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Comment by submeta | Hacker News Reader

I work in the health sector at a company with nearly 1,000 employees. In our IT department, we rely on a wide range of proprietary software and spend substantial amounts on Oracle, MS SQL, and other licenses. I’ve been trying to convince management that PostgreSQL could be a solid alternative for many of our use cases, but it’s consistently dismissed as “not an option.”

Meanwhile, we continue to pour money into Oracle licenses, not just for basic access but for additional features—like enabling data reading and analysis on the Oracle-embedded database in our main app. And, if we need to allocate more CPU cores on our VMs, we face yet another round of licensing fees.

Sometimes you don’t need much support. Yet pay tons of money.

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Every time I hear a story like this - "management says 'no'" - I wonder if anyone cared/dared to ask follow up questions.

Why was PostgreSQL not an option according to management? I would not take their dismissal at face value. I'd want to know why not. But that might be Dutch culture.

Insurance. The piece of paper that states who the buck stops with when there's a claim or lawsuit.

Let's say that is the reason, then that seems a very valid reason, right? Accountability is important, especially in large organizations.

I guess what ticks me off a bit is the trope of dissing on management for saying 'no' but leaving out all the relevant context that might show management to be right.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen my own fair share of bad management. But it's not so black and white when it comes to grand sweeping decisions like "should we invest in PostgreSQL or keep paying Oracle big license fees?"

> Accountability is important, especially in large organizations.

Why? So we'll have someone to blame when things inevitably go wrong? In my experience, the people who like to say the buck stops with them are nowhere to be found when that happens.

I much prefer organizations focussed on actually getting things right, instead of worrying about who takes the blame.

I'd say it's also to stop people from doing dumb things (i.e. proactive defense).

Say, if the org runs Postgres in-house, there's a mighty chance that an intern somewhere might decide to ...test things out in a creative way.

Perhaps the idea of outsourcing that to Oracle is that Oracle has the processes/controls to rein in such interns. As opposed to e.g. a hospital having to create such processes/controls.

(Oracle is still a bad idea IMHO, just slightly less so comparatively)

I once had a few drinks with an Oracle salesperson many moons ago, and he did a pretty good job of convincing me that they sold risk minimisation over personnel changes to my uber boss, which honestly makes more and more sense to me as I continue in my career.

I disbelieve that starting a lawsuit against Oracle because their software didn't work as it was supposed to would ever end well.

Do you know of any examples of that happening?

Crowdstrike.

Same, but not necessarily due to nationality. It very much depends on the company culture and interpersonal relationship in question

It's a US approach not considered the same in Europe/internationally.

A good example is the GIS industry where ESRI (ArcGIS) dominates. In Europe the open source qGIS is generally an acceptable alternative despite less 'support'. In America its hard to find anyone using qGIS and ESRI is basically a monopoly.

Is the issue only support though? Oracle has a lot of features that PostgreSQL doesn't.

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