It sounds like you're not so much in "the" industry but a subset of the industry that doesn't consider free open source software to be an option.

If you're fighting the attitude that the only viable option is one that costs a ton of money instead of a decision based on technical merit, additional facts about Postgres won't help.

Sometimes the decision gets made on a golf course and not after reading very long texts.

>Sometimes the decision gets made on a golf course and not after reading very long texts.

This is why I swore to only write software at software companies some years ago. For other industries software is just another expense like buildings or supplies. The people buying it have no idea what they're looking at so they buy the shiny thing that everyone else is buying.

When I worked in other sectors I regularly saw executives attempt to assemble software as if it was a large building. Materials were gathered, agreements were made to purchase or rent heavy equipment, and the whole project was planned out with exacting detail. When all the permits and contracts were in place construction would begin. This was to be done in a measured amount of code using the chosen architecture, and delivered complete on a certain date. Any deviations were seen as workarounds for not following the original plans, and overruns the result of incompetence. The whole thing was just a shitshow of incompetence at the higher levels.

You're correct that non-software companies will simply outsource but not quite correct that it must be closed source - software is simply something they don't have much expertise in and never will. The problems only show up when software becomes such an integral part of business operations that you really do need to actually do well at software or risk a lot of business. The reason that it tends to be closed source companies is that most of the relationships that the non-software companies have is when open source was really not very viable of a foundation for one's software.

Demanding and exercising the use of a throat to choke is a massive, massive part of how at least American business works due to prevailing leadership styles as well. It also shows how they tend to view their workers as well. "Blameless culture" is something that is a tiny, tiny minority that only seems to have worked out well among socialist-ish boutique software companies and until we start seeing companies that practice traditional Taylorist and authoritarian leader worship cultures fail very disproportionately, nothing will fundamentally change.

I think that is another reason why some companies outsource all aspects of IT, so they can blame someone. Who cares if it takes 10x the time compared to having the skillset in house when you can just point at the 3rd party and blame them. Doesn't matter if it is the same person selecting all the 3rd party providers who continually are horrible at their jobs, we are saving money!

I guess I already covered that in the culture of desiring parties to choke. Whether it's a vendor or your own employees, leaders that rule by fear like to find scapegoats to shift blame away from themselves and take credit for others' efforts. The people that know better are effectively kept away from any form of power or under-resourced, so they'll always be too small to succeed.

I'm familiar with a number of very large deals done basically between C-level to C-level where the scope of IT projects has nothing to do with technologies but entire about cost savings - literally "I will save you $n MM / yr in opex so you can get your bonuses" and other vendors get shut out. Sometimes these deals work out, other times they don't and the executive is basically ousted. Companies with bad politics and enormous cronyism may have worked fine for decades, but they just may not be doing as well anymore unless you're on Wall Street and you make so much money it doesn't matter how it's done.

well, yeah, obviously.

Software is not the end-goal itself. The point is not to make (or use) amazingly elegant software. The point is to make money.

If a supplier says "I will provide the same service as you are currently getting and cost you $X less" then that's a no-brainer regardless of what service they're providing. It's got nothing to do with technology, and technology doesn't change the nature of that decision.

"Having a throat to choke" is also a matter of insurance. You can't insure against your own incompetence, but you can sue a supplier for not fulfilling the terms of their contract. Executives would much rather negotiate what they think is a tough contract with a supplier than manage a complex project themselves. To that mindset, the removal of risk (because if anything goes wrong they can sue the supplier) is a huge bonus.

It's a totally different mindset from those of us who actually make things.

Nobody ever got fired by hiring IBM mindset I guess...

It's worse than that. You're not just choosing a reliable solution, or even a solution with a conservative reputation so that your butt is covered. You're choosing a solution which may actually be worse because when you fail to deliver for someone else, you have someone to scapegoat. If there is nobody else to blame, you might take the blame for having chosen open source with no specific party to blame (the hot potato stopped with you).

Is that not just plan driven development? (I.e. waterfall)

It's not about technical merit or cost - it's about service contracts.

I was a Sybase point person for years at a fortune 50 medical devices enterprise company (we had revenues of well over $1B annually on devices running Sybase dbs). There were dozens of bugs/issues I found that I pushed up the chain to an engineer and had special patches turned around within 48 hours, sometimes even hours.

Before I left that job I started playing around with Rails and mentioned MySQL and Postgres for a potential greenfield project. I was told it would be fine for internal use but no way, no how were they going to deploy any software without that kind of parachute based on economic leverage.

But you can pay for this level of service for PostgreSQL too, there are a bunch of companies which offer it, and I bet you can get it for a fraction of the price you would buy the same service for from Oracle or Microsoft. So this seems to me to mostly stem for a poor understanding of open source.

Some years ago - never mind how long precisely -I was one of the engineers at Sybase who would have produced that EBF patch for you. More recently I do the same sort of thing for clients running Postgresql. I have worked on the code of both db servers, been involved in bug hunting and fixing as well as support escalation for both, and interacted directly with users and developers of both. If my life depended on a medical device, with a choice of one running Sybase and one running Postgresql, I would choose Postgresql, in a heartbeat (so to speak).

FWIW, there's several firms providing such services for PostgreSQL too. At $previous_company others and I, as a PostgreSQL committers/contributors, provided escalation exactly for such cases. I know they, and others still provide such services. (Not naming names right here, so this doesn't come over as an ad)

Often enough you'll even get similar turn-around times from the community, if you can't (or don't want to) afford such a support contract.

> no way, no how were they going to deploy any software without that kind of parachute based on economic leverage.

Making software work at scale without that economic leverage could never work in theory. It only works in practice.

Those in practice fixed bugs in mysql themselves and had to make it more performance themselves. Which basically means larger development team and more time. The parachute is meant to avoid that expense.

Oh, and those who did it were above oracle in terms of data size making it rational decision too. The calculation is still different for majority of companies.

I've gotten better support out of the Postgres mailing list than I have our of any commercial contract.

I spent several years in securities and derivatives trading and the most frequently cited reason for avoiding open-source software I heard was that, in the event of a major foul up, there was no one to sue if you got sued yourself. It's not that difficult for an attorney to paint you as reckless for using "free" software.

I spent 13 years writing the core trading system for many of the well known exchanges. We used open source wherever possible because the software tended to be more reliable. That said, clients usually got to request the database and we used Sybase a lot. I have been using Postgres for the last eight years since. every day of the week and I really like it but the planner is quite a bit worse than Oracle, SQL Server's. The postgres planner is still way way better than MySQL's. It still has correlated subqueries explode into cartesian joins. Mysql is great as a data store but it's more of a replacement for noSQL than an advanced query engine.

MySQL's planner is predictably stupid; structure complex multi-table predicates as joins (nested if necessary) rather than subqueries and it's almost imperative. Postgres OTOH is very unpredictable; sometimes it does the right thing, and sometimes it does something amazingly asinine, where simply swapping a table between from vs join clause can result in 1000x speedup.

Specifically, I've seen pg take a query that looks like this:

  select ... from a join b join c join (select ...) d

where a has millions of rows and is an equijoin with d where d has 10 rows, and it decides to materialize a x b x c, only joining in d at the last step. But do it like this:

  select ... from (select ...) d join a join b join c

and it does the right thing! And analyze gets it right (i.e. the plan for the reordered joins is recognized as better) - never mind genetic optimization, it's lacking analytic optimization.

With the lack of hints, almost the only tool you have to control query plans effectively in postgres is parenthesized joins. Since it's more liable to rewrite the query, the language ends up being less imperative, and thus less predictable. And I like predictability in production.

SQL-level feature set is no comparison of course, pg wins easily.

There are settings for choosing between the exhaustive search planner and the genetic planner. The exhaustive planner is better, but can be slow for complex queries with a lot of paths. But, if your query is at all time consuming you probably want to increase geqo_threshold and geqo_effort as well as join_collapse_limit and from_collapse_limit.

I'd also suggest disabling nest_loop_entirely if you are having problems with bad cardinality estimates resulting in nestloop plans that run 100 times when the planner estimated once.

An interesting argument for the predictability of mysql. Great observation.

It is interesting to see how postgresql will often choose hashmap scan, even with very up to date statistics and much better paths available.

SQLServer's planner does an amazing job of digging right into joins/sub-selects to constrain preliminary results for joins.

It's a very hard job and MS and Oracle obviously have had some of the best people on the world paid well to work on this.

Show me an enterprise DB license that offers you better indemnity/liability options than open source. (I negotiated them on behalf of huge clients for many years.)

It's not so much the license per se. It's that the setup is done by a third party that can be blamed when something goes wrong. I saw one one contract that was specifically saying that they are insured for 1 mio. in damages.

The company for the longest time wouldn't even touch basic firewall rules without having the firewall contractor implement it.

This is so true, it hurts. I call it The Triangle Of CIO Turnover.

In my experience with couple of banks, it comes down to support. Lot of systems in banks are written for longevity. So they frown upon software which might be obsolete or people stop working on them 5 years down the line. A paid software, they reason, can at most release a new version while free might not provide enough incentive for people to work on it continuously.

Many also think looking up issues on stackoverflow, google or blogs as unreliable. Then there are times when issues might be specific to installs or data, in which case sharing the logs/sample data (even masked ones) can be risky. They feel comfortable sharing logs/masked data with for example Oracle because they believe it to be safe and locked under Oracle's security guidelines.

The 2nd refrain I hear is - security. In case of a major security issue being revealed, there is a general sense that FOSS will be slower to react in releasing a "stable" patch. Comparatively paid software take it as a reputation risk and work towards quickly releasing a "stable" patch.

If people have to use FOSS, then they try and search for the paid support flavor. Recently we were looking at MQ software. When we zeroed in on RabbitMQ we were asked to deploy only the paid Pivotal version and not the free version because "support".

Sure, these things might not be completely true but for many higher ups paying for something somehow makes them sleep better at night than a "free" alternative.

This is wrong on so many levels, I suppose you mostly understand it, but here are the counter arguments:

> Written for longevity

OSS is much better at longevity than proprietary. Even if the authors all die without will, it is possible to fix the little bugs that prevent you from using the software on [NewTechnologyHere]. I've done it countless times with Java software; If anything OSS is the guarantee that you own your future and that the system will exist in the legacy.

> Use paid flavor

It's good, but what's better is joining the golf club of a principal maintainer. He's key in paying him to fix the issue you're having quickly and merging upstream.

I think there is more to this than that, though. Software companies usually run R&D at about 10% of revenue. So, these support contracts are really returning only 10% of their cost. And the companies who are buying the support contracts are are usually big. The money they spend on 10 developers for support could pay for 100 developers once you add in license fees, etc, etc.

Long, long ago when I worked at Nortel (a now defunct, but then huge telecommunications company), they used to pay millions of dollars a year to Cygnus to support a particular embedded version of GCC. This, despite the fact that Nortel had more than 10k programmers on staff including a compiler team!

I think the real reason these support contracts exist is because companies (even large ones) don't want to dilute their focus maintaining projects that are peripheral to their core business. It's not so much a technical problem, or a money problem -- it's a management problem. They can't scale out to handle every little thing.

I think OSS is a red herring in this conversation. Most companies just don't care about that. They don't want to support it themselves (even if they are big enough to do so), and they need to have confidence in the company that provides the support. Build that company (hint: you need to be sales heavy!) and you could sell Postgresql just as easily as any other database. Of course breaking into an entrenched area in Enterprise software is always going to be difficult, so I'm not sure how successful you would be with this particular product, but you get my point, I think.

There are several companies which sell PostgreSQL like that with EnterpriseDB and 2ndQuadrant being the two largest ones. It seems like these companies are at least semi-successful since they hire more people all the time. So I agree with your idea, that you just need to convince the enterprise customers that you are a reliable partner.

Most enterprises don't want to own coders to fix/hack OSS. They want a solution, roadmap and 24x7 support.

Sure OSS has a longer lifecycle because a dev can lookup the source code and fix it. But companies don't want to spend twice. For example in case of a DB, they would rather want a DBA to manage the DB. They don't want to hire a developer and a DBA - that's how they view it. Sure if you can find someone who is good at both but they are few and far in between. It is much easier to have an Oracle DBA manage Postgres with paid support than find a developer with enough programming under his belt to ensure he can take care of Postgres issues.

As hindsightbias puts it they want solutions and 24*7 support.

and how often do securities firms sue oracle, microsoft, ibm, sybase and other current and previous database giants?

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.

I think is the better point or rewording of your point.

The state government of Queensland (Australia) has forbidden any further contracts going to IBM.

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/queenslands-ibm-ban-lives-on-...

Some of the money gets funneled back into salespeople; that's how enterprise software gets bought. The salespeople target the CTO or another single point of contact.

Regarding "The industry". Okay.

Let me rather call it, The Real World.

I work in a Fortune 500 company, a consultancy of 400.000 people, on projects for other Fortune 500 companies.

My experience is from the real world.

I guess it depends. We are migrating away from Oracle towards Postgresql. For Oracle you quickly need enterprise edition or flaky third-party software for basic features lile replication. We could hire several dedicated DBAs on Postgresql for that money. And the licensing is just too idiotic, with no list price anywhere. Usually takes a month to get a quote for us. Not to mention the client libraries and how cumbersome they are to deal with. Good riddance.

No one ever chooses Oracle or Sybase on technical merits.

That is, although those two products may indeed have some merit, that is not why they are chosen.

As somebody spending a large amount of my time working on postgres, and obviously being convinced PG is good: Of course people sometimes choose oracle on technical merits (I've not worked with modern sybase versions much, so I can't judge, although some sybase IQ numbers look interesting).

Golden Gate, RAC, Management Tools, stable plans, decent parallelism, decent partitioning, some columnar stuff - that's not just marketing fluff.

Oracle's politics / sales tactics, and cost are one large argument against, being able to influence feature development / add features yourself another, against Oracle, that I've seen driving companies - including big financial ones - away from oracle over time. Often that's not starting with the business critical stuff, but with some smaller project, and then grows over time.

What does PG need to improve, then? I see a lot of discussion of how Oracle is better at this or that but not much discussion on how PG will come to parity and how we'll know when it's finally good enough to use.

> What does PG need to improve, then?

There's some things (better replication out of the box , higher performance).

> but not much discussion on how PG will come to parity

That's because this subthread started with "No one ever chooses Oracle or Sybase on technical merits." - neither Postgres' strengths and needed/planned improvements are relevant to refute that position.

> on how PG will come to parity and how we'll know when it's finally good enough to use.

Just because Oracle has some features that postgres doesn't match doesn't mean it's not good enough. There's a lot of features where postgres is further along than Oracle, too. For a good number of OLTPish workloads postgres is faster.

We're talking about large and complex products here - it's seldomly the case that one project/product is going to be better than all others in all respects. Postgres has been good enough to use for a long time.

If you're interested in which areas postgres needs to improve, I'm happy to talk about that too.

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.

[citation needed]

Here's a link to a site I use frequently for these sorts of things. I apologize for not including a citation, I figured most people were familiar with it or similar services. https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=oracle+benchmarks+ag...

The first result is a blank copy of a license agreement that they presumably forgot was on their website.

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.

You aren't allow to publish benchmark results, a condition that is both upsetting and not at all unique as commercial databases go http://m.sqlmag.com/sql-server/devils-dewitt-clause

Search for DeWitt clause and you'll find plenty interesting history.

This unfortunately has become very common.

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.

In this particular case I think we can do fine without.

I was doing advanced Oracle DBA work.

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.

Pretending that OS X (or macOS) is better?

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.

Is that feature available in Microsoft SQL Server?

Yes, there are resource controls in MS SQL server as well.

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)

One thing I can remember was the automatic query advisor.

It was actually good and very easy to activate. If you did activate it though you could expect a sizable extra invoice after next audit.

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.

It's not that I don't trust you but we are a technical community and I believe we all appreciate some more details...

Have you used 2017 OSX? Because comparing something to OSX doesn't make it sound "really really good".

And by that I assume you mean macOS 10.12.

Your last sentence isn't favorable for Oracle, in my opinion; the opposite in fact.

lol. Any meat to this ? A specific feature missing in pstgres that makes it worth spending a few hundred thousand on oracle ?

Having worked with both Oracle and Postgres, there have been a few features in Postgres that I wish were built out more completely, but nothing insurmountable, and they have been improving those (e.g. partitioning). Postgres is incredibly reliable - I worked on a couple data warehouses in Oracle and found a bunch of defects, and so far none in similar systems in Postgres.

I work in the industry too, and I didn't even realize Sybase was still around. It's a big world out there and there are little subcultures with different preferences. Bigger tech companies seem to prefer MySQL, old Enterprise ccompanies use Oracle, .NET people use SQL Server, and smaller Rails shops seem to use Postgres in my experience. But it's interesting to hear a different perspective.

That's finance and trading. In web services, "Oracle" is a bad word. Like. Paying money? For a database system?! That sounds extremely alien to me

Not sure if you're actually worked in web services but it's very common to pay for database systems.

Netflix, eBay, Apple, Sony (for PSN), Spotify are all Datastax customers paying for the commercial version of Cassandra.

Facebook, Foursquare, eHarmony, Buzzfeed, LinkedIn are listed as paying customers of MongoDB.

Yeah, sure, big companies pay for support/consulting! But Cassandra and Mongo are FOSS, you don't have to pay for the right to use them.

I have experience with Oracle, Postgres, MS SQL Server and DB2.

Postgres is in the same range of relational enterise SQL database engines. Postgres offers even Oracle PL/SQL compatible syntax, so you can think of Postgres as the Linux of relational databases. (Linux is a clone of Unix). If you need advanced SQL syntax, XML support, complex triggers, inlined procedural code, GIS, etc look no further than this and choose Postgres. If you just want to hit your DB with thousends of connections from your web application frameworks and public APIs or think of easy clustering, it might be a good idea to add a caching layer in-front like memcached/redis or read on... (as the forking model doesn't scale that good)

And then there is a unique database-software with a common SQL dialect that supports dozends of database engines. It's called MySQL and it supports plugin-engines like InnoDB (default, true web scale, very fast), ISAM (old 1980s style features, very fast), etc. MySQL can handle many concurrent connections and InnoDB is really good, that's why it's a very good fit for web apps, using basic SQL features and used by Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc as a main production database.

And there are NoSQL databases that have different kinds of features like MongoDB/RethinkDB, Lucene (Solr/ElasticSearch), Hadoop (HBase, etc), Cassandra, etc. - they have often just basic SQL-like query language or non at all, but a custom API to interact with the datastore. Those domain specific solutions are often very fast for certain use cases. Some have limited index support, limited join support, transactions, etc. so the it really depends. E.g. for JSON datastore and full text search, those are ideal solutions.

We would need a database guide that highlights the common open source database engines. And provide a transition guide and compatibility matrix compared to legacy binary blob database engines - the real competitors to open source. People in the open source communities are often fishing in other communities and try to convert them - instead look no further than your corporate colleagues and enterprise fellows and try to convert them away from their rusty databases.

You seem mistaken about what the real costs of the forking model. To solve the cost of opening new connections you just need to use a connection pooler. The need for caching is not really relevant here. PostgreSQL can easily handle hundreds of thousands of read queries.

The real costs are:

1. Need for a third party connection pooler (built-in in many client libraries like JDBC, ActiveRecord or Sequel). Some poolers like pgboucner lack support for prepared statements.

2. Memory usage can become an issue, especially if you have tens of thousands of stored procedures since stored procedures are compiled and cached per connection. Also working memory for sorting is per connection which means PostgeSQL will use more memory than MySQL on some workloads.

3. Having to recompile all stored procedures on first use after reconnecting to the database can be an issue.

In finance, no one will trade on perm oracle/sybase installs for open source databases, even if they were free (which they are not - always have to pay for support). A couple of million $$ don't make the difference in comparison to a few hundred million $$ that have to go into replatforming, tools, skills.

In cloud/managed space, Postgres is also hit and miss - still no good cross-region option and frankly other than AWS RDS not many other managed Postgres services.

So, MySQL rules the cloud/managed databases, and oracle/sybase/mssql rule on prem.

My company does managed Postgres on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean and UpCloud - https://aiven.io/postgresql. Compose offers managed Postgres (https://www.compose.com/postgresql), as does ElephantSQL (https://www.elephantsql.com/). Database Labs is one more provider (https://www.databaselabs.io/).

Google recently added beta version of Postgres to Cloud SQL as well (https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/). Of course, AWS RDS and Heroku have been on the market for some time.

I'd claim managed Postgres market is in a pretty good shape.

Google Cloud has managed Postgres:

https://cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/

They announced that just a few weeks ago. And what they state on the site you linked to proves the parent's point about managed Postgres being hit or miss:

"This is a Beta release of Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL. This product might be changed in backward-incompatible ways and is not subject to any SLA or deprecation policy."

Azure offers a managed version of mssql, which I'm quite happy with.

I really wonder where you work then. It sounds really weird.

You'll find similar attitudes in utilities, manufacturing, resource extraction, government.

To convince the, guide would also need more words from the enterprise world like OLAP and OLTP, XML, SOAP, etc