So as much as I want to talk about Oracle vs. Postgres, these slides aren't giving me anything technical to debate.
2. The other concern was Oracle's slow bugfixing and reaction to feedback.
So, this is a good case showing how a company can stop wasting millions of $ for proprietary software, joining Open Source community, contributing to it and taking benefits from tech collaboration with core developers of the product.
- PL/SQL was harder to deploy than PL/pgSQL (as stated later)
- Only synchronous interface in Oracle's OCCI
- Problems with Oracle's development environments
- Not very responsive support from Oracle.
But the dev environment and support for Postgres are not talked about.
Also I can't quite figure out if "3x more hardware" is supposed to be a good thing on their last slide. It's possible that it's a good thing (if it's, say, we can replicate to more servers), but to me it doesn't read like one.
Initial architecture with 2 servers was set up that way to save money on Oracle per-core licensing. They wanted to add more, but that was too costly.
Not having to deal with stuff like this while having the same features/performance/stability/etc may qualify as a 'wow':
I'm guessing it was a few million dollars worth of wow-factor.
I'm a postgres fan and booster myself but I'd need a good reason to migrate a data backend on any project I'm managing.
Judging by the salaries from job sites and my yandex interview, the cost would most certainly top up at $0.5 million (that's a very generous guess, probably half or two thirds that, realistically). Not sure how much Oracle costs at Yandex scale (a LOT more?).
Still though: your point is valid in that, Oracle RAC cluster licensing and support is serious bucks.
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.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-...
So if you look at just enterprise licensing, it's $47k per "processor" - which in their world, a single intel core counts as 0.5 processors. So if you've got a 36 core machine (which I think they mentioned in the video) that's 18 "processors". Or $846,000 for one box. You want clustering (RAC) - that's another $315,000. Partitioning? $207,000. So now we're up to ~$1.4 million for a single server. YAY!
Obviously these are list prices, so you should be paying less than that, but it gets ugly FAST.
It took much more time to rewrite backends logic because of lots of legacy code in many applications without using abstraction libraries.
First type is still in the database. Some part of type 2 was moved to our abstraction library (that is used by all applications). Logic of thrird type was moved to our applications and it greatly reduced stored code size.
That's actually huge for companies that have invested in Oracle and feel trapped.
And the companies that buy Oracle, have a slight tendency to write all their core business logic inside the database.