Yandex.Mail's successful migration from Oracle to Postgres [pdf]

My endorsement of Switzerland is about legal jurisdiction, culture that respects privacy, and stability. Well-intentioned owners won't be forced to do the kinds of things we see in America or Russia. At worst, it will be something selective with a warrant. A nice foundation to build on.

Even though everyone I know here calls the process "bribing", it's greasing the wheels - in some ways, it's bad that it happens. At the same time though, everyone is allowed to participate in the bribing and whoever takes the bribes can and will settle for what they can get.

I wouldn't say dishonesty is more pervasive - quite the opposite, most people are brutally honest, sometimes to a fault. When it comes to official things, it's true, you can grease the wheels and get preferential treatment. Certain problems can go away with a few well placed notes, and so on. Schools are a bit different too since the collapse of the Soviet Union. From what I'm told, there's a lot of pressure from the state to ensure that students pass, so students will repeat through classes as long as necessary to pass them, and often professors will just give out the lowest possible passing grade to get rid of bad students. A little bit of cash will net you a better grade, which will get you access to better universities.

Just as an outsider looking in and watching, I see it more as the same bad system that exists elsewhere but at least the system is open to everyone.

The real problem is the economic situation and people that focus on personal enrichment by any means instead of building something sustainable. Basically, in an environment where you cannot be sure of what next year is going to look like, it's brutally rational to try and extract as much value now, as opposed to invest for the future.

As the result, you get everything from poor infrastructure investment and lack of true small business growth, all the way to bribing because the official taking the bribe isn't sure he or she will have this access tomorrow, so better to enrich now and as fast as possible.

This is not something that is endemic to Russian culture, but rather to the survival situation. Unfortunately, Russia seems to teeter in this state for centuries at a time.

Nah, perish the though!

Nervousness with regard to both police and local citizenry.

Couple of years ago ruble's exchange rates dropped significantly (it was ~33RUR for USD, now it's 64-65 rubles).

Monthly salaries for a good engineer in Moscow are usually 100-200k rubles, or 1.2-2.4M rubles/year.

It's only $18-36k per year. Looks insane from typical californian HR's point of view, isn't it?

Taxes take additional ~50% (in Russia, employer pays all the taxes and payments to the pension fund), so $500k was a pretty good estimate.

Brezhnev is more responsible for the collapse of the USSR than either Gorbachev or Yeltsin (or anyone else, except maybe Yuri Andropov.) Oh, sure, he was dead and the other two were around when it happened, but it was his intervention in Afghanistan that essentially sealed the fate of the USSR.

Just replace .ru with .com and everything else is the same, except the language.

I just registered and yandex mail really seems like a fine service.

- There are a lot of Googlers on HN, not so many Yandex-ers

- Google, in the general public's minds, is buoyed by positive mindshare that was generated a very, very long time ago (early-to-mid-2000s). Today's Google has appreciably changed from those days, and yet their likeability has mostly been unaffected.

- Google tried to make their lack of focus official by spinning off a corporate umbrella parent by the name 'Alphabet', like Philip Morris Companies the "tobacco" company renamed itself to 'Altria' in 2003 because at the time it owned 84% of Kraft Foods Inc., a large food and beverage company [1].

I maintain that to an American, Yandex is most analogous to Yahoo or AOL rather than Google, because Google is, as of writing, a company that makes money primarily from ads and is under transition to pursue higher revenue streams from business-to-business sources (like Google Cloud Services) more so than by brokering advertising. Whereas Yahoo or AOL are tech-media hybrids. I know Yahoo and AOL don't evoke such positive brand power anymore than, say, Google, but their structure I believe is more reflective of Yandex.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Foods_Inc#Philip_Morris_...

It ought to be obvious to anyone that applying black and white judgements in these situations is idiotic. Do I think the US government is beyond reproach? No. Do I think the US government is more open and accountable than the Russian government? Yes.

> (that with the usa gov you have facts, whereas the russian gov you have suspicions)

Yes, because the US government is open and accountable enough that this information is public. The same cannot be said for the Russian government.

So the biggest in my experience is not enterprise support. Folks generally expect it to be. The biggest is actually flexibility. Oracle DB is good at handling some edge-case scenarios, such as a RAC cluster with a failover cluster running an Advanced Dataguard Reporting instance in a whole different state.

Basically you are running a (super expensive) near real-time cluster that's doing compressed log-shipping to another cluster, and you have a standby on that secondary cluster that's open in a read-only mode. And none of it requires cron jobs or excessively complicated setup.

However... even though I've done stuff like this for a number of clients, there are SO MANY better ways to address these sorts of scenarios with creativity and elbow-grease that Postgres tends to be a better tool.

The caveat, of course, is when the person who sets it up leaves, and some other person has to take over. With Oracle's scenario, it's mostly just a slightly unusual config of a standard set of tools. The more creative Postgres solution might be quite a bit more of a learning curve.

This is just an example off the top of my head, but it is one that came up recently. A client had a shipping/receiving system that could not go down, so the 20k+ per node was trivial. To reduce the load for reporting, they just simply had us open a standby DB for read-only reporting on the failover cluster - and they liked that so much, we set up another one for them local to the offshore reporting team.

It's absolutely possible to do something like that with Postgres clustering, but there's a whole lot fewer folks doing it.