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by Ovid 4814 days ago
Out of curiosity, how comprehensive is your test suite? For one company I worked for, we actually found PostgreSQL was outperforming Oracle and because of how comprehensive our test suite was, the lead dev connected to PostgreSQL and got 80% of the test suite passing in one evening. A strong test suite allows you to instantly find out where your app breaks down.

Side note for those who don't believe PostgreSQL can outperform Oracle: we needed a custom data type that we were aggregating over. The projected table size was over a billion rows (last I heard it had reached over 4 billion rows). As I recall, in Oracle, you were limited to writing user-defined data types in SQL or Java (now you can use C). PostgreSQL, being open source, allowed the leave to implement the custom data type in C. The query we needed in Oracle took several minutes to run due to the need to constantly serialize/deserialize the data over the aggregation. The PostgreSQl version returned in a few seconds.

We even hired a well-known Oracle performance consultant who did wonderful things to all of our queries ... except for this one custom data type which left him stumped.