Oracle and PostgreSQL Debate

Mark Brunelli writes DBAs are talking about the merits of the open source PostgreSQL database management system (DBMS) as compared to Oracle - and their opinions truly run the gamut. DBAs responding to the interview said they liked the low cost and ease of use of the open source database, while others said that Oracle's rich feature cannot be ignored. Still others talked about how well the two systems play together. According to one DBA, a gateway product from Oracle would be a welcome offering."

Comments

There are other options....

[jarich]

I've been working with Ingres recently. It's GPL and has a great enterprise-proven track record. Best of both worlds.

http://ingres.com/

DBA Comparisions - Oracle vs. PostgreSQL

[Anonymous Coward]

If they want something that plays nice with Oracle, they should take a look at http://www.enterprisedb.com/ .

One of the goals of the company is aimed specifically at making life easier for Oracle people on PostgreSQL.

Company I work for runs both PostgreSQL and Oracle. Years ago we were a PostgreSQL only shop. Along comes a Sr. Developer who touts Oracle to management, and they listened to him.

Now we have 2 Sr. Oracle DBAs, 1 Jr., and 2 PL/SQL programmers.

Oh yeah, we don't have any PostgreSQL DBAs. But we have just as many PostgreSQL servers.

Now we are moving some of our applications back to PostgreSQL, which of course scares the Oracle DBAs.

Our servers are heavy-hit. Thousands of queries per-second on both systems. PostgreSQL can keep up with Oracle, and Oracle can keep up with PostgreSQL.

One thing I've noticed about the market that is both good and bad for PostgreSQL - You can put out an Ad for an Oracle DBA and get hundreds of responces. Put one up for PostgreSQL and you get almost none. Almost a year we've had an Ad out for a PostgreSQL, there just arn't any.

And I don't think its because there arn't any full-time DBAs. The reality is PostgreSQL just doesn't need the same amount of staff that an equal amount of Oracle databases need. The good side, it just works and requires so little maintenence. The bad side? Its hard to sell to companies when they can't have someone full-time on it.

I'm curious with other companies experiences. How many full-time DBAs do you have for Oracle? How many for PostgreSQL?

Re:If you need Oracle, you need it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have become increasingly frustrated with Progress for about 2 versions now. The 4GL is clunky and limited, and the implementation of SQL is poor. Interoperability with free software tools, languages and databases is practically nonexistent, so you get tied into an all-progress solution. That just grinds my gears.

But at least empty string isn't a null. WTF were Oracle thinking?

Anyway, this is so offtopic. Postgres is entirely adequate for anything you would do with Progress, and it's relatively unencumbered with bullshit.

THIS is how source code availability matters

[WebCowboy]

I want to know who has a job where they have so much extra time on their hands that they can debug the source code of their database product.

Nobody except the active contributers to the RDBMS I'm guessing. Certainly not be. But I'll tell you my personal experience with PostgreSQL and how it being open source directly benefited me:

I was doing a project involving PgSQL many years ago (v6.2 I think) to manage a small inventory database. There was a problem that looked like a bug in PgSQL rather than a configuration issue (I think it was causing VACUUM to fail among other things but my memory fails me). What I clearly remember was how I resolved the issue, and it is the first time that the benefits of open source directly affected me and when I becane clearly sold on open source.

I had given up and since there wasn't a company to turn to I looked for contact emails in what passed for the docs at the time (they are MUCH better now) and on the website. I emailed one of the core developers and described my problem. He emailed me back the next day and thanked me for my feedback and said he had a few other reports of problems somewhat similar to mine. He also ATTACHED THE SOURCE CODE OF THE PATCH he had been working on that was not yet in the release on the website! I applied the patch and recompiled and bingo...it was back to normal!

Now I was (still am) far from a guru C programmer but as with a lot of people I can stumble my way around makefiles and GCC and patches and so forth, and I did have time to recompile PgSQL. I can also (at the instruction of one of the developers) to traces and such and send in the results and THEY can do the debugging with my help. If I was using Microsoft SQL Server and had a similar problem I'd be screwed: I'd have to call clueless tech support, or wander around the KB articles and hope to find the solution, and in this case I'd probably find a useledd KB article along the lines of "Microsoft has acknowledged this to be an issue and will provide a solution in the next available hotfix" telling me to do some kludgy, unacceptable workaround in the meantime, which could be days, or weeks...or maybe even never. I certainly would NEVER have the ear of a Microsoft programmer who wrote or reviewed the code as a lowly intern-type doing a small experimental project.

So there you go...I'm (a) not an "elite programmer", (b) never been part of the PostgreSQL team beyond exchanging emails with a team member, and (c) though some may say I am a nerd I moved out of my parents' home when I was 17 and never lived in their basement. Despite that I have indeed directly benefited from source code availability for software that I did not write.

Re:If you need Oracle, you need it.

[pamar]

I had the "pleasure" to work on eveolutive maintenance of a large Progress project for 4 years.

Progress, despite its name, is really a collection of relic, non-standard concepts and technologies, with bizzarre and arbitrary ideas like implicit transaction scope, rollback on memory data structures, a 4GL that grown in a sort of Frankestein monster of a language, pathetical error checking, inflexible data model and convoluted syntax to replicate stuff, like cursors, that other DBMS had sported for decades.

Add horrible performance under ODBC/JDBC ("but we have solved that now, and we needed only 3 major revisions of the platform to get it right!"), grudgily, non-integrated support for SQL (SQL-89 to be precise) a bolted-on-the-side OO (released this February, so untested in the field, apart from the obvious fact that they added another cartload of statements to a bloated language) and the fact that anything invented in the last 30 years (from sockets to XML) is either impossible to do or extremely clunky, and you have "Progress".

My opinion is that it survived because it was quite successfully in the 80s, and created a niche industry centered around specific vertical solutions.
Imagine Powerbuilder without the OO or the ability to interface with diverse RDBMS and you will have a vague idea of what Progress is.

Progress - the company - actually controls an umbrella of diverse technologies, some even very interesting like Sonic, but Progress - the product, is something that should have died a long ago, or be revamped instead of adding more and more stuff without ever deprecating language features from 5+ versions ago.

Re:I'm not convinced...

[el_womble]

I hate this doublethink. I both 100% agree with you and 100% hate the fact that your right.

Why do people associate the cost of the tool with the cost of the engineer? Surely a man who can create a masterpiece with a brush and an oil solute is worth more than some monkey with a digital camera and photoshop. I guess its just an easier metric for managers to deal with.

What annoys me the most is that this is why big companies, that make lousy solutions, are making a killing. The project I'm working on put out a tender for its platform technologies. Unsuprisingly, the technologies that won were BEA Weblogic (Container), Sun (Servers), Cisco (Networks) and Oracle (Database).

I know that the same product could be built using Tomcat (Container), Debian (Servers), OpenBSD (Networks) and PostgreSQL (Database) and work as well or better (the budget doesn't reflect the complexity in this case), and I know that they weren't even concidered because, as OSS solutions, they don't have a consultancy team running around making promises Dev can't keep. I used to believe that it was important that enterprise solutions came with enterprise support, however, I have yet to experience enterprise grade support from anyone, at least not in any form that was better than an OSS product.

But who am I trying to kid. If PHBs had a clue about technology they wouldn't be PHBs. The big corporations that can afford big iron software soultions exist because of pervasive ignorance and metric crunching abilities of middle management, and the zeal of their marketing dept, not becuase they know what their doing.