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Comment by stcroixx | Hacker News Reader

I've never worked on a system where we didn't make an effort to make sure we were NOT dependent on a specific DB vendor/implementation and avoiding SP's has always been a part of that.

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And in how many systems you ever ended switching from one database engine for another?

We went through and got Oracle out of our enterprise after a particularly nasty licensing negotiation and audit with them some years ago. So it does happen.

I expect at some point we'll have a similar initiative around cloud providers.

Yes, a very commendable goal, I've seen this effort undertaken many times. Curiously enough, I've never actually seen anyone switch databases.

Depends on the product in question. For integration products, its very common to support multiple database vendors with the same core engine. So any SQL written and db data-types is generally SQL-92/99.

This is pretty good since one can generally fast unit test DB code with an embedded database.

Once of the major lifts at my last job was going from Oracle to post Fred's. The speed procedures were the worst part of it all.

I’ve done it twice. Mass migration off Oracle and before that DB2 and Sybase. Current system is also occasionally sold on premise to customers who have their own db preference and we can support them all.

I moved the same system from MSSQL server to Oracle, then to MySQL.

The Oracle version had a lot of logic written as SP. I migrated them to MySQL SP.

So the conclusion is: SP don't make it impossible to migrate from one database to another, and second: yes database migrations do happen.

Also: all database migrations I have known involve Oracle in one way to another. Oracle salespeople are way too nosy.

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