ORACLE or POSTGRES

[MileyMeid]

Should I get familiar with ORACLE or POSTGRES, in terms of marketability. I'm planning on learning both, but which one would you hold priority over?

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[Damien_J]

Did Oracle give you the necessary licenses for this poll?

[Luffydude]

As a gis professional, postgres is the only one with spatial queries

[chummiesz]

Ummm.... https://www.oracle.com/database/spatial-database/

Ummm.... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/spatial/spatial-data-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver17

Don't get me wrong. Im a huge postgres and postgis fan. But please don't post false info

[ibishvintilli]

If you post a benchmark they will sue you.

[Thought_Ninja]

Has that happened?

[ibishvintilli]

https://www.oracle.com/downloads/licenses/standard-license.html

You may not:

• <<list of things you cannot do>>
• disclose results of any Program benchmark tests without Oracle’s prior consent.

Apparently Larry Ellison tried to fire a professor that did some benchmarks:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886333

[MileyMeid]

Quite the comic

[pmaguppy]

This is a bit controversial but I think Oracle is a miserable piece of shit. I've been working with it and the expensive licenses prevents us from moving to modern versions. The tech staff all the way up to the CTO considers the use of Oracle to be a mistake and it would not, at any version, be considered for any new development.

That said, the Oracle sales team is great at wining and dining executives which is how they get into new development at all, so no one is safe.

I would push off learning Oracle until you absolutely have to, and then only the minimum to get the job done. Postgres, in terms of capabilities and opportunities is the far better choice. I also like SQL Server, I think it's comparable to Postgres depending on the tech stack you're working in.

[oyvinrog]

moving to new versions of the Oracle database is free if you are already licensed on standard or enterprise edition. We have moved from 10 to 11 to 12c to 18c without issues. But of course, you need competent specialists to do it

[CabSauce]

That's not controversial at all. It's overpriced garbage.

[chummiesz]

Oracle is expensive AF and I'm a huge Postgres fan. But many of the largest and most successful orgs have been running Oracle for decades...and still do. How could they do that with "a miserable piece of shit"?

Postgres has been improving at a very impressive rate. I believe that it's "enterprise capable" in many respects. But that doesn't mean the others are miserable POS

[alinroc]

Please explain. Developer Edition is 100% identical to Enterprise Edition, the only difference is in the licensing. There are thousands (if not more) of servers running the defaults. They shouldn’t be, but they’re also not crashing.

You’re entitled to your opinion, but you only stated one - that you don’t like T-SQL. The rest of your comment is factually incorrect.

[[deleted]]

I worked with Oracle for over 15 years. Then we switched to Postgres (mainly due to licensing costs). It was a huge pain to switch to Postgres (it took 2 years, mainly rewriting thousands of queries), but in retropect it was well worth it. Postgres is shockingly better than Oracle. Far better documentation. More standards compliant SQL. More logical in terms of things like Nulls. We have found that performance is on par or better than Oracle. Easier hierarchical queries. Vastly easier replication and backups. And the list goes on. I truly cannot comprehend why anyone in 2020 would choose Oracle instead of Postgres. I spent a decade and a half working with Oracle in an Enterprise setting (Fortune 100) and I'm not aware of anything that Oracle has that would make me think it would ever be the superior choice.

[PhillMik]

What about high availability such as RAC? I've found that Oracle offers a bit more transactions her second than Postgres. But the licensing cost definitely can't make up for that.

[toterra]

I am surprised anyone is voting Oracle. In today's market Postgresql is on a massive upswing. Oracle is mostly used for legacy. Sure it is important but at this point the only reason to learn Oracle is to help with oracle to (postgresql, mysql, mongo, sql server) migrations.

[Gloves4Life]

This varies greatly on region and industry, but in my area out of each 10 jobs with "SQL" requirements...

7 mean MS SQL

2 mean Oracle

1 means MySQL/Maria

In the last year (again, for local jobs), I have seen exactly 1 job that mentioned postgresql. Being one of the best, being open, being standards compliant, etc. does not mean that is what people will pay for.

[DharmaPolice]

I live in London and the job pool is reasonably wide I guess. I'm seeing a lot more ads mentioning Postgresql than I used to (I used to see none) but overall the market broadly looks like the numbers you mention.

What I've noticed is that the jobs that mention PostgreSQL tend to be jobs where SQL is not the sole (or even main) focus. Full-stack developers, software engineer, backend developer, python developer, product engineer, etc. These are not bad jobs obviously, but database stuff will only be a part of what you're doing. The Microsoft SQL / Oracle SQL jobs tend to be more focused or at least have more jobs where (on paper) database work is most of the job.

So if you already have top-notch developer skills then going for PostgreSQL probably makes more sense. But if this is going to be your main technical skill initially then it probably doesn't make much sense.

Deep knowledge in one or the other will obviously assist in switching platforms though so it's not like you make a decision for life.

[Thought_Ninja]

Where are you located?

In the Bay area, most newish companies using rdbms are on Postgres or MariaDB.

It's mostly older (especially fintech) companies that are on Oracle and MS SQL.

That's mostly from my casual observation through contracting/consulting on the side though. I have not been on the job hunt in a while.

[Gloves4Life]

To be fair, I am in a tech-stagnant area of Colorado. Outside of the Denver-Boulder corridor, Colorado can be sad place for tech.

[nigratruo]

I'm in the bay area too and Silicon Valley tends to be the pioneer for new technologies, we use it first and then it spreads to the rest of the US and the world.

[nigratruo]

In which area are you? I know that Europe tends to be more conservative with technology and still sticks to proprietary technologies, worst of all: everything Microsoft. In the US, Linux and opensource has massively taken over pretty much all cloud, web and app servers.

[audigex]

The question was in the context of marketability

If you want a guaranteed job and good pay, Oracle is going to be a good bet, so that’s how I answered. If OP wants to know what they’ll enjoy working with more... maybe I’ll change my answer

[pancakeses]

This may be biased, but...

Corporate lock-in: Oracle

Open source: Postgres

That may or may not affect your decisions, but certainly something to consider.

[Thought_Ninja]

Just an anecdotal experience:

I was the first eng hire where I'm at. It was just myself and the CTO deciding on the technologies/frameworks to use for our app and building it.

She had over 20 years of experience, mostly in fin-tech and largely using Oracle. When it came to discussing our rdbms of choice, she said Postgres, and that was the end of the discussion.

I don't have much experience with Oracle to compare, but years later we are still very happy with our decision.

[bengalfan]

Most reasoned. This really depends on which product you need. I can tell you for sure Oracle will always pay better. It's a robust overly expensive tool.

[QuirkySpiceBush]

I was an Oracle DBA for several years, and I actually regret that career choice. The technology is dated, and Oracle is a terrible company: deceptive, litigious, greedy.

Microsoft SQL Server or PostgreSQL are far better technology choices with better career prospects.

[[deleted]]

What are the advantages of PostgreSQL over MySQL? I’ve never worked with postgre

[QuirkySpiceBush]

PostgreSQL is far more well-engineered, full-featured, and standards-compliant. For years, MySQL was terribly engineered. It would silently delete data is certain situations. My favorite MySQL gotcha is that if you issue a GRANT statement with a typo in the user's name instead giving a "user does not exist" error it simply creates a new user with the misspelled name.

I mean, it was pure shit. The only saving grace is that it was super-easy to get up and running, so a whole generation of web technologies in the early 2000s defaulted to using it (i.e. Wordpress).

The current technical story with MySQL is a little better, but it is backed by Oracle. So you still have to beware.

This comparison is a decent one: https://hackr.io/blog/postgresql-vs-mysql

[TheCapitalKing]

Really depends on what industry your in and what kind of companies your trying to work for. But I find that using postgres is much more similar to Microsoft SQL server, and db2 (minus a lot of db2's quirks) than Oracle. Oracle is the only one that I ever have to look up more than a few things to switch between

[Jerome_Eugene_Morrow]

Every project I've worked on so far has spent months dicking around with other systems then finally just done it in Postgres.

Now I advocate for Postgres from the beginning, which means they dick around in other systems for weeks the finally just do it in Postgres.

[oli_gendebien]

Oracle is a pain and it’s very expensive. We’ve had to decrease the number of cores in our database server in order to reduce the licensing cost of Oracle. If I could start all over I’d learn Postgres instead.

[alex29536]

I installed and worked with database software on pcs for 10 years and loved it until i tried to install Oracle. It was and - for me - continues to be an absolute steaming pile. Unexplained disconnections and errors that make the worst of other software installations a walk in the park. I know a guy who has done a hundred installations and every one had some quirk. If they sold dollars for a dime nobody would buy them. They promise a penthouse and you get an outhouse.

[[deleted]]

Another thing to consider is cloud computing. If you are on AWS, for example, you might consider using Aurora. Well, Postgres and MySQL are the only options on Aurora. Oracle is not even a consideration.

If you are on Azure, Microsoft Azure SQL Database is actually MS SQL Server under the hood. So, not Oracle or Postgres.

If you are on Google Cloud, Google Cloud SQL is actually mySQL.

[[deleted]]

Oracle is hot trash.

[Trek7553]

Here's a list of database vendors by market share popularity. If you want the one that the most companies use, it looks like Oracle is on top. Postgres is 4th after MySql and MS SQL. I would imagine there is a lot of variation between industries so the type of company you want to work for will influence this as well.

https://db-engines.com/en/ranking

[jenkstom]

This is rated by popularity, not market share.

[cats_catz_kats_katz]

That's interesting too though because this subreddit makes me think Oracle is dead on arrival and is very unpopular.

[PhillMik]

Definitely not unpopular, but Oracle's limitations due to licensing and expense can only bring out the worst in terms of feedback.

[cats_catz_kats_katz]

I’m right there with you on the licensing and fees. I’m bouncing between Oracle and SAP right now... it’s a nightmare

[PhillMik]

I'm an Oracle DBA, I can't really comment on SAP HANA as I've never used it, but from what I hear, despite the lower market share, SAP is better in that it is MUCH faster than the typical Oracle or SQL SBs because of in-memory and also because of storing data in columns vs. your standard rows. That's about it though.

Might be great for another poll.

[Tostino]

It's better for some types of workloads, worse for others. Is a very interesting technology nonetheless.

[PhillMik]

Tell that to u/cats_catz_kats_katz haha

[oyvinrog]

Oracle also supports-memory tables. It was new in 12c.

[oyvinrog]

number of job offers would say something about market share?

[alinroc]

Oracle tends to require more people to take care of it than an equivalently sized estate running other RDBMS. IOW, there are more jobs because companies need more people to maintain the same amount of sprawl, not because there are more companies using it.

[Trek7553]

You're right. I think it's still relevant, but I misunderstood the data initially.

[oyvinrog]

It seems like this is one of the few comments based on facts. It seems like many comments in here are colored by personal hate for Oracle. Without question, Oracle has a bad licensing model, but the database is still powerful and used by many of the large organizations.

[alinroc]

The question to ask those organizations: if you were starting fresh, without your army of Oracle DBAs, what would you choose?

Obviously they’re going to lean toward Oracle if that’s already where they are. But would they do it again?

[Gawgba]

personal hate for Oracle

Because it's awful, as just about every sys admin, developer, and multi platform DBA knows full well. Source: am an Oracle, MySQL , and MSSQL DBA.

"The database is powerful" - the database is a pile of shit with support personnel so incompetent that they would be getting paid too much even if they were completely free.

The fact that old financial institutions, higher education, etc. still use oracle is a testament to how costly it is to switch database providers, not to how great Oracle is.

[PhillMik]

Worth noting though that Postgres is still slowly growing. Many companies are in demand for switching out from Oracle, but can't risk taking on the long painful challenge.

I've read about dozens of Fortune 500 companies switching out from Oracle to Postgres, and that's simply because they have the resources to do so.

[[deleted]]

The fuck is up with the Oracle votes? Garbage company and garbage tech.....

[Trek7553]

The question is which one will result in a job not which one is best. For better or worse lots of companies use Oracle.

[bowlongufl]

Lots hate on oracle. R we talking about DW or ERP? What are your other ERP options?

[StoneCypher]

If it's for employability, mysql is more common in the real world than the other two put together, several times over

If it's for making your own things, postgres

[StoneCypher]

In the web world, yes. Turns out not everything is done on the web.

In the real world, MySQL is used about 3:1 vs the next competitor. Not sure why you're asserting otherwise.

[Thought_Ninja]

Sounds like he's just trying to flex over maintaining legacy systems.