[chris_wot]

There is going to come a point where Postgres passes Oracle in terms of features and performance.

There is also a point that Postgres will perform with enough features needed by most businesses that they'll choose it even though it doesn't match Oracle on a feature by feature basis.

We have hit peak Oracle. From this point forward it's going to be hard for Oracle to regain momentum. Expect a lot of FUD against Postgres - the more you see, the more worried you know Oracke execs are becoming.

[willlll]

Oracle is writing Russian IT shops to try and convince them from moving to postgres http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CANNMO++6tPiwBv2OKcy-Hh...

[reactor]

First hand experience, I work for a bank which is a Fortune 100, and our department was heavily relying on Oracle Exadata, paying between 1-2 millions (don't know exact figure), we moved away to PostgreSQL and Casandra. Cost factor was not the only motive (1-2 millions was actually penny for this bank) but our Director was convinced that exadata was unnecessary.

[chris_wot]

Out of interest, what are the benefits of Exadata, or is it really a bit of emperorer's new clothes? Can you not get similar performance with similar good hardware?

[jerven]

Exadata:Hardware used to be competitively priced (at least in the x4 age), its the licensing for the software on top that makes it really expensive.

The other thing is that some oracle features only work on exadata or other engineered systems. The hybrid columnar compression for one and query offload as well as some forms of the in memory stuff. The problem is that these are very high end features and most of us live happily without these. Postgres is going after the bread in the oracle db market while exadata is the exclusive cheese shop. Much smaller market even if the margins are better.

[reactor]

We were on x5-2 and it was a beast, but in reality we never needed those specs. I think, Oracle sales guys got to those MD's who were calling the shots.

[kbenson]

> There is going to come a point where Postgres passes Oracle in terms of features and performance.

I wouldn't be so sure. Oracle has deep pockets, and I'm not sure there's a reason why anything PostgreSQL wants to roll out they can't pay to prioritize and have done sooner.

> There is also a point that Postgres will perform with enough features needed by most businesses that they'll choose it even though it doesn't match Oracle on a feature by feature basis.

No argument there.

[chris_wot]

Oh, I'm not saying this is an overnight thing or that Oracle will be destroyed. In fact, I don't want to see them destroyed, but what I am interested in is that their market power and influence wanes over time. Ironically, this will be good for Oracle - they will be forced to dump immoral and illegal business practices.

The problem commercial businesses have when it comes to open source is that you might be able to reduce customer take up, by you can't compete with it like you would other businesses. In the closed source world you can purchase a company and shut down its product and thus kill off the competition.

As Microsoft have found, with open source software, that's not possible.

The other unfortunate thing for Oracle is that when they attack Postgres they have to publish lists of competitive advantages. All this does is give Postgres developers a todo list, and they then work towards implementing the features that matter.

[kbenson]

Yes, in a way open source acts as a vibrant market of competitors forcing proprietary products to innovate where they may have been willing to stagnate, and in a way immune to some of the more anti-capitalistic ways of preventing innovation (e.g. buying out the main competitors). As unions worked to combat some of the major criticisms of capitalism by Marx (as I understand it), open source works to combat some of the major criticisms of companies in the software market (patents are put in an interesting light in this theory).

[chris_wot]

It's funny, I really feel until open source became widely known as a viable thing that patent reform was dead and non-existent. Not only that, but things like the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act passed just before the start of the true mainstreaming of open source culture, but wouldn't fly now.

[pbarnes_1]

This migration has been happening for many years anyway.

I used to work consulting doing these types of migrations for customers for a huge IT services company.

[chris_wot]

Yeah, that point is probably occurring as we speak :-)