Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

As someone who spent some time in Oracle land: MariaDB can't hold a candle to it, but postgresql comes close.

Some things better in Oracle vs Postgres (and I might be dated on my postgres knowledge):. The active/active failover story of Oracle is better with RAC. Auto vacuum horror stories don't exist in Oracle.

Also pro oracle: The 'enterprise' ecosystem is better. Everything enterprisey integrates with oracle, postgresql is still a toss up.

But at the end of the day, I still vastly prefer postgresql. The endless list of weird idiosyncracies and weird limitations in oracle makes you always feel a bit dirty, compared to the relatively clean syntax of postgresql. In oracle land, it is common to wait 1 major version before using new features, because they are unstable when released.

And dealing with oracle support is hell with an additional bonus of pain. They take months for a simple bug fix. They won't admit a bug exists, then call you at 3AM and give you a patch written 2 years ago.

Oracle licensing is a game for advanced poker players. It will be expensive. Then you negotiate, walk away with a 40% discount, making it more expensive than competitors, and find out later it was still a bad deal. They'll interprete standard words like CPU in a slightly different way in their licenses, and finding out in an audit will cost you a lot. Licensing is a never ending drain on your time, and you will loose their games in the end.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: