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There are many reasons you might choose to migrate from Oracle to Postgres. Here are just a few of the benefits:
Number One: Cost - In addition to Oracle license costs, using Oracle databases incurs additional costs for features like partitioning and high availability, and expenses can add up quickly. Open-source Postgres is free to install and use.
Number Two: Flexibility - Postgres has open-source licensing and is easily available from public cloud providers, including AWS. With Postgres, you’re not at risk of vendor lock-in.
Number Three: Customizability - Because Postgres is open-source, there are countless extensions and add-ons that can improve database performance markedly, and many of them are free to use. With Oracle, similar features quickly add up in cost.
That’s not to say that migrating from Oracle to Postgres is not an involved process. Since the data migration is between two relational database management systems, it can be a challenging and time-consuming process due to heterogeneous structure or data types. As such, you want to be sure it’s tackled with the right tools. Keep listening and you’ll be well on your way.
What are the advantages of Postgres database over Oracle?
Advantages of Postgres over Oracle can be seen in the following areas:
- Application programming
- Authentication
- Extensibility
- Languages
- Localization
- Performance
- Scalability
Here’s a breakdown of Postgres vs. Oracle in each.
1) Application programming
Oracle and Postgres both provide an application API for communicating with the database. However, Postgres is open source. Developers can directly access any Postgres component simply by including the header file in their project.
2) Authentication
Oracle has a built-in authentication system. Postgres relies on host-based authentication and can, therefore, support a wide range of authentication methods. This provides greater flexibility for authentication and the option to delegate the process.
3) Extensibility
Oracle has a mostly proprietary plug-in system, whereas Postgres' extension system is supported by the general community, so thousands of plug-ins are available.
4) Languages
While Oracle has a built-in programming language called PL/SQL, Postgres has not only PL/pgSQL but many others, as well as an extension system that allows users to create additional procedural languages as plug-ins, plus bindings for even more programming languages.
5) Localization
Oracle offers globalization support tools including a globalization development kit and unicode character support. Postgres' localization system services are built-in to provide automatic character encoding and collation support.
6) Performance
Because Postgres can create an unlimited number of nodes in a read cluster, the cost of any particular read operation can be reduced to close to nothing. And because of that, you can tune it differently for every workload. You can do this in Oracle too, but each node has an additional cost.
7) Scalability
Oracle of course has strong vertical read scalability, but Postgres can create a virtually unlimited number of nodes in a read cluster, depending on the resources you have available to dedicate to it.
The benefits of migrating from Oracle to Postgres are clear, and leading organizations are making the Postgres move. Are you one of them?
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this audio blog series. In the meantime, check out our Complete Oracle to Postgres Migration Guide.
Raghavendra Rao is a Managing Consultant in Professional Services Division in EnterpriseDB(Headquarters). He has been working with PostgreSQL since 2009 and over 20 years of working experience with relation database systems. He architects, migrates, manages, consults, speaks, teaches & blogs abo ...