[sheff]

Postgres is a fantastic database.

That said, I've also used Oracle quite extensively in the past when clients have needed it and it has some features that would be great to have in Postgres - as well as some features which we won't see in Postgres as they don't match the Postgres philosophy. Lack of one or more of the features below have driven the choice for various clients to use Oracle despite the cost, so having them would help grow the Postgres ecosystem.

Features in Oracle I'd like to see in Postgres :

1) Flashback. This name encompasses lots of ways to see data as it existed at a previous point in time.

If you drop a table, make a big (wrong) change etc, being able to flashback to just before it is brilliant. Or if you have a multi-terabyte sized performance test database, running a test and then a flashback to before the test is much quicker than restoring from a backup.

2) More robust partitioning - Postgres is quite lacking in comparison here.

3) Better backup options. PG really needs an in core incremental backup to start with, with something like Oracles block change tracking for backups thrown in to do quick incremental backups of a large database.

4) Replication - the lack of something like Oracles switchover which is used in a lot of architectures where you have a application and DB replicated across two sites, with one site being the active one at a point in time. When you need to take one site down for whatever reason, in Oracle you can just do a planned "switchover" to the replica DB and then switch back whenever you want without having to do anything as the DB knows it was a clean switch.

5) The diagnostic and performance monitoring built into Oracle are more extensive than those in Postgres.

The one other really useful feature Oracle has which will likely never be in Postgres is RAC (Real Application Clusters) which lets you create a multi-node active-active DB cluster quite easily.

[AlterEgo20]

> 3) Better backup options.

Already exist as "Continuous Archiving". Was done by third party tools in version 8, part of the core in 9. Details: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/continuous-arc...

> 4) Replication

Master - slave is in core of version 9. Allows fast switchover, but is somewhat harder to swith back.

> RAC

Logical replication is already in 9.4 . And with logica replication we might soon see full master - master replication in core postgres.

[sheff]

Continuous archiving (WAL) is something quite different from incremental backups.

Incremental backups involve taking a full backup once in a while and then making interim backups of the changes since the base backup. WAL ( or archive logs in Oracle terminology) are still used for point in time recovery for changes that have occurred since the last incremental backup. One advantage is that if a row is updated 100 times between the base and incremental backup, you will only essentially be backing up the last change in your incremental backup versus WAL which will have all 100 changes. For big DBs, this can be very handy.

"somewhat harder to swith back"

Thats my point exactly. In Oracle switching between primary and standby is easy and you can do it back and forth as needed with no need to worry about rebuilding the database. In Postgres this is not yet the case, but most of the infrastructure is there already so its surprising it hasn't been done.

I'm also looking forward to logical replication. RAC is different however from master-master replication. Essentially its a specialized cluster with storage thats shared between all nodes in the cluster (so there is no replication going on) with "cache fusion" to share in-memory data between nodes .

PG lets the OS do the stuff it does best versus RAC which is largely a OS cluster solution specifically tailored for a multi node DB - so its unlikely (in my opinion) that the PG developers will ever produce anything similar.