Comment by JaggerFoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JaggerFoo | Hacker News Reader

Oracle SQL is not the devil.

I can code up SQL easily and find errors. I use sqldeveloper and granted It's not as helpful as say coding Dart on Android Studio IDE in pinpointing where a problem is and making suggestions. But I've been able maintain single sql statements 800 lines long, perform knapsack in a single sql statement, and develop complex packages in Oracle.

If you really want to see super complexity, download and create an Oracle EBS 12.2 virtualbox instance and checkout the PL/SQL packages in the APPS schema and the schemas themselves of which there are over 200.

I've used NoSQL and other SQL databases, each which had their challenges. I like the free tooling that Oracle provides - The APEX app builder and XE database are nice, if not hosted on Oracle Cloud - try the libvirt instance to evade Oracle's cloud grip.

I think the problem here is developer experience and a negative bias toward Oracle, which is understandable and prevalent in the developer community.

Cheers

You really should try Postgres. I was a professional Oracle developer for 15 years, then we had to move to Postgres since we simply couldn't afford the Oracle licensing fees anymore. It took 2 years to move our database over - mainly because we had to rewrite thousands of queries from Oracle sql syntax into standard-compliant sql syntax. Anyway, I truly expected Postgres to by worse than Oracle. I was wrong. The performance has been equal to or greater than Oracle. The documentation in Postgres is so good it almost makes me weep. I had no idea the Oracle documentation was so bad until I had something to compare it with. Installing and managing Postgres is so much easier. Backups, replication, etc. are far far easier and less error prone than Oracle. I've literally not found a single thing to complain about in Postgres. Now I wish we had moved years earlier.

APEX just exists to lock people even further into the database. A literal antipattern of a product.

That is completely true, but the product is actually very cool. I wish there was a database agnostic version of the product as it is such a great concept for many business apps.

I sort of agree, but then the data structures get basically fixed forever, as lots of UI code is written directly against them. It's not the end of the world, but it does require data model maturity.

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