Re: Trade Study on Oracle vs. PostgreSQL

There's also the "ease of use" issue. I've worked with Oracle in the past. Postgres is a breeze in comparison. This is more than just looking for the easy way out. The learning curves, classes and support issues all equate to $$.

As for performance, I couldn't say. But I will say that tuning Oracle is/was more complicated. PG is much easier (IMO). Also, if it performs "well enough", which DB actually runs the fastest becomes moot. If, for example, an interactive query takes 100msec in Oracle and 125ms on Postgres, I doubt your users will care. Of course the same holds true of PG runs faster.

Finally, back on the subject of price, it's tough to beat PG's price if you download and install yourself. REAL tough !

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Steve Atkins
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 11:57 AM
To: Postgres-General General
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Trade Study on Oracle vs. PostgreSQL

On Sep 24, 2010, at 7:52 AM, Wang, Mary Y wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> We are starting a new project in my organization and need to have a database. I proposed that we use PostgreSQL. Because we already have the Oracle infrastructure in-house, I'm told that I need to do a simple trade study on Oracle vs. PostgreSQL. Based on the database requirements, it looks like we just need to create some relatively simple tables. I'd like to get buy-ins from my co-workers. I googled the web, and couldn't find anything that are more recent stuff. Does anyone have more recent information?
>
>
> Thanks. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Assuming that both Oracle and Postgresql have the features you need (which they likely do) you're really talking about performance and TCO.

Your contract with Oracle prevents you from publishing any benchmarks, so you won't find much published about it (which, in itself, says something about Oracle performance vs cost).

If you just need to see whether postgresql runs well enough for your needs you'll need to install it, on decent hardware, and tune it and see how well it works with your application. Or, if you just want to run some basic synthetic benchmarks you might find pg_bench useful.

If you're looking for a performance trade study between postgresql and oracle then you'll need to run the comparison yourself - ideally using the application you're interested in using with the database, or a synthetic benchmark that's similar in transaction rate, complexity and concurrency. Again, you'd need to run them on comparable hardware and tune them both well.

If you have some budget for evaluation I suspect that one of the postgresql companies could install and tune an installation for you pretty inexpensively.

Cheers,
Steve