[fock]

we pay millions to Oracle. We hit a bug and it took 6months for them to reproduce and acknowledge there is a bug. they now seem to be on the lookout for someone being able to produce a fix: sales and indian after-sales can't do that... curious!

Oracle seems just a moneygrabbing shell company at this point and I suppose the whole hyperscaler-cloud is developing towards that point with the leaders of those corporations repeating exactly the same talking points...

[toomuchtodo]

Why are you still on Oracle? (genuine question, no snark)

[plantain]

Because Oracle gives their manager premium baseball tickets on the regular.

[ie21]

They make a great database?

[jeltz]

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.

[fulafel]

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.

[thyristan]

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...

[inetknght]

This isn't always a bad thing because microservice architecture isn't always the best solution.

[evanelias]

This often isn't related to a monolith vs microservice comparison. Large enterprises and institutions tend to run a lot of completely separate applications, which then end up sharing database infrastructure unnecessarily. Think of universities, for example.

[overfeed]

Oracle extends the problem to the opposite end of microservices, by encouraging monolith DB consolidation, with unrelated monolith applications on the same db cluster for purely budgetary reasons.

[cess11]

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.

[markandrewj]

Postgres is commonly used in GIS, via PostGIS (https://postgis.net). That said it is Oracles model to try to lock customers in.

[fulafel]

PostGIS seems leaps better to me (like the PG DX in other aspects). Eg in Oracle you don't have 2d points. Adding a geo index can fail in the middle and leave the table in a unusable state that requires DBA magic to untangle. Etc.

This is just on top of the general technical inferiority (eg there are no transactional schema changes, so you don't get the safe go/no-go in those when applying those as part of app deploys with a migration tool)

[cess11]

SDO_POINT(x, y, 0) or SDO_POINT(x, y, NULL) ought to do what you want. Index corruption can be a nasty problem on Postgres too.

You need to decide if and how to perform a rollback, similar to how you would define a down() procedure in migration files. A schema change might imply changes to data, and in that case you might turn off client writes, copy the table, change it, validate, do rename dance, turn on client writes again. If it doesn't it might be much cheaper to operate on a single copy. How does Postgres decide on such strategies automatically?

[toomuchtodo]

Another curious question: what use case can only be served by an Oracle DB?

[eitland]

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.

[tbrownaw]

Anything that was previously built on Oracle and would be too much of a pain to try to migrate to something else.

[internet101010]

The Oracle products built on top of them, such as EPM.

[toyg]

EPM products were originally built on SQLServer (or on nothing, like Essbase), and then adapted to run on Oracle. So it's more like "the products commercially forced to run on Oracle, like EPM".

Not that it matters that much - there are better EPM/CPM products now available, like OneStream ;)

[YetAnotherNick]

Then the obvious follow up is which area is EPM significantly better than competition?

[fulafel]

Going on Oracle sales rep sponsored ski trips.

[comprev]

Because of architectural decisions made a very long time ago (finance industry) and the potential risk of migrating to another platform.

[tartoran]

It seems like an even bigger risk to not migrate.

[fock]

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.