Hacker News Reader

Comment by imwillofficial | Hacker News Reader

Remember when people used Oracle for databases? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

When I was a bit younger I worked on quite some high profile (for my country) web apps. Think e-commerce, travel. Couple million users. We used Oracle on big fat metal server stacks for this.

I honestly thought this was needed because RAC and some other stuff. Uptime!

Now, a little older and wiser, I know all of these projects would have been fine on Postgres on some hosted provider.

When companies were moving to the internet in my part of the world, second half of the 90s, their preferred stack was a Windows NT 3.5 server, Java and an Oracle DB communicating by file exports/imports with some AS 400 or an actual IBM mainframe.

Probably the same people still do, but the tech industry has expanded, and most of the new things (startups) are better served with a Postgres cluster.

Most banks, telcos, insurances, many private and government sectors are using it, and will keep using it for decades to come. The people who think otherwise don't have much experience in real world (TM) outside of startups and small shops.

I don't think that ie Postgres has immediate onsite 24/7 support globally, which is much more important for business than pure performance per dollar or similar metrics and they are happy to pay for it. Also trying to find top notch DBAs in Oracle vs Postgres gives, at least here in Switzerland, very different numbers of resources available.

Ie for banks its usually part of their core banking packages and performance-wise not much can replace that (but you need a small army of plsql experts to tame it, although there are plenty of those in the industry).

Also, I'm not sure that you can buy off the shelf hardware from top vendors which guarantees transaction performance and reliability for PostgreSQL either.

HPE, Dell, IBM, Oracle itself is building and selling systems designed and optimized for running Oracle databases, for at least a decade now?

Allegedly 90% of the world's biggest banks run their core systems on mainframes. Oracle did offer their database on mainframe but stopped and the last supported release went EOL in 2013. There's still possibly extended support being paid for, but sounds like they possibly don't have a lot of the bank-on-mainframe market.

I wonder what those banks use for their databases. IMS or DB2 maybe?

Not so say your comment is wrong, there are thousands of banks and average assets of few hundred million. Unlikely they would fork out millions for mainframe setups. Majority of those could be on Oracle as you say.

I know that one of our biggest national banks still run on mainframes for their core banking infrastructure, but there's so many satellite systems which are way more modern and use separate systems and servers.

In these cases generally DBs are migrated to external clusters of their own (like HPE Superdome, Exadata or similarly tailored hardware) and connect via IB or IB like low latency, high performance networking.

AFAIK, the bank I'm talking of is working with "Don't fix what is not broken" motto, and only move what's necessary to modern or external systems.

Huh. You mean the bank running the mainframe has moved database to a cluster of other systems? What does the mainframe run then? Business logic / applications in COBOL or ABAP or whatever?

It handles the torrent of banking transactions. Generally money movements, interest rates and such.

I still do for almost everything, a lot of middleware applications too.

Good PL/SQL devs are getting a little rarer these days but its manageable.

Same, it all depends on your costs, if you are SaaS and have a dev team that knows Oracle then why not use it, it's not going anywhere, it's hugely reliable and it will definitely scale up vertically as high as anyone. And plsql is a much underrated technology.

On the other hand if your product involves on-site deployment then Oracle is most likely not going to stack up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com