http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/2006/11/04/postgres-for-the-win/

The only thing that would require additional funds is if you are adding on new features that cost more. Say partitioning – something you can’t get in postgreSQL or MySQL.

Did you say “10g”. Dude, 11g is out.

http://www.oracle.com/database/index.html

Sounds like *you* need to “UPGRADE” ;)

I’ll check out the link, sounds cool.

That would drop your cost to $15,000 instead of $40,000 for enterprise.

Of course, if you phoned up Oracle, discussed Postgres with them, and then sat back and waited, you’d end up paying $15,000 or less for the enterprise licence. Oracle will discount like mad if you mention open-source databases to them.

You should have a look at EnterpriseDB if you’ve not already seen it http://www.enterprisedb.com/ – it’s the Postgres back-end, with an Oracle compatibity layer. Might be an interesting proposition for your management.

You’re hinting RBO in 8i when you could be using 10g?

One word: “Upgrade”

Read the license agreement. Download the installer. Migrate.

Although, our Postgres version is over 5 years old. It’s no slouch either.

By the way, they would usually not have such uptime if it weren’t for the policy against giving developers root… I would make security and bug fix upgrades. I’m usually not one to brag on uptime even when it is impressive.

The price I mentioned was given to me by the DBA team who know a lot more about it than I do. Obviously I don’t buy Oracle often. But they seemed adamant that licensing by CPU required the enterprise version.

“You mention it being half the salary of a new developer, but of course it’s only half the salary of that developer for 1 year, next year you’ll still need to pay him.”

I guess I was thinking we could pay somebody to do nothing but port to Postgres for six months and still break even… Of course, it shouldn’t take but a couple weeks for the actual work since we have most of the code already. Testing all the services takes longer but that should still add up to some serious savings.

In Oracle’s defence, you’re talking about Oracle 8i here, a piece of software released in 1999. For it to still be running 9 years later in your production environment is surely a testament to how reliable it is? Have you experienced any data loss in this time because Oracle messed up?

And since the Oracle licence is perpetual, your $40,000 licence fee is a pretty solid long term investment if you’re going to get a similar length of use out of it (you can re-use the software on a new box in the future when you upgrade). You mention it being half the salary of a new developer, but of course it’s only half the salary of that developer for 1 year, next year you’ll still need to pay him.

From the price it sounds like you put in Enterprise edition, can you tell me if you needed a specific feature? It sounds like Standard Edition One would be suitable for your use. Standard Edition One has a list price of $12,000 for the 2 CPU sockets option.

MySQL and Postgres are both very solid databases that I happily deploy and use, but Oracle has its place too – though it may not be in your department.

Well, yes it is. That’s half an average programmer’s salary in this area, as I said. And it’s a complete waste of money if Postgres can handle it just as well.

“Given that oracle will perform orders of magnitudes better than postgres or mysql, its really a matter of cost of switching to faster hardware which is trivial.”

I have to replace 8i eventually. That price didn’t include hardware. Just licensing.

And who said Oracle performs better for me? I have one app running on Oracle and three that run on a Postgres database. They run on similar hardware, yet the Oracle server is the one that gives me the performance problems. Postgres gets hammered all day long by the user’s poorly written reports and handles it just fine.

And it’s true that it’s my fault. While Postgres generally just works out of the box, Oracle requires intimate knowledge of rollback, temp space, segments, extents, block sizes, and on and on. For truly large installations, I’m sure those are useful things to be able to customize. I do what I can but performance experimenting on a live server is dangerous.

That’s why there’s a whole secondary industry dedicated to making Oracle faster. High priced consultants who are versed in the gospel of Oracle and who can make it actually work.

On the other hand, I’ve never had to write funky procs just to handle DELETE on large set of rows by committing at regular intervals on Postgres. It just works.

“You’re just whining because you dont have any real metrics besides dollar signs to impress your customers with.”

I said this was a rant, but that’s a good idea. Perhaps I should track all of the care and feeding that goes along with using Oracle. I hadn’t bothered because I don’t think it’ll make a difference — Oracle has been decreed.

But then, you haven’t said anything that would convince me either. You tried to say Oracle performs better, but that’s not true in my case. So why should we spend $40,000?

For that price I could have a whole farm of Postgres boxen.