No one ever chooses Oracle or Sybase on technical merits.
That is, although those two products may indeed have some merit, that is not why they are chosen.
That is, although those two products may indeed have some merit, that is not why they are chosen.
Golden Gate, RAC, Management Tools, stable plans, decent parallelism, decent partitioning, some columnar stuff - that's not just marketing fluff.
Oracle's politics / sales tactics, and cost are one large argument against, being able to influence feature development / add features yourself another, against Oracle, that I've seen driving companies - including big financial ones - away from oracle over time. Often that's not starting with the business critical stuff, but with some smaller project, and then grows over time.
There's some things (better replication out of the box , higher performance).
> but not much discussion on how PG will come to parity
That's because this subthread started with "No one ever chooses Oracle or Sybase on technical merits." - neither Postgres' strengths and needed/planned improvements are relevant to refute that position.
> on how PG will come to parity and how we'll know when it's finally good enough to use.
Just because Oracle has some features that postgres doesn't match doesn't mean it's not good enough. There's a lot of features where postgres is further along than Oracle, too. For a good number of OLTPish workloads postgres is faster.
We're talking about large and complex products here - it's seldomly the case that one project/product is going to be better than all others in all respects. Postgres has been good enough to use for a long time.
If you're interested in which areas postgres needs to improve, I'm happy to talk about that too.
The best example of this is Salesforce, which has their own proprietary SQL-like query language that's clearly just a crappy front end to generate raw SQL to feed their Oracle DB's. Without Oracle's per-tenant limit this would be far too risky because of idiots making bad queries.
An better solution these days is to put each tenant in a Postgres container and let the OS control resource limits for them, but this wasn't an option until recently.
Killing connections can be done in postgresql too. The reason for sf to be on oracle is probably history.
A few things I've found great in Oracle that aren't (AFAIK) available in PG:
- Straight better/more reliable performance on average
- More advanced parallel queries (obviously this is changing in PG right now)
- Flashback queries
- Better materialized views
- Plan stability (maintains predictable query performance, rather than the nasty jumps you sometimes see when plans change)
- Better clustering story (RAC is super expensive but pretty good)It was actually good and very easy to activate. If you did activate it though you could expect a sizable extra invoice after next audit.
This unfortunately has become very common.
The first result is a blank copy of a license agreement that they presumably forgot was on their website.
You aren't allow to publish benchmark results, a condition that is both upsetting and not at all unique as commercial databases go http://m.sqlmag.com/sql-server/devils-dewitt-clause
It is awesome in a way but had some awful bugs (lost hours to installer bugs) and was topped up with dark patterns IMO (expensive features would be one click away)
Edit: and can we stop pretending that OS X is better? It is different. Some people like that. Other has just as legitimate reasons to stay away.
I spent 3 years on a Mac and went from really enthusiastic to really disappointed. I still defend others right to prefer it though and hope you'll defend my choice as well.
Having been exposed to Linux on the desktop for more than a couple of decades, in addition to using OS X since 2003, my subjective opinion is that it's not only far more mature, but better in almost every conceivable way.
That goes for casual users to developers. The ecosystem from Apple is maybe not perfect, but I still dare to use the word fantastic.
But we are not supposed to argue over such things here.
I'm just asking that Mac people respect that I and others way prefer other OS-es like Linux, BSD or even Windows.
[0]: like 1.) not having consistent shortcuts for moving using the keyboard 2.) With two monitors the menu bar will be very far away when you work on the other monitor 3.) One Chrome window would block the other, preventing me from finding the instructions on the wiki while having a file select box open in another.
Etc etc. This is before I start my rant about things more unrelated to their OS implementation like a) putting fn in the bottom left corner b) not giving me any chance to fix it c) the fact that many programs I want to use was either unavailable or looked horrible.