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Article title is pure click-bait. PgBouncer adds complexity. If you need it, you need it. If you don't need it, then you added complexity for nothing. > since

by solatic 2mo ago

Article title is pure click-bait. PgBouncer adds complexity. If you need it, you need it. If you don't need it, then you added complexity for nothing. > since neither IBM nor Oracle is a service that any self-respecting person not part of an enterprise sales cycle would actually use Author needs a serious ego check. There are legitimate engineering reasons to pick IBM Cloud (like if you need to support Z mainframes, which you will sometimes need if you sell to those enterprise folk) as well as Oracle Cloud (they built datacenters in cities that are not served by other cloud providers and can thus offer the lowest latency). These reasons may not be common, but they're certainly legitimate.

mike_hearn 2mo ago
It's an ironic claim because the Oracle cloud has great support for the Oracle Database, which doesn't require "bouncers" or equivalent. Its support for server-side connection pooling, client side load balancing (SCAN) and horizontal scaling means it offers exactly what the author wants - a single URL that just magically works and scales to any amount of work or connections cheaply. https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/26/jjdbc/database-resident-connection-pooling.html#GUID-8B2DD8CE-5E6A-4D15-8997-D3261F137D8E https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2... Yet he says simultaneously that Postgres hasn't improved in a decade, but also no self-respecting person would use a database that fixes all the problems he identified. Right! Disclosure: work part time in the Oracle DB group. Things I say here are unvetted, personal opinions.
- tensor 2mo ago
  Oracle DB may be excellent, but there is no chance I'd ever ever ever do business with Oracle due to their aggressive business practices.
- moooo99 2mo ago
  I do not think it is a mystery why people favor Postgres over OracleDB, is it?
  - mike_hearn 2mo ago
    Depends what you mean by people. Outside of the startup space you'll find commercial RDBMS everywhere, especially OracleDB. Not many are running banks or hospitals on Postgres.
    - moooo99 2mo ago
      > Not many are running banks or hospitals on Postgres. Certainly not. But the key here is that not many are running banks or hospitals in the first place. I work at a big company, we run on SAP as the big commercial DBMS, but also have some oracle instances. By number by far the most widespread commercial RDBMS seems to be SQL Server
- btown 2mo ago
  Slightly off topic, but a friend of mine worked on Microsoft SQL Server a ~decade ago, and I recall all sorts of conversations on types of optimizations they were doing that sounded truly magical compared to other databases at the time. There was a meaningful frustration on the team that their features weren't getting as much hype as the databases du jour. I think it's very relevant to consider that "enterprise" adjacent databases may not support the licensing you need at scale - but that doesn't mean they don't have great engineering and research teams that are solving really difficult challenges, and those challenges may be highly relevant to your workflows. Go into things with an open mind, if not an open wallet!
  - mike_hearn 2mo ago
    Yeah, that's a common sentiment. I regularly see people describe features commercial RDBMS' have shipped for years as if they were unmapped frontiers in computer science. Awareness of their capabilities is very low; I was once there too and remember being taken by surprise when I realized how far ahead of open source they truly are. IMO startups can get edge by exploiting this information asymmetry. Spending a bit more to solve all your DB problems and buy productivity is a no brainer as they have VC funding but not enough time. A single bad DB outage can be the difference between beating a competitor or losing to them. Ditto for slowly shipping a feature because your senior dev is trying to implement their own message queue engine or other random thing that comes out of the box in other RDBMS engines. The costs depend what you compare it to. People tend to overestimate it. Cost multipler in Azure is very roughly about 4x, it seems (caveat: am not a cloud pricing expert, comparisons may vary wildly). That doesn't include the cost of bouncers and other hacks that increase the Postgres cost, so it's artificially generous to PG. If you want better features on the Postgres side then you might look at AlloyDB in Google Cloud which is only 2x cheaper on compute but where storage is actually ~3x more expensive! The extra money buys you a lot. Not only far more features but you can provision a smaller database because the Oracle DB burst scales in response to load. You are only charged for the extra you use so you can provision for normal load without padding extra for emergencies or peaks. It's a genuine cluster that scales up writes more or less indefinitely without sharding if you design your schema right, that's synchronous multi-write master scaling too so its simple for apps. You don't face OpenAI style problems where the single Postgres master reaches its limits and the whole thing breaks requiring app redesigns. And you aren't just paying for an idle replica: all the capacity you buy can be used for queries. It also uses more efficient algorithms e.g. better MVCC with no autovacuuming problems. And a gazillion other things. So I think you can easily argue that value delivered is much greater than 2x-4x. The capability gap is much larger than 4x. Especially if you're the sort of startup where a bored dev might start citing Postgres' limitations to justify inventing their own DB infra, or where you hit its scaling limits and have to rearchitect - if that happens you'll never recover the cost difference, Oracle will always be cheaper. This happens because clouds don't charge databases at licensing+labor value+margin, prices are set at what the market will bear.
- paulryanrogers 2mo ago
  Oracle licensing audits scare off plenty of folks. At a small SaaS we were put off by the difficulty getting OracleDB's dev edition installed and working at all. While MySQL (then independent) and Pg were bare bones in comparison, they were very quick to get started, covered what was needed, and no risk of price spikes or time consuming audits. When pain points were encountered with MySQL and Pg there were plenty of flexible options to add into the mix. Later I saw a competitor being crushed by licensing for Informix when they didn't need more than ~10% of its features.
  - mike_hearn 2mo ago
    I believe you, but these days it's just a container launch to do local dev, no different to postgres. In the cloud there are no license audits. Those are only for on-prem setups where licensing servers aren't acceptable. If you don't need the features of a commercial database then they're not worth the cost indeed.
- brightball 2mo ago
  I use PG without PG Bouncer for non trivial traffic levels using the same type of application level connection pooling I’ve used for years with every other database. Bouncer is a nice option, but definitely not required.

by solatic 2mo ago

mike_hearn 2mo ago

It's an ironic claim because the Oracle cloud has great support for the Oracle Database, which doesn't require "bouncers" or equivalent. Its support for server-side connection pooling, client side load balancing (SCAN) and horizontal scaling means it offers exactly what the author wants - a single URL that just magically works and scales to any amount of work or connections cheaply. https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/26/jjdbc/database-resident-connection-pooling.html#GUID-8B2DD8CE-5E6A-4D15-8997-D3261F137D8E https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2... Yet he says simultaneously that Postgres hasn't improved in a decade, but also no self-respecting person would use a database that fixes all the problems he identified. Right! Disclosure: work part time in the Oracle DB group. Things I say here are unvetted, personal opinions.

tensor 2mo ago
Oracle DB may be excellent, but there is no chance I'd ever ever ever do business with Oracle due to their aggressive business practices.
moooo99 2mo ago
I do not think it is a mystery why people favor Postgres over OracleDB, is it?
- mike_hearn 2mo ago
  Depends what you mean by people. Outside of the startup space you'll find commercial RDBMS everywhere, especially OracleDB. Not many are running banks or hospitals on Postgres.
  - moooo99 2mo ago
    > Not many are running banks or hospitals on Postgres. Certainly not. But the key here is that not many are running banks or hospitals in the first place. I work at a big company, we run on SAP as the big commercial DBMS, but also have some oracle instances. By number by far the most widespread commercial RDBMS seems to be SQL Server
btown 2mo ago
Slightly off topic, but a friend of mine worked on Microsoft SQL Server a ~decade ago, and I recall all sorts of conversations on types of optimizations they were doing that sounded truly magical compared to other databases at the time. There was a meaningful frustration on the team that their features weren't getting as much hype as the databases du jour. I think it's very relevant to consider that "enterprise" adjacent databases may not support the licensing you need at scale - but that doesn't mean they don't have great engineering and research teams that are solving really difficult challenges, and those challenges may be highly relevant to your workflows. Go into things with an open mind, if not an open wallet!
- mike_hearn 2mo ago
  Yeah, that's a common sentiment. I regularly see people describe features commercial RDBMS' have shipped for years as if they were unmapped frontiers in computer science. Awareness of their capabilities is very low; I was once there too and remember being taken by surprise when I realized how far ahead of open source they truly are. IMO startups can get edge by exploiting this information asymmetry. Spending a bit more to solve all your DB problems and buy productivity is a no brainer as they have VC funding but not enough time. A single bad DB outage can be the difference between beating a competitor or losing to them. Ditto for slowly shipping a feature because your senior dev is trying to implement their own message queue engine or other random thing that comes out of the box in other RDBMS engines. The costs depend what you compare it to. People tend to overestimate it. Cost multipler in Azure is very roughly about 4x, it seems (caveat: am not a cloud pricing expert, comparisons may vary wildly). That doesn't include the cost of bouncers and other hacks that increase the Postgres cost, so it's artificially generous to PG. If you want better features on the Postgres side then you might look at AlloyDB in Google Cloud which is only 2x cheaper on compute but where storage is actually ~3x more expensive! The extra money buys you a lot. Not only far more features but you can provision a smaller database because the Oracle DB burst scales in response to load. You are only charged for the extra you use so you can provision for normal load without padding extra for emergencies or peaks. It's a genuine cluster that scales up writes more or less indefinitely without sharding if you design your schema right, that's synchronous multi-write master scaling too so its simple for apps. You don't face OpenAI style problems where the single Postgres master reaches its limits and the whole thing breaks requiring app redesigns. And you aren't just paying for an idle replica: all the capacity you buy can be used for queries. It also uses more efficient algorithms e.g. better MVCC with no autovacuuming problems. And a gazillion other things. So I think you can easily argue that value delivered is much greater than 2x-4x. The capability gap is much larger than 4x. Especially if you're the sort of startup where a bored dev might start citing Postgres' limitations to justify inventing their own DB infra, or where you hit its scaling limits and have to rearchitect - if that happens you'll never recover the cost difference, Oracle will always be cheaper. This happens because clouds don't charge databases at licensing+labor value+margin, prices are set at what the market will bear.
paulryanrogers 2mo ago
Oracle licensing audits scare off plenty of folks. At a small SaaS we were put off by the difficulty getting OracleDB's dev edition installed and working at all. While MySQL (then independent) and Pg were bare bones in comparison, they were very quick to get started, covered what was needed, and no risk of price spikes or time consuming audits. When pain points were encountered with MySQL and Pg there were plenty of flexible options to add into the mix. Later I saw a competitor being crushed by licensing for Informix when they didn't need more than ~10% of its features.
- mike_hearn 2mo ago
  I believe you, but these days it's just a container launch to do local dev, no different to postgres. In the cloud there are no license audits. Those are only for on-prem setups where licensing servers aren't acceptable. If you don't need the features of a commercial database then they're not worth the cost indeed.
brightball 2mo ago
I use PG without PG Bouncer for non trivial traffic levels using the same type of application level connection pooling I’ve used for years with every other database. Bouncer is a nice option, but definitely not required.