From my anecdotal experience: no. It is arcane, user hostile and buggy. And performance for many workloads is roughly in line with open source databases.
Some of the tooling around it is nice and it has some nice features but I would not recommend it even if it was free.
Edit: unless the great database is MySQL, they are actually decent stewards of it and while I still strongly prefer PostgreSQL MySQL is pretty good these days.
It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org).
As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.
Even worse. It skews the architecture decisions towards few large physical database servers instead of many small VMs, because licensing cost is per core in the whole VM cluster, so totally unaffordable. So you get reduced availability, higher risk, reduced separation, reduced security, higher datacenter cost, and they bill you an arm and a leg on top...
If you handle large amounts of geographical data you'll need to invest quite a bit to move to Postgres. It's possible but you're going to need to touch a lot of existing code and figure out new performance characteristics and so on. A lot of it will be hard for an average organisation, not because it's very sophisticated and complex but because it will be large amounts of boring rote work that many developers don't see how they could do programmatically.
Rumour has it the same holds for some other types of data as well but I lack immediate experience in other areas.
With Oracle you also have a rather robust, exhaustive documentation of error messages and even obscure stuff is likely to be figured out in some forum thread by someone and an indian guy. Postgres isn't exactly bad in this area but you can run into things where you need to go deep in debugging yourself and figure out minutiae of your specific version.
Containers also remove most of the issues with running several instances in development and CI environments.
I still don't recommend anyone to pick Oracle for greenfield stuff, instead you should work around shortcomings in other database engines, but for a large organisation with certain demands that already has buyin it makes sense.
Many moons ago when I was green and my skin was a lot smoother I pointed out to my then boss that we could relatively easily (a few weeks of work) move our product from Oracle to Postgres and save n x $1000 for each installation we shipped to a customer.
My personal goal was to avoid becoming an Oracle expert. (Why? Because even as someone who passed advanced Oracle training easily it was still extremely painful. One mistake towards the end of an installation could easily result in 2 days extra work to clear it out.)
Stupid as I was I said nothing about all the work we went through and only mention all the money we could save.
The response was something I learned a lot from.
It was mild and friendly and something along the lines of "here's what you don't get young lad: the customer pays for the Oracle license on top of our original price and we get a 10% cut. Changing to Postgres will effectively cost us money. Also for <this industry> when we say it is based on Oracle they feel safe."
I'm back at Oracle today after a decade of less painful options and Oracle is still painful but these days I'm not the DBA thankfully and only have to deal with connectionstrings that makes every other database look easy, different SQL syntax etc.
- institutional inertia
- some weird consultant style people in key roles (this happens around cloudy stuff too)
- the DBA-team
- "we can't move everything!"
- "we just migrated off solaris!"
however every new project with sane leadership seems to decide against oracle.
Because Oracle gives their manager premium baseball tickets on the regular.
They make a great database?
From my anecdotal experience: no. It is arcane, user hostile and buggy. And performance for many workloads is roughly in line with open source databases.
Some of the tooling around it is nice and it has some nice features but I would not recommend it even if it was free.
Edit: unless the great database is MySQL, they are actually decent stewards of it and while I still strongly prefer PostgreSQL MySQL is pretty good these days.
It's possible it has redeeming features but seems more common to be just legacy. Multiple apps accessing the same DB leading to a gridlock from migration POV. (Plus career oracle DBAs etc in the org).
As Oracle is so expensive it skews the architecture decisions towards multiple apps accessing the same DB.
Even worse. It skews the architecture decisions towards few large physical database servers instead of many small VMs, because licensing cost is per core in the whole VM cluster, so totally unaffordable. So you get reduced availability, higher risk, reduced separation, reduced security, higher datacenter cost, and they bill you an arm and a leg on top...
5 replies →
If you handle large amounts of geographical data you'll need to invest quite a bit to move to Postgres. It's possible but you're going to need to touch a lot of existing code and figure out new performance characteristics and so on. A lot of it will be hard for an average organisation, not because it's very sophisticated and complex but because it will be large amounts of boring rote work that many developers don't see how they could do programmatically.
Rumour has it the same holds for some other types of data as well but I lack immediate experience in other areas.
With Oracle you also have a rather robust, exhaustive documentation of error messages and even obscure stuff is likely to be figured out in some forum thread by someone and an indian guy. Postgres isn't exactly bad in this area but you can run into things where you need to go deep in debugging yourself and figure out minutiae of your specific version.
Containers also remove most of the issues with running several instances in development and CI environments.
I still don't recommend anyone to pick Oracle for greenfield stuff, instead you should work around shortcomings in other database engines, but for a large organisation with certain demands that already has buyin it makes sense.
3 replies →
Another curious question: what use case can only be served by an Oracle DB?
Many moons ago when I was green and my skin was a lot smoother I pointed out to my then boss that we could relatively easily (a few weeks of work) move our product from Oracle to Postgres and save n x $1000 for each installation we shipped to a customer.
My personal goal was to avoid becoming an Oracle expert. (Why? Because even as someone who passed advanced Oracle training easily it was still extremely painful. One mistake towards the end of an installation could easily result in 2 days extra work to clear it out.)
Stupid as I was I said nothing about all the work we went through and only mention all the money we could save.
The response was something I learned a lot from.
It was mild and friendly and something along the lines of "here's what you don't get young lad: the customer pays for the Oracle license on top of our original price and we get a 10% cut. Changing to Postgres will effectively cost us money. Also for <this industry> when we say it is based on Oracle they feel safe."
I'm back at Oracle today after a decade of less painful options and Oracle is still painful but these days I'm not the DBA thankfully and only have to deal with connectionstrings that makes every other database look easy, different SQL syntax etc.
Anything that was previously built on Oracle and would be too much of a pain to try to migrate to something else.
The Oracle products built on top of them, such as EPM.
2 replies →
Going on Oracle sales rep sponsored ski trips.
Because of architectural decisions made a very long time ago (finance industry) and the potential risk of migrating to another platform.
It seems like an even bigger risk to not migrate.
as others have mentioned
- institutional inertia - some weird consultant style people in key roles (this happens around cloudy stuff too) - the DBA-team - "we can't move everything!" - "we just migrated off solaris!"
however every new project with sane leadership seems to decide against oracle.