Are we sure? I'm by no means a DBA, but DBA at our company (who is freaking smart btw) said if money wasn't an issue, he would actually go with OracleDB.
An example, Oracle has global unique index when a table is partitioned, Postgres doesn't.
Again, I haven't worked with OracleDB at all, and my postgres knowledge is limited, but assuming without having experience with both systems isn't fair to either DBs IMO.
Every large database vendor forbids public disclosure of benchmark results these days - ie Snowflake, you name it. Privately it's a different story obviously.
I work with engineers and technical managers with 25+ years of experience, building and maintaining serious business software 'you could run a country with' - people here build react web apps or do scientific research, or work for a SaaS provider - completely different view than building highly complex, regulated, mission critical software that supposed to run for decades and be supported at this level.
I think it's an arrogant and naive mistake to think nobody reading hacker news has ever built anything complex, regulated, mission critical, or intended to last.
A more useful line of conversation might be discussing the vastly different requirements and environments (both physical and bureaucratic) that span our industry. Right now I'm a one man dev team slinging multiple products as fast as I can, trying to find revenue as the runway burns up. It would be silly to think everyone is in my same position with my same tradeoffs and I don't expect that to be particularly controversial.
If you have some good insight about when Oracle products are particularly well suited to the task I think many folks would love to read and discuss it. If you just want to act like you're the only one taking your job seriously then I suggest you just save your keystrokes and everybody's time.
The Oracle database is an amazing piece of software. The problem with it is as open source and SQL Server started eroding its share, Oracle pivoted to owning vertical line of business software.
My employer probably spends more money on databases for our learning management system than we do for one of our main customer facing apps with thousands of concurrent users. It’s literally a tally of training courses.
Postgres is a better choice for 99% of the companies out there. But there are cases where you need ability to massively scale AND control your database cluster perfectly.
Postgres won't even let your force an execution plan and ignores hints (yes, there is an extension for that) so your optimized query can at some point just 10x in execution time and increase load in production when the plan changes.
In Oracle, I am told you can prioritize certain queries at certain time of day - it's crazy what it can do. Yes, it's slow and expensive. If you have money to throw at the problem, it's fast and it solves your problem, whatever the scale. Their Exadata cluster, for example, is wicked fast storage layer pre-filtering the data it sends to the database.
Of course, I despise their business practices - especially the abuse of customers via audits. As a database, it absolutely has its place regardless of lobbying, corruption, and whatever else they are doing.
> Postgres won't even let your force an execution plan and ignores hints
Finally, an actual technical argument. I agree that PostgreSQL's absolute insistence on trusting the query optimiser to Do The Right Thing is weird and annoying (despite being sound general strategy). It even seems to contradict its own general spirit of being on the whole extremely customisable -- you can make your own data types, operators, indexing data structures, complete scripting language plugins... but not, ya know, a way to 100% guarantee that this here query will use this here execution plan.
Beats at what? Not mission critical multi decade setups that can be easily repeated by hiring someone from postgres consultancy. Oracle handles every use case you throw at it: maybe not optimally, but that is not what you care about at that level anyway. They suck but what are the actual alternatives: not postgres or supabase for most orgs of significant size.
Are we sure? I'm by no means a DBA, but DBA at our company (who is freaking smart btw) said if money wasn't an issue, he would actually go with OracleDB.