Comment by pallopiipaeri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pallopiipaeri | Hacker News Reader

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MySQL and Postgres have multi-master replication. They do NOT have distributed transactions (with the distributed locking system etc). For some customers it is important. Others have delusions that they need it.

Oracle has other products as well. I am generally aware of couple used widely.

Their ESB is one of the heavy players, and some sausage stands always need the most advanced ones. The funny thing is that with Oracle's ESB you end up developing the missing glue features using Java, and the ESB product's framework. The environment is extremely non-productive.

Oracle's JavaEE application server is kind of nice, if you wanted WebSphere with training wheels. While feature wise it does have similar set, the maintainability and management features are just plain inferior, and most options are bolted down, and not available unless you go to lower levels...

Oh, they offer ERP suite(s) as well. Those are for people that are prone to joining religious cults. They are not technology, and software products really. They are something sold to general and logistic managers with a story that you can actually force your company to use their "best practices" sets for everything, and abandon all software architecture in favor of warm and nice spaghetti. :)

Postgres has two-phase commit, which can be used at the application level to implement distributed transactions.

It does not have multi-master replication natively, though there are companion projects that enable it.

PG 9.6 brought bidirectional replication in and supported via mainline extension (no patches).

http://blog.2ndquadrant.com/bdr-is-coming-to-postgresql-9-6/

Okay, sorry, you're right. In my head "multi-master" is N > 2, for some reason. Probably because of Bucardo.

Also, we're only on 9.5, so I haven't gotten to play with BDR yet, though I do have a meeting next week to start talking about how we might use logical decoding.

I may be missing something, but I don't see any mention of 2 nodes in that blog post. In fact, BDR is designed to be run with many more nodes. That being said, it's an asynchronous multi-master, suitable for geo-distributed architectures. Everyone has their own concept of what multi-master is, sadly.

The other thing is that "PG 9.6 brought ..." might suggest this is built into PostgreSQL 9.6. That's not quite the case - we're working on moving it into core, but that takes time. For now it's an extension (plug-in). PG 10 will however include pglogical, which is another step in that direction.

Unfortunately those are blocker level issues for most enterprisey IT managements.

Adding extra implementation to application, to do the database's work against the usual division of labor, no thanks. And bringing some shady 3rd party support package on top of the database is a second really big no.

For businesses only what you get out of the box counts. Otherwise you can always state that "the platform has C++ compiler, stfu and code". That doesn't really work. The companies are into buying complete products for a reason: they don't want to implement unnecessarily things they really should just get out of the box.

TBH I love postgres, but before they offer proper multi-master transactions out of the box most companies just still go for Oracle. That's similar as to why people buy Photoshop. GIMP fell some 10 years after in usability and features when they did not prioritize implementing the dynamic layer effect system. Instead of that they chose to masturbate with GEGL or something like that for 10 years, without providing the actual end user requested features. The situation still stands there, before they implement what Photoshop 4 or so did they got no chance of being valid alternative...

Vouching parent comment. The last time I looked at Postgres, I was really happy to see that BDR was now doable without a patched Postgres. But, I believe transactions affecting multiple tables didn't fully work yet.

Postgres is my preference over MySQL/MariaDB, but I wouldn't have pushed for it back when I worked in traditional corporate IT: Stability, and having a third-party to blame, really wins there!

> Oracle's JavaEE application server is kind of nice

You mean Weblogic, right? Because OAS has been dead for a while now. Afaik, Weblogic and Websphere are practically the same, hard to say one is "just plain inferior" to the other.

...except when it comes to support for talking with Tuxedo. I guess my shop may be one of the largest Tuxedo users in the world, so it makes WLS kind of mandatory :(

Just saying : if Oracle has proper distributed transactions, then it is lying. Welcome to CAP. Or it has times when it will shit the bed and wait. For reaaaaally long time.

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