Re: Oracle rant

I work in an all Oracle shop, with server instances around the world. At
least 20 servers are 400Gb+ and a couple are 4 Terabyte+. I tooks $15k worth
of Oracle training, have set up my own instances and done Perl/CGI/Apache
work along with setting up really big data warehousing apps for factories and
engineers.

I also am a Linux Nut and use Postgres whenever possible because I like the
freedom of access to the HACKERS mailing list...something only a few highly
renound DBA snobs have with Oracle.

I have been impressed however, with the degree to which Oracle(synonymous
with Ellison) has attempted to become "Open". Oracle is getting into Linux
almost as heavily as IBM, mostly prompted by their common rivalry with M$ and
SQLServer. Oracle's licensing policy of "download it if you want and we'll
trust you to do the right thing and give us money if you meet the criteria"
does build a sense of trust with the technical world. And, their
documentation is fairly open and detailed. What their docs don't cover, a
search on Google or something else(like attending Oracle World events) will
generally illuminate.

So, as far as "Openness" goes, I would say that PostgreSQL is more open than
Oracle, but Oracle is pretty good.

The one thing I notice about PostgreSQL however, is this tendency to keep the
DBA away from considerations of hardware..."don't worry about the man behind
the curtains folks...." mentality.

With Oracle, you can screw around with files and tablespaces and extents and
segments and partition striping and local and global indexing and block sizes
and 400+ other tuning parameters to your heart's content. And, if you
happened to put your data on separate server instances, you and use database
links to join the data together. With Oracle's transaction logging and
rollback segments, a paranoid DBA can do all sorts of replication schemes,
backup schemes, and point in time recovery...to ANY POINT IN TIME, whether or
not there was a crash or simple a user who issued a really dumb SQL
statement. Perhaps this is a tremendous waste of time and leads to a lot of
crashes with arcane error messages, but it gives the DBA control.

I am a control freak and I think a lot of other people are too. Oracle is
tremendously complex and has a steep learning curve, but it gives me control.
With PG, a lot of effort has been made to simplify. This removes DBA
control, but probably also contributes to the stability you guys think you
have over Oracle. Perhaps Oracle's supposed instability is partially due to
allowing DBAs to fiddle with too much. I know that some is sometimes due to
Oracle releasing poorly coded features too soon, but I think a lot of it is
also due to DBAs screwing with stuff too.

Of course, if the boss just wanted me to get the DB running and quit screwing
with coallescing free extents in tablespaces, then I would just run PG.

If PostgreSQL were to open up all the internals of storage and become as
complex as Oracle, there probably would be a lot of high profile crashes and
PG would get a bad reputation. However, I think that having a mode of
operation(controlled at compile time) where all the dirty details of storage
was made accessible in the data dictionary, would be something good to pacify
the control freaks.

Food for thought. If you need someone play devils advocate in the Oracle vs.
PG debates, I'll do it. I think that a little critique of PG

Fred

On 1/16/2003, "Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder" <avbidder(at)fortytwo(dot)ch>
wrote:

>On Thu, 2003-01-16 at 08:29, Mark Kirkwood wrote:
>> Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
>>
>> > I'm just saying that there are
>> >*some* small arcane details in postgres, too (although, at least, they
>> >don't affect stability, just performance).
>> >
>> >
>> Indeed you are right... Pg has its own collection of arcane details too,
>> but hopefully the culture of Postgesql (in common with all open source
>> projects) is to "expose and educate" rather than "confine to a group of
>> the initiated".
>>
>> Does that sound better ? ( i.e no so rabid Oracle bashing)
>
>Yes, sounds better. Seriously: I absolutely agree that Oracle is not
>inclined to make it easier to use their product - after all, as was
>said, they sell courses and certifications, while pg tries to be easy to
>use. I just got the impression from the first few messages that some
>people think that pg has no secret tricks you're supposed to know at
>all. Experience counts. With all systems. (And knowing the secret tricks
>is what experience comes down to, basically).
>
>cheers
>-- vbi
>
>--
>signature virus v1.0 - please use me in your own mail.