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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Maybe for startups, on the enterprise space I am yet to see any customer move away from Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and similar.

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Speaking as someone with good insight in enterprise NoSQL sales - vast majority of revenue is coming from Fortune 500s shifting off oracle systems.

Oracle customers have been very easy targets - solve the technical problem, and then give them sales people that care about their success and support people driven to solve any hurdles. I've been on the phone with ex-oracle DBAs crying from happiness, trying to explain how working with a support team that's genuinely there to help them get their job done has changed their professional lives. Those people become lifetime advocates and friends, making up a foundation that will keep the current NoSQL winners healthy businesses for a generation.

When I worked government contracting they had broad goals handed down which they must work toward without it being an explicit requirement. One of these goals? Get on top of an open source only stack for security, cost and future interoperability between other groups.

I worked on several projects where they were originally using Oracle or MarkLogic and we transitioned them to Postgres or various other, open source tech.

If the slow moving government is moving various projects away from Oracle, I would be shocked if some businesses weren't doing so as well. Now I don't know if moving away from proprietary is a trend or the more frequent than moving to them.

Amazon is in the middle of a top-down migration off of Oracle. despite owning AWS, there are still a huge number of dependencies still running on Oracle.

If you are allowed to and comfortable with it, could you share which country was that? Over the years I have looked at government projects in Western Europe, SE Asia and Australia, Europeans seem to be the ones that care the most about open source, while at the other end of the spectrum SE Asian governments are interested in it just as much as it lets them save money (much less because of "free as in freedom"). Australia seems to me kind of a mixed bag, it boasts about using Drupal because it's open source but I know that some projects are based on proprietary technology. Please note that much of the information I gathered is second-hand and may be inaccurate.

I can say from experience that in the U.S., the procurement people are definitely incentivized to look for solutions built on open standards and open source because of the ability for the government to have the option to not ever have to upgrade again, but to continue servicing this specific procurement (and this specific version) forever and ever and not be beholden to a specific vender or solution provider.

I've even seen cases where one company will sell a solution into the government and lose the maintenance contract the next year to some entirely different company who underbid the original provider -- and there's minimal slowdown in technical execution because the entire stack is open to some degree.

The government is starting to develop an allergy to vendor lock-in because of this.

United States. It may be a mixed bag as the agencies I worked with, well the groups within them I should say, were very, VERY against proprietary ANYTHING. I've never seen such a huge push back against software like Palantir. Funny thing? Almost every user I met LOVED just about all of the proprietary software and hated the contractor created, built on open source stacks, software.

Search YouTube, for "Yandex oracle to PostgreSQL". You would be shocked at how the enterprise space is just sick to death of oracle and once they actually TRY moving off it to PG how much insanely easier, cheaper, and better performance it is for most workloads that people thought they HAD to have oracle for.

You simply can't find Postgres DBAs in VA, whereas you can't swing a cat and not hit an Oracle DBA with 10+ years of experience.

Oracle DBAs are super easy to retrain to PostgreSQL because the two systems are quite similar and Postgres is catching up on features it has been missing.

SAP have their own tech in HANNA now of course

Edit: SAP have a DB called HANA, not HANNA as I incorrectly typed

HANNA?

sorry HANA. SAP seem to be pushing it hard for Business One, over and above MS SQL.

Probably developed by the Sybase team after they bought Sybase years ago.

You should look harder. If you have Oracle experience then brush up on Postgres and cash in because specialization in just that specific migration can probably carry you into retirement.

I also have done some Postgres deployments for a department that didn't want to follow the IT rules regarding Oracle.

I wasn't very impressed.

Specially regarding the programming language for storage procedures, GUI tooling and lack of support for distributed transactions across cluster nodes.

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