First I have to state that I have used Oracle mostly from 8.x to 10.x
and I have little experience with 11 and 12 and none with current
versions. So I'm comparing Oracle from 10 years ago with current
PostgreSQL, which isn't fair.
On 2020-06-01 12:36:14 +0700, Stefan Knecht wrote:
> Comparing Postgres with Oracle is a bit like comparing a rubber duck you might
> buy your three year old, with a 300000 ton super tanker.
If it's a 300000 ton rubber duck, that might be correct :-).
> Do they both float? Yeah, but that's about the only similarity.
>
> The rubber duck barely tells you how and why it floats, but the super tanker is
> packed with instrumentation, statistics, events and trace functionality down to
> every last bit of activity.
That may be, but all that functionality is very hard to use. One of the
main reasons why I prefer PostgreSQL is that it is much easier to
extract the information I need than with Oracle. There is usually an
option to write it to a logfile (in a readable format) or a view to pull
it from (sometimes you need an extension like auto_explain or
pg_stat_statements). With Oracle that was always complicated, needed a
trawl through Metalink (their "support" website) or specialized tools.
Yes, Enterprise Manager was quite nice, but it required an Enterprise
license and we couldn't afford that (I'm guessing that there is now a
similar tool which can be used with Standard Edition). And being a
GUI/Web tool it wasn't that flexible either.
> Oracle is also the single most feature-rich database out there - the feature
> set of Postgres isn't even 1% of what Oracle has.
As a developer (and part time DBA) I have a hard time thinking of any Oracle
feature that I'm missing in PostgreSQL. OTOH, every time I have to deal
with one of our legacy Oracle databases I notice quite a few things that
PostgreSQL has and Oracle doesn't. But of course that's also not fair.
Over the last 6 years I've become quite familiar with PostgreSQL and
have forgotten much about Oracle. And those databases are old.
hp
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"
