.
cturner 4y ago
It's an enterprise thing. I have seen these dynamics with database vendors: databases are sticky, clever license agreements. A commercial database vendor system gave us several free licenses (or cores or something like that) for their platform as part of a deal. Sounds good at first glance. But when you shut down an instance, that returns a license to the free pool. As a result, nobody has incentive to ever do this work. Indeed, if you did free up a license, one of your colleagues might notice and use it on another project. After all, it's free. The way that databases are commonly used, they become an informal API for communication between systems. One codebase writes an order to the database, another reads it, and another reports on it. Once you this situation, it is difficult to remove. That would require coordination between multiple teams, and it doesn't generate revenue. For a piece of software like this, it only needs to get in the door once.
alex_suzuki 4y ago
No CIO ever got fired for buying… Oracle?
buro9 4y ago
I've seen things written in Oracle 20-30 years ago that I've still not seen PostgreSQL or SQL Server do. An example? A full credit card processor in stored procs. I really mean full, it handled the call outs to financial providers, managed the 2-phase commit, replied to the app, all within a single call (Stripe API is the closest I've seen to this in the 30 years since). It remains possible to do things that are crazy and powerful, very quickly. Whether the people here would want to is a different question. But if you are in a large corp and Oracle is available it is easy to do crazy things. Once these things are done, Oracle is going nowhere. They are now in your system for the life of your product.
- icedchai 4y ago
  Oracle does have quite an impressive set of capabilities. However, for every company that absolutely needs Oracle, there are probably 10+ that don't and could work fine with PostgreSQL or SQL Server today (though maybe not 20 years ago.) I worked in an Oracle shop early in my career, and would never want to go back to that again.
- sprayk 4y ago
  Curious: what is the version control story like for stored procs? The two that naively come to mind would be 1. Organized in some regular repo with some tooling to deploy/sync 2. Some way of tracking versions _in a DB_ and some magic set of queries that can deploy from said DB.
- zaphar 4y ago
  Not only could you do that in Postgres, but you could do it in a real language of your choice. The reason you don't see it done is because the people who choose Postgres over Oracle know that it's kind of a terrible way to build it if you care about long term maintainability. That method of building fossilizes quicker than quickcrete.
Spooky23 4y ago
Usually it’s either because your company has built a practice around it, more commonly you need Oracle Financials, etc. Once you have the Oracle infrastructure for Financials, PeopleSoft, etc, the question is does it make sense to stand up services around the Oracle portion. The cost of the people to run Postgres or MS SQL server may be more than the marginal add of Oracle.
ibejoeb 4y ago
> honest to goodness question, looking to learn. Awesome. I have probably dozens of posts over the years about why one would choose Oracle, so I won't rehash it all right here, but I'll link some relevant ones. Briefly though: > in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open source alternatives This isn't really true. Postgres is a truly excellent RDBMS, but most people compare it at a rather superficial level, because many use only very superficial features. If you need to insert, select, update, and delete, you have a lot of compelling options. (This can easily veer off in another direction, but I astounds me how many people shun the database and chose to reimplement innate features in procedural code outside of the database.) For example: Oracle has an extremely richly featured, powerful, and stable data warehousing feature set that has no open source analog. A lot boils down to build vs buy. Some places build because it's exciting. Some don't even know that the thing being built has existed for three decades. This applies equally to open source. It's entirely possible that a materialized view will obviate your whole external caching infrastructure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246208
- oneplane 4y ago
  I imagine that some of the choices to lean into the RDBMS specifics also come from application architectures and data complexities. If you have a few large monolithic applications that share multiple schemas (so no single-owner), and you then need to do classic OLAP, OLTP and cubing, you're essentially stuck with database solutions from the same era. Same goes for record-oriented software and mainframes or low level rtos software that requires real mode. The requirements never stand on their own (which is pretty much what you wrote anyway ;-) If a BI solution can do gRPC to a few specific services that contain the datasources for the dimensions you need, then nearly all OLAP-native features are irrelevant. It also means that the dynamic resource usage means that your overall cost in terms of energy and money are significantly lower. The big 'if' in all of those is going to be 'does the organisation have the skills and the willpower', and often the answer is no. Because hiring some MSP to do your BI, data management and have some single vendor do your ERP, EHRM, ESB on top of some RDBMS "sounds" good and means it's their responsibility, and when a user then sends them a support ticket about how crappy their UX is and how much the workflow sucks, they will get ignored and somewhere in some expensive place, old grey men shake hands on yet another successful quarter ;-)
dagw 4y ago
Is there some edge to Oracle compared to the FOSS stuff that I'm not aware? One is that there is still a lot of third party (or in house) software out there that doesn't support any of the FOSS databases for its backend. So if you depend on one of those tools then you're not only replacing Oracle, but a bunch of additional software as well. In fact very few people choose Oracle in a vacuum. They 'choose' one of these software platforms and then end up with Oracle. Every time I've worked with Oracle it was because we wanted to/had to use some software that had to use Oracle. Another point is that there are very few really large PostgreSQL database deployments out there and very few people who have any experience working with huge Postgres databases, while Oracle has been doing that for a long time. If you need 100s of TB in a data warehouse there are hardly any FOSS systems out there with any sort of track record, while for Oracle it is their bread and butter. That being said, the only people I know still deploying new Oracle systems today are people supporting legacy systems. Even the former pro Oracle people I know are using Postgres these days for almost everything, if only to get away from Oracle's licensing bullshit.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I agree 100% with the "100s of TB" comment. More: If you find a bug in the database, they will fix it ASAP -- sometimes 24 hours or less then will send a patch. (I have seen it more than once in my career, and I am not a super databasey person.) Of course, you pay dearly, but that part is good value for businesses where "the DB is the biz". Businesses that come to mind are telco, utilities (elec, water, gas, etc.), retail/commercial banks, insurance, hospitals, pharma, universities, gov't. In the extreme, they can generate TBs of data per day.
  - flaviut 4y ago
    > If you find a bug in the database, they will fix it ASAP -- sometimes 24 hours or less then will send a patch On the other hand, there's this legendary description of what working at Oracle is like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
    - 4y ago
elorant 4y ago
Because when something doesn’t work you can pick up the phone and call someone at Oracle. Who would you call when you have problems with Postgres?
- bombcar 4y ago
  People say you can buy commercial support for Postgres - and you can - buy someone who has not seen full enterprise support from the likes of Oracle or even IBM would be amazed. When your database is down and you’re a major bank and losing millions a minute, Oracle can respond appropriately.
bob1029 4y ago
Legacy applications that use mountains of PL/SQL to run business logic. It's possible to refactor this, but these systems are usually the backbone of things like a semiconductor factory, so you don't get a lot of room to play around with alternatives. Paying a billion dollars to keep the current stack running is worth it for a lot of orgs.
- chasil 4y ago
  I heard some time ago that Intel runs the VMS operating system on much of its production floor. DEC's relational database for this platform was Rdb. The Rdb database, originally written by DEC, was bought by Oracle in the '90s. It was actually the first commercial database to implement a "cost-based optimizer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Rdb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Rdb It was purchased by Oracle, is still maintained, and is likely on Intel's VMS systems. https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.html https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.htm... (I also have an account on a system that runs it.)
throwaway2037 4y ago
We are using Oracle for something that could fit into SQLite. I am sure we overpay by 100x to 1000x. (To be fair, yes FOSS can be free as in beer, but big corps need/want to pay for support contracts, either directly with the vendor, or indirectly via RedHat, etc.) I agree 100% about PG. It is ridiculously good these days. To be fair, MariaDB is also very good for most use cases in 2022. I asked the same question at my office. The answer surprised me: We are a big corp who pays Oracle squillions of dollars for all kinds of licenses (DB, Java, hardware, other stuff). They said: If we cut our 20x global DBs from this project, probably Oracle will just increase license fees elsewhere. I was told we probably need total exit from Oracle DBs (whole company, which probably has 1000s of Oracle DBs). That is tough. Still, it is weird to me that we don't hire 2-5 (10!) ridiculously skilled (and expensive) "old school database consultants" -- you know what I mean: neckbeards (gents), librarian glasses with little chain around neck (ladies), big hair (both!), corduroy pants, jackets with elbow patches, turtlenecks... the full 1990s package. Move them from team to team over next 10 years. Step by step: Replace Oracle with PG or MariaDB. I am sure it would pay for itself 100x.
whatthesmack 4y ago
I'm right there with you on PostgreSQL's impressiveness... I love it and use it everywhere. However, having done a decent amount of database performance analysis, there is a very good reason I've seen to use Oracle instead of anything else: Oracle scales more consistently linearly on the biggest variety of workloads compared to any other RDBMS. Give it more cores and it is the RDBMS most likely to give you more performance no matter what you're doing.
- VHRanger 4y ago
  There hasn't been reliable benchmarks to that effect. In fact, Oracle and MS SQL specifically disallow posting benchmark comparisons publicly
HunOL 4y ago
If core of your business is not IT you can not be fired for selecting Oracle.
debarshri 4y ago
I can tell you from my past experiences, organisation who started out with Oracle databases and products have a hard time moving away from them to opensource alternatives. The migration risk and cost of reskilling is very high. There are actual Oracle product experts in organisations who also create resistance towards migration as well as rewriting lot of business logics and procedures is alot of risk. If you start a new company today I'm sure you won't use Oracle database there are better alternatives.
ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
Where I work, our business is mainly based on using our in-house legacy system which uses Oracle database for storage. Migrating away from Oracle involves completely rewriting the legacy system (which I think should have been started many years ago) and that costs money. As it happens, we're specifically using Oracle Standard Edition in a RAC configuration which is nice and cheap. RAC on standard edition allows you to use up to 4 physical processor sockets without needing to go to Enterprise edition. One particularly annoying part of Oracle licensing is that if you run it on a virtual machine, they require licensing for every core on the virtual host - it makes no difference how many cores are allocated to the database instance itself.
ubermonkey 4y ago
Do you have the same question about SQL Server, or is it just Oracle you're asking about?
- fb03 4y ago
  That would also be really cool, if you could post some comments on MSSQL. I would like to know in general what these paid products really have that we cannot really build with FOSS right now and what kinds of problems/product decisions would make them considerable options when kickstarting new projects. Thanks in advance.
  - dillab2 4y ago
    I would recommend focusing on DB2 and Oracle rather than MSSQL if you are trying to learn about that. MSSQL is not particularly expensive in comparison and doesn't really try to compete in the big enterprise league. It's much more similar to FOSS solutions.
bityard 4y ago
I imagine a lot of HNers don't really understand the scope of what Oracle offers in the enterprise setting. This question is like asking: why would anyone still be using AWS in 2022 when OpenStack is available for free? Yes, PostgreSQL is an impressive piece of software and it certainly deserves all the praise it gets. But the complexity of many mid- to large-sized businesses, particularly those in high-stakes finance and bio/medical tech is impossible to imagine until you've seen it. Years back, I worked in a mid-size finance company whose computing infrastructure was three identical datacenters scattered across the city. One hot, two standby for DR. All populated with big expensive IBM iron and storage with fast network and fiber channel links between them. All writes were continuously and automatically replicated to all three sites so that even a complete outage at one site meant the workloads could be shifted to another site with virtually no interruption to the business. All of the business logic was written in-house in a variety of languages (but mostly Java) and there were a half-dozen separate teams that existed ONLY to manage the infrastructure. An outage could legitimately cost the company millions of dollars (depending on the scope) in either lost opportunity, customer sales, or regulatory fines. I was on the Unix Admin team and not counting the toxic management, the scope of our jobs was relatively easy: provision computing resources as LPARs or VMs, manage storage, manage users and permissions, make sure backups worked, automate the shit out of whatever we could, troubleshoot issues, interface with vendors, etc. The DBAs who sat in the next row over had much harder jobs. They did many of the same things we did, but in the context of Oracle DBs. In addition, they also had to be experts in SQL and schema design, PLUS understand the business decisions underlying the data and structure of the databases they were responsible for. Which sometimes meant arguing with the application developers who didn't grok the platforms their code was running on had finite amounts of RAM, etc. I don't have any love for Oracle as a company, but they just don't have any competition when it comes to deep integration with highly complex enterprise systems like this.
- fb03 4y ago
  Thank you for the reply!
ransom1538 4y ago
Vendor lockin. For example I know soutwest airlines uses oracle [clusters, relplicas, etc]. You are going to upgrade them to PostgreSQL? I just don't see that, happening, well, ever.
exabrial 4y ago
> I regularly kickstart systems You should absolutely start with a minimal stack and Postgres is a good choice for that. Everyone likes to pretend that scaling is their problem because it's a sexy problem to have... but really their problem is that the product doesn't exist. Postgres cannot hold a candle to Oracle or even DB2 when it comes to scale. I've worked at two places did real-time transaction processing on gigunda IBM mainframes. One was Oracle and the other was DB2... This was 15 years ago and the databases were terabytes in size back then... all queryable in milliseconds. Backups, restoration, and schema changes while the system is running is not an issue... And these systems simply did not go down, ever.
- kubota 4y ago
  FWIW there are several horizontally scaleable relational databases out there (Cockroach, Yugabyte) compatible with pg wire protocol. So you can mostly keep your application queries / driver the same and move to a horizontal solution easier than if you were on Oracle. I don't think Oracle has a horizontally scaling solution. Might be wrong though.
csours 4y ago
Oracle offers some integrations that are not found in other DBMS products. If a software product uses those integrations it may be difficult to migrate. Bear in mind that DB code is often not unit tested or integration tested outside of manual tests. This makes moving off of Oracle a huge tech debt burden. === Ask me how I know this
jmull 4y ago
For my company it's the massive cost and difficulty of rewriting a major portion of the codebase of a 20-something year old successful product. It's been attempted a few times over the years, but gets canceled once management realizes the actual cost and difficulty.
nnurmanov 4y ago
There are differences as these two products have different backgrounds, but based on what I see there is strong movement from Oracle. It will take sometime for application vendors to port their products on open source databases, when this happens the landscape will be different.
matchagaucho 4y ago
The "rip and replace" costs far exceed maintaining an existing Oracle stack for many businesses. Nouveau DB projects and tech companies undoubtedly lean towards FOSS options. The IBM solution is aimed at those maintaining an existing stack.
nova22033 4y ago
Lots of COTS products that depend on Oracle for a backend. Can't just upgrade to Postgres. The vendor may not have the $$ to support multiple databases. Not just COTS...lots of in house systems
KronisLV 4y ago
I've used Oracle in a number of projects and I'm inclined to say that it's passable, but if given the choice I would look at alternatives for new projects. One of the main reasons for this is that setting up local instances (even with Oracle XE) for development or CI processes (e.g. for full end to end tests, that test the actual database layer) is just not as easy as with the alternatives. It might scale up well, but it doesn't scale down that nicely at all. In addition, I had numerous things breaking when attempting to export and import some data and setup a local database instance for a project that hadn't really been developed with that in mind and up until then had just used a shared database for multiple developers. That said, Oracle has some nice features to it, such as automatic indexing (which oddly enough doesn't let you manually delete those indices, which is annoying), SQL Tuning Advisor in SQL Developer, some nice performance tracing and reporting functionality, a pretty good procedural language (PL/SQL is up there with PL/pgSQL), good performance in many cases (except I've had the query optimizer pick the wrong plan and have a query take 45 minutes instead of 3 seconds if a hint wasn't present) and a lot of enterprise oriented things I don't use or need, but someone else might. Tooling wise, I'd say that it's okay. The SQL Developer tooling is okay (maybe apart from their data modeler functionality, which corrupts files and breaks), though personally I like MySQL Workbench as well and dislike pgAdmin somewhat, so my opinions might not be very mainstream. The drivers are available and can be installed without too many issues, there are relatively few surprises there, outside of maybe how widely supported they are (or rather, are not) in certain third party open source tools out there, like various migration utilities. I suspect that many pick Oracle because that's what has worked for them in the past, some pick it due to the old adage of "Nobody got fired for picking IBM" which can hold true for Oracle in certain environments, others have a mindset of free being bad, or maybe they are perfectly justified in wanting some more support from the vendor. Frankly, pick whatever fits the task at hand best and is suitable for your own needs: be it PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB or something else altogether. If given the choice, I'll personally optimize for technologies that are likely to give me the least amount of headaches, as long as they still fit the project goals. That said, comments like this were interesting to behold: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
r00tanon 4y ago
Main reason would be they have a lot of legacy code written for Oracle. For new projects, the choices are wide open.
eitland 4y ago
> Serious question: Can someone explain to me why would someone still be using Oracle in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open source alternatives like PostgreSQL, which have none of these shenanigans? Several years ago I asked this to a company that used Oracle databases in their products. I pointed out they could save $10 000 for each installation just in licensing, and probably 3 days of intense work to install it (yes, this was my main motivation. I was so good at it I had absolutely no problems with the advanced DBA training, but it still took 1-2 days to set it up the 20th time I did it, and if one missed a single step, like to stop one of the installers between step 2 and 3 to open a terminal and chmod one of the files the installer had just created, you often had to start from scratch.) The answer was enlightening and went something like this: "The first thing you don't consider is that the license cost is paid by our customers, and we get a cut. Switching to Postgres would cost us money. The second thing is that customers see Oracle as a sign of quality. It is easier to sell the product when we say it is built on Oracle "

by fb03 4y ago

plantain 4y ago

Oracle has a much more effective sales team than PostgreSQL. A few basketball tickets to the right managers makes all the difference.

fb03 4y ago
I see. I guess you are right. The endless Samsara of people with a MBA and their churn to keep plates spinning.
hgsgm 4y ago
I know why Oracle does this, but I can't comprehend why the customer's senior leadership and the owners tolerate this embezzlement, which hurts the company and is criminal.
lazyfanatic 4y ago
This answer contains more truth in it than any technical answer ever will.
sprayk 4y ago
We can all be so blind sometimes to the 8th layer of the OSI model.

ch_123 4y ago

While there may be reasons to pick Oracle for greenfield projects in 2022, I suspect most of the business comes from companies which have been on Oracle for a very long time and have huge amounts of critical data in it. Oracle has likely calibrated their pricing so that it's always slightly cheaper to stay on Oracle than to move elsewhere.

homeland221 4y ago
Doubt that calibration is the impetus to stay with Oracle. Most C-suites are quite dumb when it comes to technical stuff. They also don't value technical people more than it is just a replaceable organic "machinery". I have seen many instances IT advising moving away from Oracle but every additional budget to do so (even if it is just time and no direct dollars involve) even if just to test feasibility is shotdown. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of dollars they gladly pay as long as they freely grumble that their staff too dependent on Oracle tech.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  "Hundreds of thousands of dollars" is cheap compared to "staff", and staff time costs direct dollars.
- cduzz 4y ago
  Oracle and AWS offer the same offerings at different points in the product maturity lifecycle. Oracle absolutely solves very hard problems, provides stability and continuity and is 100% the right solution (cost inclusive) for some hard problems. I'd recommend you recalibrate your judgement of "all thems"
  - iwillbenice 4y ago
  - alfalfasprout 4y ago
    > provides stability and continuity and is 100% the right solution (cost inclusive) for some hard problems. What kinds of hard problems? I think a big part of the discussion here is centered around the fact that aside from legacy software that's exclusively compatible with oracle (in which case you're stuck with it) there isn't yet a compelling reason to use it otherwise vs. eg; postgres w/ a support contract or even something hosted. FWIW a lot of things people have tried to shoehorn into a traditional RDBMS can be accomplished other ways too.

cdogl 4y ago

A large part of the workforce makes a living maintaining and extending systems, not building them. In fact, I call that success.

adrr 4y ago

It’s not for new development but ERPs which require it. Oracle also makes a bunch of ERP platforms.

ngcc_hk 4y ago

You may expand to DB2, IMS etc. The question as usual IT is not everything. It is everything to us. But not to business. For new business. But most big business started long time ago. If it makes business sense to migrate they would. Business sense. Of course in some it does make sense but it did not. USA tax ?

_visgean 4y ago

I had a friend working as a project manager for company using oracle, i asked him the same question, he said they looked into it - if they could get rid of 100m bill they would be happy to use anything else but some functionality was not really there.

eliaspro 4y ago
It'd be probably a fraction of the costs to hire competent developers to implement the missing features in PostgreSQL.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  Given this is the platform we interact on, you are likely a competent developer right? Would you apply for that job? Non-tech company seeking competent developers to move 100s of thousands of lines of code and sql scripts written by juniors over twenty years from Oracle to Postgres. Must have plenty of Oracle experience but also Postgres experience. Will have to coordinate with DBAs across business units and coerce them to help you in (eventually) axing them. There is no amount of money that would get me to sign up! And also I wouldn't trust the current team to interview and recruit competent developers!
  - twodave 4y ago
    Heck yeah I'd sign up for that! Honestly, this is the kind of work that can sustain an entire consulting firm. - It's specialized, so you can charge more for it. And I mean come on, we're saving you millions of dollars. I can charge you a LOT and everyone still wins. - It's repetitive, so you can train people to do it and then start earning margins as they replicate the process across the organization. - It's even fulfilling. Yeah, I said it. Would you rather go work on another to-do app in [pick an obscure fruit or animal]-framework for your blog? Count me out of _that_ crap. Any Oracle DB you work on in the wild is going to have an impact on thousands of people--a positive one if you do your job well.
  - jeltz 4y ago
    Yes, I would sign up! That sounds like a fun job which pays well. I love that kind of jobs.

mickeyp 4y ago

Because despite its predatory pricing and quirks, it's actually a pretty good database? There's an enormous amount of larger businesses for whom the database _is_ the business. (Well, databases plural, they'll inevitably have many.) I've worked for places where the vendor of the software that sits on top of the DB is either defunct, gone AWOL or too pricey to consider upgrading what ever version of software we were using. I worked one place where we had to large hadron collide data from Sybase and Oracle together. Live. No batching. The whole thing had to plug into some decades old Delphi crud apps + some financial software somewhere else. Oracle + dblink made that possible. It even, as I recall, did proper two-phase across the dblink. I merely queried -- yes, I know PG kinda has the same feature nowadays -- across the database boundaries and wrote some pg/Sql to make things work. 10 minutes and $10k (or w/e the Sybase connector cost) later and we had a POC, and later that month, a working system. Pretty? No. But it worked well, and two disparate software products written in different eras that were never meant to talk to one another now did. And it saves us millions in licencing + bespoke software and expensive consultants. There are few limits to what you can do with Oracle, and that is its strength. When you have weirdo requirements, you can probably do it with Oracle + some skilled DBAs and be assured it'll still run in 20 years. As for PG: I love PG, and use it for everything greenfield. But its replication is still a planet-sized joke. There are more competing methods and processes than there are JS frameworks. With Oracle, you've got DBAs who know this stuff inside out, and it works, and it has a million-billion ways of matching the needs of your business. With PG? I don't even know who to call if things are up the creek.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
It's not really a good database. By most actual database-related metrics, it's worse than most of its competitors on durability, performance, cost, etc. It's just one that has people to call when it breaks.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > it's worse than most of its competitors on durability, performance, cost, etc. When you say competitors, do you mean: 1. paid competitors like DB2/MSSQL 2. free competitors like Postgres/MariaDB 3. both

helsinkiandrew 4y ago

Existing systems. Migrating large mission critical systems with lots of SQL is surprisingly complex and expensive. Not only will they be tied to Oracle they are probably tied to a specific version that costs a fortune to be maintained.

narrator 4y ago
I did a migration from Oracle to PostgreSQL and saved a ton of money. I'm happy to say that automated integration tests for everything made cutting over not too bad. The other thing that helped was PostgreSQL consultants to plan and execute the data migration.

jrumbut 4y ago

It speaks to a marketing failure anyway. Shouldn't we be getting reminded of whatever that situation is where an Oracle database would be useful? Even if it's just compliance or political ("if you want a military contract, you'd better say you're using Oracle"). I remember years ago certain features (materialized views, maybe?) were Oracle-only, but Postgres has more of those now and I'm not sure what's left.

bfgoodrich 4y ago

username_my1 4y ago

The answer I got from a head of IT of a medium size traditional company is that they have shitloads of processes, scripts, server calls all running without anyone of the people who wrote them on board anymore… they all work perfectly together, transactions are always guaranteed. Their job is simply to understand the machine itself rather than the software and make sure they keep it running

friendzis 4y ago

1. Sales. Oracle will sell you not only the database engine, but also spec hardware, Cloud Control and similar things. Essentially they sell consulting and appliance in one package. This can sound like a good deal to management, detached from boots on the ground, in larger companies. 2. Support and guarantees. Postgres comes with no exrpress liabilities while Oracle offers some guarantees. Data loss being "their problem" can be a nice clause for business people. 3. Legacy projects. Migrating schemas between engines is usually doable exercise. Migrating application logic can be multi-year project for a decently sized, capable team. 3.1. Cross-project dependencies. Exchanging data via database rather than APIs is more common than one might think. Changing database engine in such circumstances becomes exponentially harder the more projects are involved.

sinuhe69 4y ago
AFAIK, Oracle also offers large discount/kickbacks for the chief, who knows to negotiate.
cratermoon 4y ago
> Exchanging data via database rather than APIs is more common than one might think. I heard Kevlin Henney call databases "one huge global variable"

cerved 4y ago

Large companies typically run ERP and related systems on Oracle. Supply chain, finance, hr etc. These system were often implemented decades ago and companies are reluctant to poke around that. It's also very likely implemented by some consultants and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of weird Oracle specific functionality used. Convoluted stored procedures that nobody understands and nobody touches because then it probably breaks. Oracle also has a very aggressive sales organization. They will defend their accounts. That might be with carrots like discounts. It may also be with sticks, like licensing audits.

xmcqdpt2 4y ago
Often the consulting was done... by Oracle itself!
4RealFreedom 4y ago
I've seen Oracle 1000 times for ERP.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Anyone who hasn’t used an ERP would be amazed in good and bad ways by it. We think people using the slightly older version of HTTPS is weird - ERP systems are often so old that the grandkids of whoever started writing it are retiring. Oracle has things like “pretend to be a version of the database from 20 years ago so this weird load-bearing piece of software doesn’t break.” The only thing I know of that comes close is Windows itself with its shins and Linus’s absolute refusal to break userspace.

cduzz 4y ago

There's a business model of "Give us enough money and we will solve all your Foo related problems." Oracle has a widget to solve any IT / Data related problem for a naive enterprise who's core business is not IT. One vendor, one bill, one support contract, assurance that if your board asks you to do some other thing (we need a thingawidgit for compliance for our peoplethinger! Oracle's got peoplethingerwidget !). Amazon's AWS is the same for IT these days. Need a queue? We've got 3! Interestingly, oracle where I work, where we have a lot of oracle, was only 2-3x the cost of our slack license. So either slack was absurdly expensive or oracle isn't actually that expensive, or possibly both. But we only use oracle DB + some support oracle DB widgets, not the whole oracle ecosystem. And for us, the oracle DB and the widgets have been actual facilitators in our enterprise. Need a CDC system? They've got 3!

sidlls 4y ago
Or you just haven't undergone an Oracle audit yet. From what I saw, their business model is entirely predatory.

cturner 4y ago

It's an enterprise thing. I have seen these dynamics with database vendors: databases are sticky, clever license agreements. A commercial database vendor system gave us several free licenses (or cores or something like that) for their platform as part of a deal. Sounds good at first glance. But when you shut down an instance, that returns a license to the free pool. As a result, nobody has incentive to ever do this work. Indeed, if you did free up a license, one of your colleagues might notice and use it on another project. After all, it's free. The way that databases are commonly used, they become an informal API for communication between systems. One codebase writes an order to the database, another reads it, and another reports on it. Once you this situation, it is difficult to remove. That would require coordination between multiple teams, and it doesn't generate revenue. For a piece of software like this, it only needs to get in the door once.

alex_suzuki 4y ago

No CIO ever got fired for buying… Oracle?

buro9 4y ago

I've seen things written in Oracle 20-30 years ago that I've still not seen PostgreSQL or SQL Server do. An example? A full credit card processor in stored procs. I really mean full, it handled the call outs to financial providers, managed the 2-phase commit, replied to the app, all within a single call (Stripe API is the closest I've seen to this in the 30 years since). It remains possible to do things that are crazy and powerful, very quickly. Whether the people here would want to is a different question. But if you are in a large corp and Oracle is available it is easy to do crazy things. Once these things are done, Oracle is going nowhere. They are now in your system for the life of your product.

icedchai 4y ago
Oracle does have quite an impressive set of capabilities. However, for every company that absolutely needs Oracle, there are probably 10+ that don't and could work fine with PostgreSQL or SQL Server today (though maybe not 20 years ago.) I worked in an Oracle shop early in my career, and would never want to go back to that again.
sprayk 4y ago
Curious: what is the version control story like for stored procs? The two that naively come to mind would be 1. Organized in some regular repo with some tooling to deploy/sync 2. Some way of tracking versions _in a DB_ and some magic set of queries that can deploy from said DB.
zaphar 4y ago
Not only could you do that in Postgres, but you could do it in a real language of your choice. The reason you don't see it done is because the people who choose Postgres over Oracle know that it's kind of a terrible way to build it if you care about long term maintainability. That method of building fossilizes quicker than quickcrete.

Spooky23 4y ago

Usually it’s either because your company has built a practice around it, more commonly you need Oracle Financials, etc. Once you have the Oracle infrastructure for Financials, PeopleSoft, etc, the question is does it make sense to stand up services around the Oracle portion. The cost of the people to run Postgres or MS SQL server may be more than the marginal add of Oracle.

ibejoeb 4y ago

> honest to goodness question, looking to learn. Awesome. I have probably dozens of posts over the years about why one would choose Oracle, so I won't rehash it all right here, but I'll link some relevant ones. Briefly though: > in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open source alternatives This isn't really true. Postgres is a truly excellent RDBMS, but most people compare it at a rather superficial level, because many use only very superficial features. If you need to insert, select, update, and delete, you have a lot of compelling options. (This can easily veer off in another direction, but I astounds me how many people shun the database and chose to reimplement innate features in procedural code outside of the database.) For example: Oracle has an extremely richly featured, powerful, and stable data warehousing feature set that has no open source analog. A lot boils down to build vs buy. Some places build because it's exciting. Some don't even know that the thing being built has existed for three decades. This applies equally to open source. It's entirely possible that a materialized view will obviate your whole external caching infrastructure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23068341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32246208

oneplane 4y ago
I imagine that some of the choices to lean into the RDBMS specifics also come from application architectures and data complexities. If you have a few large monolithic applications that share multiple schemas (so no single-owner), and you then need to do classic OLAP, OLTP and cubing, you're essentially stuck with database solutions from the same era. Same goes for record-oriented software and mainframes or low level rtos software that requires real mode. The requirements never stand on their own (which is pretty much what you wrote anyway ;-) If a BI solution can do gRPC to a few specific services that contain the datasources for the dimensions you need, then nearly all OLAP-native features are irrelevant. It also means that the dynamic resource usage means that your overall cost in terms of energy and money are significantly lower. The big 'if' in all of those is going to be 'does the organisation have the skills and the willpower', and often the answer is no. Because hiring some MSP to do your BI, data management and have some single vendor do your ERP, EHRM, ESB on top of some RDBMS "sounds" good and means it's their responsibility, and when a user then sends them a support ticket about how crappy their UX is and how much the workflow sucks, they will get ignored and somewhere in some expensive place, old grey men shake hands on yet another successful quarter ;-)

dagw 4y ago

Is there some edge to Oracle compared to the FOSS stuff that I'm not aware? One is that there is still a lot of third party (or in house) software out there that doesn't support any of the FOSS databases for its backend. So if you depend on one of those tools then you're not only replacing Oracle, but a bunch of additional software as well. In fact very few people choose Oracle in a vacuum. They 'choose' one of these software platforms and then end up with Oracle. Every time I've worked with Oracle it was because we wanted to/had to use some software that had to use Oracle. Another point is that there are very few really large PostgreSQL database deployments out there and very few people who have any experience working with huge Postgres databases, while Oracle has been doing that for a long time. If you need 100s of TB in a data warehouse there are hardly any FOSS systems out there with any sort of track record, while for Oracle it is their bread and butter. That being said, the only people I know still deploying new Oracle systems today are people supporting legacy systems. Even the former pro Oracle people I know are using Postgres these days for almost everything, if only to get away from Oracle's licensing bullshit.

throwaway2037 4y ago
I agree 100% with the "100s of TB" comment. More: If you find a bug in the database, they will fix it ASAP -- sometimes 24 hours or less then will send a patch. (I have seen it more than once in my career, and I am not a super databasey person.) Of course, you pay dearly, but that part is good value for businesses where "the DB is the biz". Businesses that come to mind are telco, utilities (elec, water, gas, etc.), retail/commercial banks, insurance, hospitals, pharma, universities, gov't. In the extreme, they can generate TBs of data per day.
- flaviut 4y ago
  > If you find a bug in the database, they will fix it ASAP -- sometimes 24 hours or less then will send a patch On the other hand, there's this legendary description of what working at Oracle is like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
  - 4y ago

elorant 4y ago

Because when something doesn’t work you can pick up the phone and call someone at Oracle. Who would you call when you have problems with Postgres?

bombcar 4y ago
People say you can buy commercial support for Postgres - and you can - buy someone who has not seen full enterprise support from the likes of Oracle or even IBM would be amazed. When your database is down and you’re a major bank and losing millions a minute, Oracle can respond appropriately.

bob1029 4y ago

Legacy applications that use mountains of PL/SQL to run business logic. It's possible to refactor this, but these systems are usually the backbone of things like a semiconductor factory, so you don't get a lot of room to play around with alternatives. Paying a billion dollars to keep the current stack running is worth it for a lot of orgs.

chasil 4y ago
I heard some time ago that Intel runs the VMS operating system on much of its production floor. DEC's relational database for this platform was Rdb. The Rdb database, originally written by DEC, was bought by Oracle in the '90s. It was actually the first commercial database to implement a "cost-based optimizer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Rdb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Rdb It was purchased by Oracle, is still maintained, and is likely on Intel's VMS systems. https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.html https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/rdb.htm... (I also have an account on a system that runs it.)

throwaway2037 4y ago

We are using Oracle for something that could fit into SQLite. I am sure we overpay by 100x to 1000x. (To be fair, yes FOSS can be free as in beer, but big corps need/want to pay for support contracts, either directly with the vendor, or indirectly via RedHat, etc.) I agree 100% about PG. It is ridiculously good these days. To be fair, MariaDB is also very good for most use cases in 2022. I asked the same question at my office. The answer surprised me: We are a big corp who pays Oracle squillions of dollars for all kinds of licenses (DB, Java, hardware, other stuff). They said: If we cut our 20x global DBs from this project, probably Oracle will just increase license fees elsewhere. I was told we probably need total exit from Oracle DBs (whole company, which probably has 1000s of Oracle DBs). That is tough. Still, it is weird to me that we don't hire 2-5 (10!) ridiculously skilled (and expensive) "old school database consultants" -- you know what I mean: neckbeards (gents), librarian glasses with little chain around neck (ladies), big hair (both!), corduroy pants, jackets with elbow patches, turtlenecks... the full 1990s package. Move them from team to team over next 10 years. Step by step: Replace Oracle with PG or MariaDB. I am sure it would pay for itself 100x.

whatthesmack 4y ago

I'm right there with you on PostgreSQL's impressiveness... I love it and use it everywhere. However, having done a decent amount of database performance analysis, there is a very good reason I've seen to use Oracle instead of anything else: Oracle scales more consistently linearly on the biggest variety of workloads compared to any other RDBMS. Give it more cores and it is the RDBMS most likely to give you more performance no matter what you're doing.

VHRanger 4y ago
There hasn't been reliable benchmarks to that effect. In fact, Oracle and MS SQL specifically disallow posting benchmark comparisons publicly

HunOL 4y ago

If core of your business is not IT you can not be fired for selecting Oracle.

debarshri 4y ago

I can tell you from my past experiences, organisation who started out with Oracle databases and products have a hard time moving away from them to opensource alternatives. The migration risk and cost of reskilling is very high. There are actual Oracle product experts in organisations who also create resistance towards migration as well as rewriting lot of business logics and procedures is alot of risk. If you start a new company today I'm sure you won't use Oracle database there are better alternatives.

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago

Where I work, our business is mainly based on using our in-house legacy system which uses Oracle database for storage. Migrating away from Oracle involves completely rewriting the legacy system (which I think should have been started many years ago) and that costs money. As it happens, we're specifically using Oracle Standard Edition in a RAC configuration which is nice and cheap. RAC on standard edition allows you to use up to 4 physical processor sockets without needing to go to Enterprise edition. One particularly annoying part of Oracle licensing is that if you run it on a virtual machine, they require licensing for every core on the virtual host - it makes no difference how many cores are allocated to the database instance itself.

ubermonkey 4y ago

Do you have the same question about SQL Server, or is it just Oracle you're asking about?

fb03 4y ago
That would also be really cool, if you could post some comments on MSSQL. I would like to know in general what these paid products really have that we cannot really build with FOSS right now and what kinds of problems/product decisions would make them considerable options when kickstarting new projects. Thanks in advance.
- dillab2 4y ago
  I would recommend focusing on DB2 and Oracle rather than MSSQL if you are trying to learn about that. MSSQL is not particularly expensive in comparison and doesn't really try to compete in the big enterprise league. It's much more similar to FOSS solutions.

bityard 4y ago

I imagine a lot of HNers don't really understand the scope of what Oracle offers in the enterprise setting. This question is like asking: why would anyone still be using AWS in 2022 when OpenStack is available for free? Yes, PostgreSQL is an impressive piece of software and it certainly deserves all the praise it gets. But the complexity of many mid- to large-sized businesses, particularly those in high-stakes finance and bio/medical tech is impossible to imagine until you've seen it. Years back, I worked in a mid-size finance company whose computing infrastructure was three identical datacenters scattered across the city. One hot, two standby for DR. All populated with big expensive IBM iron and storage with fast network and fiber channel links between them. All writes were continuously and automatically replicated to all three sites so that even a complete outage at one site meant the workloads could be shifted to another site with virtually no interruption to the business. All of the business logic was written in-house in a variety of languages (but mostly Java) and there were a half-dozen separate teams that existed ONLY to manage the infrastructure. An outage could legitimately cost the company millions of dollars (depending on the scope) in either lost opportunity, customer sales, or regulatory fines. I was on the Unix Admin team and not counting the toxic management, the scope of our jobs was relatively easy: provision computing resources as LPARs or VMs, manage storage, manage users and permissions, make sure backups worked, automate the shit out of whatever we could, troubleshoot issues, interface with vendors, etc. The DBAs who sat in the next row over had much harder jobs. They did many of the same things we did, but in the context of Oracle DBs. In addition, they also had to be experts in SQL and schema design, PLUS understand the business decisions underlying the data and structure of the databases they were responsible for. Which sometimes meant arguing with the application developers who didn't grok the platforms their code was running on had finite amounts of RAM, etc. I don't have any love for Oracle as a company, but they just don't have any competition when it comes to deep integration with highly complex enterprise systems like this.

fb03 4y ago
Thank you for the reply!

ransom1538 4y ago

Vendor lockin. For example I know soutwest airlines uses oracle [clusters, relplicas, etc]. You are going to upgrade them to PostgreSQL? I just don't see that, happening, well, ever.

exabrial 4y ago

> I regularly kickstart systems You should absolutely start with a minimal stack and Postgres is a good choice for that. Everyone likes to pretend that scaling is their problem because it's a sexy problem to have... but really their problem is that the product doesn't exist. Postgres cannot hold a candle to Oracle or even DB2 when it comes to scale. I've worked at two places did real-time transaction processing on gigunda IBM mainframes. One was Oracle and the other was DB2... This was 15 years ago and the databases were terabytes in size back then... all queryable in milliseconds. Backups, restoration, and schema changes while the system is running is not an issue... And these systems simply did not go down, ever.

kubota 4y ago
FWIW there are several horizontally scaleable relational databases out there (Cockroach, Yugabyte) compatible with pg wire protocol. So you can mostly keep your application queries / driver the same and move to a horizontal solution easier than if you were on Oracle. I don't think Oracle has a horizontally scaling solution. Might be wrong though.

csours 4y ago

Oracle offers some integrations that are not found in other DBMS products. If a software product uses those integrations it may be difficult to migrate. Bear in mind that DB code is often not unit tested or integration tested outside of manual tests. This makes moving off of Oracle a huge tech debt burden. === Ask me how I know this

jmull 4y ago

For my company it's the massive cost and difficulty of rewriting a major portion of the codebase of a 20-something year old successful product. It's been attempted a few times over the years, but gets canceled once management realizes the actual cost and difficulty.

nnurmanov 4y ago

There are differences as these two products have different backgrounds, but based on what I see there is strong movement from Oracle. It will take sometime for application vendors to port their products on open source databases, when this happens the landscape will be different.

matchagaucho 4y ago

The "rip and replace" costs far exceed maintaining an existing Oracle stack for many businesses. Nouveau DB projects and tech companies undoubtedly lean towards FOSS options. The IBM solution is aimed at those maintaining an existing stack.

nova22033 4y ago

Lots of COTS products that depend on Oracle for a backend. Can't just upgrade to Postgres. The vendor may not have the $$ to support multiple databases. Not just COTS...lots of in house systems

KronisLV 4y ago

I've used Oracle in a number of projects and I'm inclined to say that it's passable, but if given the choice I would look at alternatives for new projects. One of the main reasons for this is that setting up local instances (even with Oracle XE) for development or CI processes (e.g. for full end to end tests, that test the actual database layer) is just not as easy as with the alternatives. It might scale up well, but it doesn't scale down that nicely at all. In addition, I had numerous things breaking when attempting to export and import some data and setup a local database instance for a project that hadn't really been developed with that in mind and up until then had just used a shared database for multiple developers. That said, Oracle has some nice features to it, such as automatic indexing (which oddly enough doesn't let you manually delete those indices, which is annoying), SQL Tuning Advisor in SQL Developer, some nice performance tracing and reporting functionality, a pretty good procedural language (PL/SQL is up there with PL/pgSQL), good performance in many cases (except I've had the query optimizer pick the wrong plan and have a query take 45 minutes instead of 3 seconds if a hint wasn't present) and a lot of enterprise oriented things I don't use or need, but someone else might. Tooling wise, I'd say that it's okay. The SQL Developer tooling is okay (maybe apart from their data modeler functionality, which corrupts files and breaks), though personally I like MySQL Workbench as well and dislike pgAdmin somewhat, so my opinions might not be very mainstream. The drivers are available and can be installed without too many issues, there are relatively few surprises there, outside of maybe how widely supported they are (or rather, are not) in certain third party open source tools out there, like various migration utilities. I suspect that many pick Oracle because that's what has worked for them in the past, some pick it due to the old adage of "Nobody got fired for picking IBM" which can hold true for Oracle in certain environments, others have a mindset of free being bad, or maybe they are perfectly justified in wanting some more support from the vendor. Frankly, pick whatever fits the task at hand best and is suitable for your own needs: be it PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB or something else altogether. If given the choice, I'll personally optimize for technologies that are likely to give me the least amount of headaches, as long as they still fit the project goals. That said, comments like this were interesting to behold: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

r00tanon 4y ago

Main reason would be they have a lot of legacy code written for Oracle. For new projects, the choices are wide open.

eitland 4y ago

> Serious question: Can someone explain to me why would someone still be using Oracle in 2022 when we have equally capable or even superior open source alternatives like PostgreSQL, which have none of these shenanigans? Several years ago I asked this to a company that used Oracle databases in their products. I pointed out they could save $10 000 for each installation just in licensing, and probably 3 days of intense work to install it (yes, this was my main motivation. I was so good at it I had absolutely no problems with the advanced DBA training, but it still took 1-2 days to set it up the 20th time I did it, and if one missed a single step, like to stop one of the installers between step 2 and 3 to open a terminal and chmod one of the files the installer had just created, you often had to start from scratch.) The answer was enlightening and went something like this: "The first thing you don't consider is that the license cost is paid by our customers, and we get a cut. Switching to Postgres would cost us money. The second thing is that customers see Oracle as a sign of quality. It is easier to sell the product when we say it is built on Oracle "