I used to be a big Oracle fan in the late 1990s, but now can't see the point in paying big bucks for Oracle DB.
Are there any legitimate reasons to pick Oracle over Postgres for a new project? Apart from "support"
Are there any legitimate reasons to pick Oracle over Postgres for a new project? Apart from "support"
I will never look back. There were so many things that we wanted to do, but were 'enterprise only' features. Like rebuild/create indexes online. We had a DB with a 1TB table. rebuilding that, while locking the table, would mean something like a 14 hour outage. With postgresql, online index creation is right there.
Oracle didn't support a proper incremental backup, except in enterprise edition. (and RMAN was a pain in the ass of arcane commands and black magic). pgBarman makes backups so simple for us.
Standby's on Oracle are good for disaster recovery. But you have to manually ship the logs, apply them, monitor it, and delete old logs. There were multiple thousand line korn shell scripts we utilized, and lots of cronjobs. With Postgresql, its stream based, and my standby follows production by less than 100ms most of the time. Plus, I can connect to the standby, and run read-only queries on it (we run large reports on standby, so we don't affect production) That is also possible in Oracle, with 'enterprise' edition (data-gaurd).
We filed a few ticket with Oracle Support. We never got any answers. I don't think we ever got an support person at Oracle that had been there more than a year. Even when we escalated.
Anecdotally, I've met someone who said his interview with a startup went completely downhill when he suggested using oracle. Can't say I blame a startup for shutting down that idea immediately.
These days there are great 3rd party postgres support firms. We've used 2ndQuadrant for years and couldn't be happier.