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Well, the subject suggests the question:

  1. Oracle has a good support, so has enterpriseDB
  2. Huge amount of data can be easily managed by Oracle, Specs of PostgreSql suggest the same
  3. Feature wise I'm not sure, but reading on internet about both the DBs result in a tie

I wonder now, why oracle is more popular.

Which DB should be considered (leave the license/money thing) for a website which should be scaleable and may have large number of active users (lets say 10,000 users online).

I'm not looking for anything like Cassandra, mongo DB etc...

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    The 'spec' of a website of 10,000 users is far too vague. 10,000 people concurrently trying to book stadium seats for a concert is very different to 10,000 users looking at a web page from a database backed CMS. Get a real spec and take it to a real development shop. Commented May 12, 2011 at 12:25
  • No need to rehash this yet again. Commented May 12, 2011 at 13:08
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    We use Postgresql: select count(*) from users; count --------- 4150279 24/7 clustered. Both dbs work fine for large loads, as long as you have an admin who knows what he's doing. Commented May 12, 2011 at 16:17
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    Its amazing that nobody mentions the costs. Oracle is a hell of expensive. Commented Apr 27, 2016 at 13:10
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    I'm sure that somebody must have done a chart proving that the more useful a thread is (29 upvotes on the question, 7 favourites, 67 upvotes on Horse's answer) the more likely it is that moderators will close it as "not constructive" because "heaven forfend!" someone might possibly, express an opinion notwithstanding the OBJECTIVE points in Horse's answer. To me what it REALLY shows how "not constructive" the moderation process is on SO. Commented Jun 9, 2017 at 22:33

3 Answers 3

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My opinion is that PostgreSQL is very close to Oracle, especially with the upcoming 9.1 which offers an alternative to Oracle's DataGuard.

On the SQL Level there are really head-to-head, not much difference (with Postgres having actually more "little helpers" and features that make life a lot easier).

Things where Oracle offers still more features:

  • Materialized views (available since Postgres 9.3, but Postgres still has no incremental refresh or query rewrite)
  • Flashback queries and flashback archives (they are really cool)
  • Index only scans (available since Postgres 9.2, but not as efficient as Oracle's implementation in my experience)
  • transaction control in stored procedures (there will be support for that in the upcoming Postgres 11, but not as complete as in Oracle)
  • Index organized tables (aka "clustered indexes")
  • ASH and AWR reports (Postgres 9.6 added the infrastructure to have something like that in the future)
  • parallel queries
    Postgres 9.6 added some basic ability to run queries in parallel, Postgres 10 improved that even more and Postgres 11 will even be able to use it for things like create table as
  • parallel DML
  • Changing tables that are used in views (e.g. drop a column)

As much as I like PostgreSQL one thing that can be really annoying is configuring (auto)vacuum to cope with high write traffic.

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4 Comments

PostgreSQL has boolean and now json data types too!
@markmnl: and Postgres has range types. How often have I missed them in Oracle (or any other DBMS)
@a_horse_with_no_name: I think that PG has had clustered indexes since at least 2007: postgresonline.com/journal/archives/…
No. It does not and still doesn't. The cluster command simple re-orders a table based on an index. But that is something different then a clustered index (aka "index organized table" in Oracle) and additionally that order is not maintained
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Oracle is more popular than PostgreSQL for the same reason that Microsoft is more popular than Linux in larger companies: no head of IT with a budget has ever lost his job for choosing them over an open source alternative.

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In my experience working in large companies, this is unfortunately the case. Oracle is rarely chosen for specific technical reasons - it's still a great product, but the decision to use it over other products seems to be rarely made for practical reasons.
Big enterprises will only use softwares if they can sue that product's company :-).
The scenario is even worst in Public Administration. Contracts to buy software are usually signed by politicians fully ignorant about technology. They buy licenses and support for the most expensive Enterprise Edition even to create the simplest website.
I think by saying, "no head of IT with a budget has ever lost his job for choosing them over an open source alternative" shows that there is reason to use Oracle. If you take the converse of the statement, then you have at least one or more heads of IT with a budget have lost their jobs for choosing open source. They lost their jobs because they selected a solution that failed to meet the requirements. Please understand that I think Open Source is great. However, sometimes, commercial products provide capabilities, support, or something that the open source alternatives do not.
@hobbes3 Who will sue Oracle and how when all license agreements say "NO WARRANTY" and "Limited liability".
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Ask yourself these questions:

Who is going to support your website (and database)? There are enterprise db companies out there which can provide world wide support, documentation, consultants etc. It is not just Oracle, but it is very likely that it's easier to find Oracle or MSSQL specialist in every country.

Now, if you are willing to take a challenge to find PostgreSQL specialists or you are willing to train your team for PostgreSQL, go for it! Today (2016) PostgreSQL is the most advanced open-source RDBM and is on-par for most deployments with commercial competition.

Are there required features that only one database system offers? You cannot use advanced features of both database platforms, so check what it is that your application really needs. For example, if you require specific replication, backup and other scenarios, you should read documentation for both platforms to make an educated choice. They both offer similar features, but its better to be prepared.

Big companies usually stick with one database platform. When they buy an Oracle license once (and employ DBAs and other specialists), they continue using that vendor. That's the usual scenario, but I assume you're free from such baggage.

Also in the modern IT era, another question is to consider. Do I really need RDBMS? Every insert/update/delete costs very much if you compare it to let’s say appending to a plain file. When you define foreign keys and other constraints the cost is even higher. Explore other solutions or even plain data files, RDBMS might not be the ideal solution. Options like MongoDB, Redis, Memcache, plain files, dbm or object databases. There are many options.

Beware that usually you want RDBM in 9 out of 10 cases tho!

ps - I worked on a massive MongoDB project which turned into a disaster and few years long refactoring. Tho it might be a valid option for SOME use cases.

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8 Comments

contrary to number 2, it is easier to get a support company for postgresql.
Not all support contracts are equal. But generally, I agree with you.
I'm guessing many are downvoting because of the MongoDB comment, mongo is honestly pretty terrible and 99% of the time not what you want.
I mean if you look at the benchmarks, json with postgresql is pretty comparable in performance to mongo with JSON, even though that is just a side feature of postgres, and a core feature of mongo. arangodb.com/2015/10/benchmark-postgresql-mongodb-arangodb
almost all the functionalities supported by so called NoSQL (MongoDB, etc.) are well supported by much hated RDBMS (PostgreSQL, Oracle). I can't imagine a serious enterprise business without any relational data. On scalability Oracle and PostgreSQL are more scalable than Mongo.
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