{"id":266,"date":"2005-07-13T08:06:10","date_gmt":"2005-07-13T14:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=266"},"modified":"2007-01-07T23:03:27","modified_gmt":"2007-01-08T05:03:27","slug":"exchanging-postgresql-for-oracle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/266","title":{"rendered":"Exchanging PostgreSQL for Oracle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a client who was building some commercial software on top of PostgreSQL<\/a>. This plans to be a fairly high volume site, 1.8 million views\/hour 500 hits a second. Most of the software seemed to work just fine, but they had some issues with Postgres. Specifically, the backup was failing and we couldn’t figure out why. Then, a few days ago, we saw this message:<\/p>\n

ERROR: could not access status of transaction 1936028719
\nDETAIL: could not open file “\/usr\/local\/postgres\/data\/pg_clog\/0836”: No such file or directory<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After a bit of searching, I saw two threads suggesting<\/a> fixes<\/a>, which ranged from deleting the offending row to recreating the entire database.<\/p>\n

I suggested these to my client, and he thought about it for a couple of days and came up with a solution not suggested on these threads: move to Oracle<\/a>. Oracle, whose licensing and pricing has been famously opaque, now has a pricing list<\/a> available online, with prices for the Standard Edition One<\/a> and Enterprise Edition<\/a> versions of their database, as well as other software they sell. And my client decided that he could stomach paying for Oracle, given:<\/p>\n

1. The prices aren’t too bad.
\n2. The amount of support and knowledgeable folks available for Oracle dwarfs the community of Postgres.
\n3. He just wants something to work. The value add of his company is in his service, not in the back end database (as long as it runs).<\/p>\n

I can’t fault him for his decision. PostgreSQL is full featured, was probably responsible for Oracle becoming more transparent and reasonable in pricing, and I’ve used it in the past<\/a>, but he’d had enough. It’s the same reason many folks have Macs or Windows when there is linux, which is a free tank that is “… invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I’ll let you know how the migration goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a client who was building some commercial software on top of PostgreSQL. This plans to be a fairly high volume site, 1.8 million views\/hour 500 hits a second. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oracle","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}