I've used oracle. Its awesome. Expensive. But awesome. If I have to pay, postgres is OK. But oracle is really really good. If they were laptop operating systems, postgres would be Debian, oracle would be Mac os x.
Did you know that Oracle forbids "unauthorized benchmarks" for any users of its database products? It's curious that a database with such amazing performance characteristics would not allow third party benchmarks against other products.
Call me stupid all you want, but I was looking for a clause that prohibited running unauthorized benchmarks, and neither my nor your search results corroborate​ that.
I was at an AWS Aurora talk and someone asked the presenter (VP of DB engines) if there is a benchmark comparing Aurora to Oracle and he said that they are unable to do it because of licensing agreements.
It is awesome in a way but had some awful bugs (lost hours to installer bugs) and was topped up with dark patterns IMO (expensive features would be one click away)
Edit: and can we stop pretending that OS X is better? It is different. Some people like that. Other has just as legitimate reasons to stay away.
I spent 3 years on a Mac and went from really enthusiastic to really disappointed. I still defend others right to prefer it though and hope you'll defend my choice as well.
Having been exposed to Linux on the desktop for more than a couple of decades, in addition to using OS X since 2003, my subjective opinion is that it's not only far more mature, but better in almost every conceivable way.
That goes for casual users to developers. The ecosystem from Apple is maybe not perfect, but I still dare to use the word fantastic.
I have a number of reasons to dislike it strongly [0].
But we are not supposed to argue over such things here.
I'm just asking that Mac people respect that I and others way prefer other OS-es like Linux, BSD or even Windows.
[0]: like 1.) not having consistent shortcuts for moving using the keyboard 2.) With two monitors the menu bar will be very far away when you work on the other monitor 3.) One Chrome window would block the other, preventing me from finding the instructions on the wiki while having a file select box open in another.
Etc etc. This is before I start my rant about things more unrelated to their OS implementation like a) putting fn in the bottom left corner b) not giving me any chance to fix it c) the fact that many programs I want to use was either unavailable or looked horrible.
Can you give a bullet point list aimed at someone who is very experienced at Postgres but has never used oracle? I'm curious of the corner cases and killer features that make you love oracle so much
I don't like Oracle DB really, but there's one feature that does stand apart from Postgres. Oracle has an internal scheduler that works much like an OS scheduler, allowing you to set priority and resource usage for each user or connection. This made Oracle the go-to database for anyone that needs multi tenant support but wants to allow users to access their own database. If you allow database access its trivial to create a really slow query and the resource limiters prevent one tenant from ruining performance for everybody.
The best example of this is Salesforce, which has their own proprietary SQL-like query language that's clearly just a crappy front end to generate raw SQL to feed their Oracle DB's. Without Oracle's per-tenant limit this would be far too risky because of idiots making bad queries.
An better solution these days is to put each tenant in a Postgres container and let the OS control resource limits for them, but this wasn't an option until recently.
Their own language prevents any kind of expensive queries.
Besides that, they limit the amount of anything you can think of (queries, cpu time, memory, call, querytime).
Killing connections can be done in postgresql too. The reason for sf to be on oracle is probably history.
Disclaimer: huge postgresql fanboy, use it whenever I get the chance
A few things I've found great in Oracle that aren't (AFAIK) available in PG:
- Straight better/more reliable performance on average
- More advanced parallel queries (obviously this is changing in PG right now)
- Flashback queries
- Better materialized views
- Plan stability (maintains predictable query performance, rather than the nasty jumps you sometimes see when plans change)
- Better clustering story (RAC is super expensive but pretty good)
If you're going to make claims like these that will raise a few eyebrows, please give some details and reasons why you think Oracle is awesome. Otherwise, your comment is fairly useless.