Ask Slashdot: Is Postgres On Par With Oracle? 372
grahamsaa writes "I work at medium sized company that offers a number of products that rely fairly heavily on backend databases, some of which are hundreds of gigabytes and deal with hundreds or thousands of queries per second. Currently, we're using a mix of Postgres, Oracle, and MySQL, though we're working hard to move everything to Postgres. The products that are still on MySQL and Oracle were acquisitions, so we didn't get to choose the RDBMS at the time these products were designed. So far, we've been very happy with Postgres, but I know next to nothing about Oracle. It's expensive and has a long history of use in large enterprises, but I'm curious about what it offers that Postgres might not — I'm not saying this because I think that sticking with Oracle would be a good idea (because in our case, it probably isn't), but I'm curious as to how some companies justify the cost — especially considering that EnterpriseDB makes transitioning from Oracle to Postgres feasible (though not painless) in most cases. For those that use Oracle — is it worth the money? What's keeping you from switching?"
"thousands of queries per second"? (Score:1, Funny)
Is this a gay porno site or what?
Re:READ THE MANUAL FFS (Score:4, Funny)
Yes. Great developers use lots of...stored procedures?!?!?!?!
What fucking planet are you from?
Re:what keeps us from switching ? (Score:5, Funny)
This is the best thing about SQL: it's a standardized language letting you switch between different database vendors with fluidity.
(and how says irony is dead?)
Re:MongoDB--run away (Score:5, Funny)
"Mongo is ACID compliant at the document level."
But not where it counts [youtube.com].
Re:Why Oracle? (Score:2, Funny)
The first reason to go with Oracle is its reputation.
Amazingly, this is also a reason *not* to go with Oracle.
Re: What's keeping you from switching? (Score:5, Funny)
Without whom you would likely be living in a hovel.
If your superiors decided that an Oracle solution was best, then it most likely was.
Sadly it seems you've let your jealously over compensation cloud your mind. My only advice is to remember that, when it comes to operating a business, IT workers are helpful but it is the managers who do the grunt work and take the real risks.
Re: What's keeping you from switching? (Score:4, Funny)
So you too can not tell the difference between a NULL and an empty string :-) Tri-valued logic appears to have gone right over Larry's head, not an easy task given the size of said head.
Re: What's keeping you from switching? (Score:3, Funny)
It isn't that Oracle can't distinguish between an empty string and null, it's that some pedantic developer along the way decided to impose the philosophy that a zero length string and null are the same thing (with some post-doctoral research paper involving Zeno's paradox, Einstein's special relativity and the Poincare conjecture to prove that this is, in fact, the only mathematically appropriate way to do things), so it stores all zero length strings as nulls. It is impossible to store a zero length string in a varchar2 or char field in oracle. This makes it a giant PITA porting applications to Oracle (at least it did for me) and leads to some really nasty bugs if you are caught unaware by it.
But hey, it's cool either having to put a not null constraint on every string column (and dealing with the application logic grief that this can cause), or wrapping every string column returned from a query with NVL or NVL2 and using some magic value and hoping for no collisions. Clearly no one would ever want to distinguish between the values of "nothing" and 'I don't know".
This is just one of many reasons that I hope Larry Ellison's yacht sinks in the middle of the Pacific with him on board sleeping off a bender. (not really, but the imagery makes me smile nonetheless)