Hacker News Reader

Comment by copsarebastards | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a large company which will remain unnamed, who a few years after purchasing a 12-year unlimited support contract, switched to using Postgres. Read: they were already locked in to paying for Oracle's most expensive contract for 12 years, regardless of what services they used. In short, they concluded that due to the cost of developing for Oracle, it was cheaper to migrate to Postgres than to continue using Oracle even when Oracle was free.

View on HN

It is somewhat rare that companies will recognize the fallacy of sunk costs ("We've already spent so much, we need to do this"). I think the world would be a much different place if we could somehow overcome this cognitive error.

makes for good examples that everyone can learn from

easier said than done.

I see this repeated all the time and tend to label it "the investment-bias fallacy" but it's also called commitment bias. [0] Go into any casino where people are trying to win back their lost money is one classic cliché.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

"Sunk cost fallacy" is what my college "Engineering methods" course called it, but we are talking about the same concept.

In case anyone were wondering: Postgres deliberately resembles Oracle. EnterpriseDB is one of the official Postgres commercial flavors which is an even closer "clone" of Oracle DBMS with support options to make migration from ora easier.

> Postgres deliberately resembles Oracle.

I don't think that's really the case. We don't try to do anything different for the sake of it, but that's pretty much that.

> EnterpriseDB is one of the official Postgres commercial flavors

There are no 'official Postgres commercial flavors'. EDB is well known and contributes a fair amount to PG development, but that doesn't make them official.

[citation needed]

I guess one could say they deliberately resemble Oracle in that both DBs roughly implement the SQL standard, but this is by no means a clone, nor was it a smooth transition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com